meaning of life and happiness

Two very different approaches to the question of the meaning of life:

External: what is the purpose of life?

Internal: what is the purpose within life?

When a computer breaks, it doesn't fix itself. You have to open it up and do something to it, or bring it to a specialist for repair. The computer metaphor has so pervaded our thought that we sometimes think about people as computers, and about psychotherapy as the repair shop or a kind of reprogramming. But people are not computers, and they usually recover on their own from almost anything that happens to them. I think a better metaphor is that people are like plants. During graduate school, I had a small garden in front of my house in Philadelphia. I was not a very good gardener, and I traveled a lot in the summers, so sometimes my plants withered and nearly died. But the amazing thing I learned about plants is that as long as they are not completely dead, they will spring back to full and glorious life if you just get the conditions right. You can't fix a plant; you can only give it the right conditions—water, sun, and soil—and then wait. It will do the rest.

If people are like plants, what are the conditions we need to flourish? In the happiness formula, H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities), what exactly is C? The biggest part of C is love. No man, woman, or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can't be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people. The second most important part of C is having and pursuing the right goals, in order to create states of flow and engagement. In the modern world, people can find goals and flow in many settings, but most people find most of their flow at work. Love and work are, for people, obvious analogues to water and sunshine for piants. When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he is reputed to have said, "Love and work."

Work at its best should be connection, engagement, and commitment. As the poet Kahlil Gibran said, "Work is love made visible." Echoing Tolstoy, he gave examples of work done with love:

It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart,

even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.

It is to build a house with affection,

even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.

It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were

to eat the fruit.

When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a career field is healthy.

Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right. Happiness comes not just from within, as Buddha and Epictetus supposed, or even from a combination of internal and external factors. The correct version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness

comes from between.

People are multilevel systems in another way. We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence. When the three levels of your existence are aligned and mutually interlocking: your physical feelings and thoughts cohere with your actions, and all of it makes perfect sense within the larger culture of which you are a part of, a spiritual contentment will inevitably follow.

Think about the last empty ritual you took part in. Maybe you were asked to join hands and chant with a group of strangers while attending a wedding ceremony for a friend who is of a different religion. Perhaps you took part in a new age ceremony that borrowed elements from Native Americans, ancient Celts, and Tibetan Buddhists. You probably understood the symbolism of the ritual—understood it consciously and explicitly in the way that the rider is so good at doing. Yet you felt self-conscious, maybe even silly, while doing it. Something was missing.

You can't just invent a good ritual through reasoning about symbolism. You need a tradition within which the symbols are embedded, and you need to invoke bodily feelings that have some appropriate associations. Then you need a community to endorse and practice it over time. To the extent that a community has many rituals that cohere across the three levels, people in the community are likely to feel themselves connected to the community and its traditions. If the community also offers guidance on how to live and what is of value, then people are unlikely to wonder about the question of purpose within life. Meaning and purpose simply emerge from the coherence, and people can get on with the business of living. But conflict, paralysis, and anomie are likely when a community fails to provide coherence, or, worse, when its practices contradict people's gut feelings or their shared mythology and ideology.

- Johnathan Haidt