Research suggests a meaningful life and a happy one are not the same thing: the people who rate their lives most meaningful often report more stress and worry, because meaning grows out of the very commitments that make an ordinary day harder

Think back over the last week. Which moment made you happiest?

Now pick the moment that felt most meaningful.

Were they the same one?

Maybe. Or maybe the happiest moment was easy and a bit forgettable, and the meaningful one was tiring, or stressful, or something you were glad to have finished.

Did it feel meaningful? Yes. Was it comfortable? Not really.

I had that feeling when I started my PhD. I didn't have to do it. I was passionate about it, and I knew it would cost me time for myself. Then I felt lost. I didn't feel connected to most of the people doing the same thing. For me the PhD sat closer to a passion than a career, which people around me didn't really understand. I also had no idea what to expect.

Happiness and meaning are ideas I keep running into in my research. It's hard to interview people and not ask them about meaning, or at least not wonder about it.

That gap between what feels good and what feels worth it is what four researchers went looking for in a 2013 survey of 397 adults in the United States. One sentence in their paper sounds almost backwards: “People with very meaningful lives worry more and have more stress than people with less meaningful lives.”

That line is the title of this article, and it says less than it seems to.

It turns out this is not the only version of the idea.

Later, a second set of studies looks at the same two things, meaning and stress, and seems to find the opposite. First, the survey.

Happy and meaningful overlap a lot, and still pull apart

The researchers asked people how happy they were and how meaningful their lives felt. The two answers moved together strongly. People who rated one high usually rated the other high.

Then the researchers did something clever. To see what meaning goes with on its own, they statistically set happiness aside. To see what happiness goes with on its own, they did the reverse. Once the two were separated, they pulled apart. In the authors' words, “happiness is mainly about getting what one wants and needs”, while “meaningfulness was linked to doing things that express and reflect the self and in particular to doing positive things for others.”

Parenthood is the sharpest example. For parents in the survey, “the more time they spent taking care of children, the more meaningful their lives were.” Time with children had no relation to happiness, and if anything it leaned toward lower happiness.

The sentence that sounds backwards

The line about worry comes from the part of the paper on worrying. People who worried more rated their lives as more meaningful, once happiness was set aside. Stress followed the same pattern: “The more stress people recalled having, the more meaningful they rated their lives as being, and also, the less happy they were.”

One thing is easy to miss when that line travels on its own: the link only shows up after happiness has been set aside, which is not how most of us think about our own lives.

The authors also give a reason for the pattern. They write that worrying may often be “an unavoidable part of a meaningful life, even though it detracts from happiness.” That is their reading of the numbers, not something the survey tested. They describe the people who had meaningful but unhappy lives this way: “Our findings depict the unhappy but meaningful life as seriously involved in difficult undertakings.”

The survey also asked whether people found life difficult. Those who did were less happy, but difficulty did not clearly go with finding life more meaningful. So hardship alone is not what the survey links to meaning.

An old question sits underneath all this

All of this reminded me of something I'd heard before: that feeling happy and living a good life are two different things.

It turns out the authors had the same thought. They write that some positive psychologists and others have “revived a conceptual distinction dating back to Aristotle between feeling happy and living a good life, also known as eudaimonia.” They add: “Meaningfulness is seen as more central to eudaimonia than to simply feeling good.”

There is an old book with a passage on exactly this: the Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle. It starts from a puzzle you might recognize. Ordinary people and the wise alike, he says, call the highest good happiness, but they disagree about what it is. Many take it to be something plain, “like pleasure, wealth, or honour”. His own answer is “activity of soul in accordance with virtue”, and he adds that it has to be lived “in a complete life.” Then comes a line that fits the survey well: “one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day”. So think of your happiest moment last week. A good mood on one day says little about how well a life is going.

The authors admit the limit of their own measure. Their definition of happiness is positive feelings, so the survey cannot say much about that fuller kind of happiness that Aristotle meant.

What if meaning is also what gets you through?

So meaning goes with more worry. But seven years later, a different group of researchers came at the same two things from another side, and what they found looks very different.

In 2020, Brian Ostafin of the University of Groningen and Travis Proulx of Cardiff University published three studies on meaning in life and stress, with 273 university students in total. Their question was different.

When something stressful happens, do people with a stronger sense of meaning cope better?

In the first study, students with more meaning reported less distress and less repetitive negative thinking, the habit of going round and round on bad thoughts. In the second, a river flood came after students had rated their sense of meaning, and those with more meaning had fewer distressing intrusive thoughts about it. Only 82 of the 140 students came back for that follow-up. In the third, students wrote about a distressing memory, and those with more meaning reported less distress and less dwelling afterwards.

Like the 2013 survey, these studies set other good things aside, such as optimism, and the pattern held. The authors suggest that people with a stronger sense of meaning experience less distress and less repetitive negative thinking when stressors arrive.

If we put them side by side, we can see that these two studies measured different things:

• The 2013 survey asked adults how much stress they recalled and how much they worried in their lives.
• The 2020 studies asked students how they reacted after a specific stressor, such as a flood or a painful memory.

So can both be true?

Here's one way both could be true. It's a reading of the two papers, not something either study tested.

Picture anything you'd call meaningful, such as raising a child, a demanding project or work for other people. It may come with more to worry about. The same sense of meaning may also help when things go wrong. The 2013 survey counted the worry and stress people carry day to day. The 2020 studies looked at what happens after a stressor arrives. More worry in daily life and less distress after a blow can sit in the same person.

More things to worry about, and better at coping when they go wrong. I'd take that deal.

The 2013 authors lean toward something like this in one sentence, though they are writing about misfortune, not stress in general:

Past misfortunes reduce present happiness, but they are linked to higher meaningfulness – perhaps because people cope with them by finding meaning.

So which of your two moments would you keep?

Being happy and having a meaningful life overlap, but they are not the same thing. In one survey of 397 adults in the United States, people with more meaningful lives reported somewhat more worry and stress once their happiness was set aside. In three studies of 273 students, a stronger sense of meaning went with less distress and less dwelling after stressors.

Of course, this doesn't show that meaning causes stress, that stress creates meaning, or that meaning shields anyone from stress. These are surveys and short studies in which people rated themselves. The 2013 survey is a single survey, its links were small, they only show up once happiness is set aside, and the authors call their own results “tentative”. The 2020 studies were all university students. Neither paper tested both ideas in the same people over time. So none of this shows that meaning causes stress, that stress creates meaning, or that meaning shields anyone from stress. Whether these particular studies show it or not, one thing is for sure: most of us can feel the difference between a happy moment and a meaningful one.

Look at your two moments from the start again. If they weren't the same one, that gap is exactly what the 2013 survey went looking for. I'm still finding out whether I'd choose that PhD again.

And you? If you could have more of just one of those two moments next week, which would it be, and what would it cost you?

Note: If worry or stress is weighing on you, a doctor or therapist is the right person to talk to.

Sources:

• Baumeister et al., Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2013.
• Ostafin & Proulx, Meaning in life and resilience to stressors, Anxiety, Stress & Coping, 2020.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, translated by W. D. Ross.