作者：Emily Esfahani Smith
出版社：Crown Publishing Group (NY)
副标题：Crafting a Life That Matters
发行时间：January 10th 2017
来源：下载的 epub 版本
Goodreads：4.04（1139 Ratings）
豆瓣：7.7（77人评价）

概要

the four pillars of meaning:
Belonging: We all need to find our tribe and forge relationships in which we feel understood, recognized, and valued to know we matter to others.
Purpose: We all need a far-reaching goal that motivates us, serves as the organizing principle of our lives, and drives us to make a contribution to the world.
Storytelling: We are all storytellers, taking our disparate experiences and assembling them into a coherent narrative that allows us to make sense of ourselves and the world.
Transcendence: During a transcendent or mystical experience, we feel we have risen above the everyday world and are connected to something vast and meaningful.

作者介绍

Emily Esfahani Smith is an editor at the Hoover Institution and the author of The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness.

作者 Twitter：https://twitter.com/emesfahanismith
作者个人网站：http://emilyesfahanismith.com/
Ted分享：https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_esfahani_smith_there_s_more_to_life_than_being_happy

此外作者本人还是 Hoover Institution 的 Ben Franklin Circles 在 Washington DC 的负责人，研究了一下 Ben Franklin Circles，是一个非常棒的活动，我自己也是 Benjamin Franklin 13 virtues 的粉丝，可惜不能在美国以外创办这样的活动

读后感

之前偶然听了一个 TED 分享，关注到了 Emily Esfahani Smith，由于自己对于「幸福」没有那么多的困惑，所以没有怎么在意，今天和友人聊天的时候碰巧遇到了这个话题，就随缘翻了一下这本书，Emily 介绍的关于幸福需要「belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence」，对我而言，真心是一种非常有说服力的「幸福哲学」

Emily 应该是一位苏菲派信徒，之前读过鲁米的「走进春天的果园」很有启发，阅读了 Emily 书中对苏菲派的背景知识，对这个教派的好奇更进了一步，Emily 在书中提到加缪借由随笔集西西弗神话（The Myth of Sisyphus）来描述了这一种人类所共有的借由信仰而获得意义的哲学，对我非常有启发：

有一些人在做重复着的，看似毫无意义的事情，其实需要这个人能够洞察到无意义后面的意义，我想，这可能就是盲目的信仰和真正的信仰背后的根本差别吧

说一个题外，这是我读到的第三本叫做「The Power of *」的书了，这三本是都非常的好，「The Power of Now」「The Power of Habit」，这次是「The Power of Meaning」，不知道是不是巧合

摘录

On Thursday and Sunday evenings, a group of seekers gathered in a large room of my family’s home in downtown Montreal, where my parents ran a Sufi meetinghouse. Sufism is the school of mysticism associated with Islam, and my family belonged to the Nimatullahi Sufi Order, which originated in Iran in the fourteenth century and today has meetinghouses all over the world. Twice a week, darvishes—or members of the order—would sit on the floor and meditate for several hours. With their eyes closed and their chins to their chests, they silently repeated a name or attribute of God as traditional Iranian Sufi music played.
Living in the Sufi meetinghouse as a child was enchanting. The walls of our home were decorated with sculptures of Arabic script that my father carved from wood. Tea was brewing constantly, perfuming the air with the fragrance of bergamot. After meditating, the Sufis drank the tea, which my mother served along with dates or Iranian sweets made with rosewater, saffron, cardamom, and honey. Sometimes, I served the tea, carefully balancing a tray full of glasses, saucers, and sugar cubes as I knelt down before each darvish.

Such a way of life appealed to the darvishes, many of whom had left Iran and other repressive societies to live in Canada and the United States. Some Muslims consider Sufis to be mystic heretics, and they are severely persecuted in the Middle East today. But even though many of the Sufis I knew had led difficult lives, they were always looking forward. Their demanding spiritual practice—with its emphasis on self-denial, service, and compassion over personal gain, comfort, and pleasure—elevated them. It made their lives feel more meaningful.
The Sufis who meditated in our home were part of a long tradition of spiritual seekers. For as long as human beings have existed, they have yearned to know what makes life worth living. The first great work of human literature, the four-thousand-year-old The Epic of Gilgamesh, is about a hero’s quest to figure out how he should live knowing that he will die. And in the centuries since Gilgamesh’s tale was first told, the urgency of that quest has not faded. The rise of philosophy, religion, natural science, literature, and even art can be at least partly explained as a response to two questions: “What is the meaning of existence?” And, “How can I lead a meaningful life?”

My family eventually moved out of the Sufi meetinghouse. We came to the United States, where the busyness of everyday life trumped the rituals of meditation, singing, and tea. But I never stopped searching for meaning. When I was a teenager, that search led me to philosophy. The question of how to live a meaningful life was once a central driving force of that discipline, with thinkers from Aristotle to Nietzsche all offering their own visions of what a good life requires. But after arriving at college, I soon learned that academic philosophy had largely abandoned that quest. Instead, the issues it addressed were esoteric or technical, like the nature of consciousness or the philosophy of computers.
Meanwhile, I found myself immersed in a campus culture that had little patience for the questions that had drawn me to philosophy. Many of my peers were driven by a desire for career success. They had grown up in a world of intense competition for the merit badges that would get them to an impressive college, then to an elite graduate or professional school or a job on Wall Street. When they picked their classes and activities, they did so with those goals in mind. By the time they graduated, these razor-sharp minds had already acquired specialized knowledge in fields that were even more specific than their particular majors. I met people who could share their insights on how to improve public health in third-world countries, how to use statistical modeling to predict election outcomes, and how to “deconstruct” a literary text. But they had little to no sense of what makes life meaningful, or of what greater purpose they might have beyond making money or landing a prestigious job. Outside of an occasional conversation with friends, they had no forum in which to discuss or deeply engage with these questions.

Many professors not only thought it was possible but that they had an obligation to lead students forward in this quest. Religion, it was true, no longer offered all students definitive answers to life’s ultimate question, but some educators believed the humanities could step in. Rather than leaving students to search for meaning on their own, these professors attempted to situate them in a large and enduring tradition of arts and letters. And so in the mid- to late nineteenth century, many undergraduates followed a college curriculum that stressed the masterpieces of literature and philosophy—like Homer’s Iliad, Plato’s dialogues, The Divine Comedy, and the works of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, and others.
By reading these texts, students listened and ultimately contributed to a “great conversation” that had been going on for thousands of years. As they encountered competing visions of the good life, students were able to come to their own conclusions about how to live. Is Homer’s glory-driven Achilles a better model than the pilgrim in Dante’s poem? What can we learn about the purpose of our lives from Aristotle’s writings on ethics? What does Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary reveal about love and romance? How about Jane Austen’s Emma? There was no one right answer. But by drawing on these shared cultural touchstones, students developed a common language with which they could discuss and debate life’s meaning with peers, professors, and the members of their community.
By the early twentieth century, however, the situation had again shifted. After the Civil War, the first research universities appeared on the American educational landscape. These institutions, modeled after German universities, prioritized the production of scholarship. To facilitate such scholarship, separate fields of study arose, each with its own rigorous, systematic, and objective “methods.” Professors pursued highly specialized areas of research within those fields, and students, too, chose an area of concentration—a major—to help prepare them for a career after college. Eventually, the humanities-oriented curriculum disintegrated, leaving students essentially free to pick and choose their classes from a menu of options—which, of course, continues to be the case today at most schools.
The research ideal dealt a blow to the idea that living meaningfully could be taught or learned in an academic setting. Its emphasis on specialization meant that most professors considered the question of meaning beyond their purview: they did not believe they had the authority or knowledge to lead students forward in this quest. Others found the topic illegitimate, naïve, or even embarrassing. The question of how to live, after all, requires a discussion of abstract, personal, and moral values. It does not belong, these professors argued, in colleges and universities devoted to the accumulation of objective knowledge. “An increasing consensus in the academy,” as one professor wrote several years ago, “is that faculty members should not help students discern a meaningful philosophy of life or develop character, but should instead help them master the content and methodology of a given discipline and learn critical thinking.”
But something interesting has happened in recent years. Meaning has regained a foothold in our universities, and especially in an unexpected place—the sciences. Over the past few decades, a group of social scientists has begun investigating the question of how to lead a good life.
Many of them are working in a field called positive psychology—a discipline that, like the social sciences generally, is a child of the research university and grounds its findings in empirical studies, but that also draws on the rich tradition of the humanities. Positive psychology was founded by the University of Pennsylvania’s Martin Seligman, who, after decades of working as a research psychologist, had come to believe that his field was in crisis. He and his colleagues could cure depression, helplessness, and anxiety, but, he realized, helping people overcome their demons is not the same thing as helping them live well. Though psychologists were charged with caring for and studying the human psyche, they knew very little about human flourishing. And so, in 1998, Seligman called upon his colleagues to investigate what makes life fulfilling and worth living.
Social scientists heeded his call, but many of them zeroed in on a topic that was both obvious and seemed easy to measure: happiness. Some researchers studied the benefits of happiness. Others studied its causes. Still others investigated how we can increase it in our day-to-day lives. Though positive psychology was founded to study the good life more generally, it was the empirical research on happiness that blossomed and became the public face of the field. In the late eighties and early nineties, there were several hundred studies about happiness published each year; by 2014, there were over 10,000 per year.
It was an exciting shift for psychology, one that the public immediately responded to. Major media outlets clamored to cover the new research. Soon, entrepreneurs began monetizing it, founding start-ups and programming apps to help ordinary people implement the field’s findings. They were followed by a deluge of celebrities, personal coaches, and motivational speakers, all eager to share the gospel of happiness. According to Psychology Today, in 2000, the number of books published about happiness was a modest fifty. In 2008, that number had skyrocketed to 4,000. Of course, people have always been interested in the pursuit of happiness, but all that attention has made an impact: since the mid-2000s, the interest in happiness, as measured by Google searches, has tripled. “The shortcut to anything you want in your life,” writes author Rhonda Byrne in her bestselling 2006 book The Secret, “is to BE and FEEL happy now!”
And yet, there is a major problem with the happiness frenzy: it has failed to deliver on its promise. Though the happiness industry continues to grow, as a society, we’re more miserable than ever. Indeed, social scientists have uncovered a sad irony—chasing happiness actually makes people unhappy.
That fact would come as no surprise to students of the humanistic tradition. Philosophers have long questioned the value of happiness alone. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” wrote the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill. To that, the twentieth-century Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick added: “And although it might be best of all to be Socrates satisfied, having both happiness and depth, we would give up some happiness in order to gain the depth.”
Nozick was a happiness skeptic. He devised a thought experiment to emphasize his point. Imagine, Nozick said, that you could live in a tank that would “give you any experience you desired.” It sounds like something out of The Matrix: “Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.” He then asks, “Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?”

This distinction has a long history in philosophy, which for thousands of years has recognized two paths to the good life. The first is hedonia, or what we today call happiness, following in the footsteps of Sigmund Freud. Human beings, he wrote, “strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so”—and this “pleasure principle,” as he called it, is what “decides the purpose of life” for most people. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus, a student of Socrates, considered the pursuit of hedonia the key to living well. “The art of life,” Aristippus wrote, “lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.’ ’ Several decades later, Epicurus popularized a somewhat similar idea, arguing that the good life is found in pleasure, which he defined as the absence of bodily and mental pain, such as anxiety. This idea waned through the Middle Ages, but it saw a resurgence in popularity during the eighteenth century with Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism. Bentham believed the pursuit of pleasure was our central driving force. “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure,” he famously wrote: “It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”

Meaning and happiness, in other words, can be at odds. Yet research has shown that meaningful endeavors can also give rise to a deeper form of well-being down the road. That was the conclusion of a 2010 study by Veronika Huta of the University of Ottawa and Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester. Huta and Ryan instructed a group of college students to pursue either meaning or happiness over a ten-day period by doing at least one thing each day to increase eudaimonia or hedonia, respectively. At the end of each day, the study participants reported back to the researchers about the activities they’d chosen to undertake. Some of the most popular ones reported by students in the meaning condition included forgiving a friend, studying, thinking about one’s values, and helping or cheering up another person. Those in the happiness condition, by contrast, listed activities like sleeping in, playing games, going shopping, and eating sweets.
After the study’s completion, the researchers checked in with the participants to see how it had affected their well-being. What they found was that students in the happiness condition experienced more positive feelings, and fewer negative ones, immediately after the study. But three months later, the mood boost had faded. The second group of students—those who focused on meaning—did not feel as happy right after the experiment, though they did rate their lives as more meaningful. Yet three months later, the picture was different. The students who had pursued meaning said they felt more “enriched,” “inspired,” and “part of something greater than myself.” They also reported fewer negative moods. Over the long term, it seemed, pursuing meaning actually boosted psychological health.
The philosopher John Stuart Mill wouldn’t have been surprised. “Those only are happy,” he wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

On a fall day in 1930, the historian and philosopher Will Durant was raking leaves in the yard of his home in Lake Hill, New York, when a well-dressed man walked up to him. The man told Durant that he was planning to commit suicide unless the popular philosopher could give him “one good reason” to live.
Shocked, Durant attempted to respond in a way that would bring the man comfort—but his response was uninspired: “I bade him get a job—but he had one; to eat a good meal—but he was not hungry; he left visibly unmoved by my arguments.”
Durant, a writer and intellectual who died in 1981 at the age of 96, is best known for his books that brought philosophy and history to the public. The Story of Philosophy, published in 1926, became a bestseller, and his multivolume work The Story of Civilization, cowritten with his wife, Ariel Durant, over the course of forty years, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for its tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution. During his life, Durant was a thinker with far-ranging interests. He wrote fluently about literature, religion, and politics, and in 1977, he received one of the highest honors bestowed by the U.S. government on a civilian, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Durant was raised Catholic, attended a Jesuit academy, and planned to join the priesthood. But in college, he became an atheist after he read the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, whose ideas “melted” his “inherited theology.” For many years following his loss of religious faith, he “brooded” over the question of meaning, but never found a satisfactory answer to it. An agnostic and empirically minded philosopher, Durant later came to see that he was unsure of what gives people a reason to go on living even when they despair. This wise man of his time could not offer a compelling answer to the suicidal man who came to him in 1930—the year after the stock market crash that inaugurated the Great Depression.
So Durant decided to write to the great literary, philosophical, and scientific luminaries of his day, from Mohandas Gandhi and Mary E. Woolley to H. L. Mencken and Edwin Arlington Robinson, to ask them how they found significance and fulfillment in their own lives during that tumultuous period of history. “Will you interrupt your work for a moment,” Durant begins his letter, “and play the game of philosophy with me? I am attempting to face a question which our generation, perhaps more than any, seems always ready to ask and never able to answer—What is the meaning or worth of human life?” He compiled their answers into a book, On the Meaning of Life, which was published in 1932.
Durant’s letter explores why many people of his time felt like they were living in an existential vacuum. For thousands of years, after all, human beings have believed in the existence of a transcendent and supernatural realm, populated by gods and spirits, that lies beyond the sensory world of everyday experiences. They regularly felt the presence of this spiritual realm, which infused the ordinary world with meaning. But, Durant argued, modern philosophy and science have shown that the belief in such a world—a world that cannot be seen or touched—is naïve at best and superstitious at worst. In doing so, they have led to widespread disenchantment.
In his letter, he explains why the loss of those traditional sources of meaning is so tragic. “Astronomers have told us that human affairs constitute but a moment in the trajectory of a star,” Durant writes; “geologists have told us that civilization is but a precarious interlude between ice ages; biologists have told us that all life is war, a struggle for existence among individuals, groups, nations, alliances, and species; historians have told us that ‘progress’ is delusion, whose glory ends in inevitable decay; psychologists have told us that the will and the self are the helpless instruments of heredity and environment, and that the once incorruptible soul is but a transient incandescence of the brain.” Philosophers, meanwhile, with their emphasis on reasoning their way to the truth, have reasoned their way to the truth that life is meaningless: “Life has become, in that total perspective which is philosophy, a fitful pullulation of human insects on the earth, a planetary eczema that may soon be cured.”

Such was the case with the famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. In the 1870s, around the time he turned fifty, Tolstoy fell into an existential depression so severe and debilitating that he was seized by the constant desire to kill himself. His life, he had concluded, was utterly meaningless, and this thought filled him with horror.
To an outsider, the novelist’s depression might have seemed peculiar. Tolstoy, an aristocrat, had everything: he was wealthy; he was famous; he was married with several children; and his two masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, had been published to great acclaim in 1869 and 1878, respectively. Internationally recognized as one of the greatest novelists of his time, Tolstoy had little doubt that his works would be canonized as classics of world literature.
Most people would settle for far less. But at the height of his fame, Tolstoy concluded that these accomplishments were merely the trappings of a meaningless life—which is to say that they were nothing at all to him.
In 1879, a despairing Tolstoy started writing A Confession, an autobiographical account of his spiritual crisis. He begins A Confession by chronicling how, as a university student and later a soldier, he had lived a debauched life. “Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder—there was not a crime I did not commit,” he writes, perhaps with some exaggeration, “yet in spite of it all I was praised, and my colleagues considered me and still do consider me a relatively moral man.” It was during this period of his life that Tolstoy began writing, motivated, he claims, by “vanity, self-interest, and pride”—the desire to acquire fame and money.
He soon fell in with the literary and intellectual circles of Russia and Europe, which had built a secular church around the idea of progress. Tolstoy became one of its adherents. But then two dramatic experiences revealed to him the hollowness of believing in the perfectibility of man and society. The first was witnessing the execution by guillotine of a man in Paris in 1857. “When I saw how the head was severed from the body and heard the thud of each part as it fell into the box,” he writes, “I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act.” The second was the senseless death of his brother, Nikolai, from tuberculosis. “He suffered for over a year,” Tolstoy writes, “and died an agonizing death without ever understanding why he lived and understanding even less why he was dying.”
These events shook Tolstoy, but they did not shatter him. In 1862, he got married, and family life distracted him from his doubts. So did writing War and Peace, which he started working on soon after his wedding.
Tolstoy had always been interested in the question of what gives life meaning, a theme that runs through his writings. Levin, who is widely considered an autobiographical representation of Tolstoy, famously wrestles with the problem in Anna Karenina. He eventually concludes that his life is not pointless: “my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.”
But soon after he completed Anna Karenina, Tolstoy took a bleaker view. The question of meaning cast a shadow over everything he did. A voice inside his head started asking—Why? Why am I here? What is the purpose of all that I do? Why do I exist? And, as the years went on, that voice grew louder and more insistent: “Before I could be occupied with my Samara estate, with the education of my son, or with the writing of books,” he writes in A Confession, “I had to know why I was doing these things.” Elsewhere in A Confession he puts the question in other ways: “What will come of what I do today and tomorrow? What will come of my entire life…Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything or do anything? Or to put it still differently: Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?” Because he could not answer the “why” of his existence, he concluded that his life was meaningless.
“Very well,” he writes, “you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière, more famous than all the writers in the world—so what?” Tolstoy felt like the prophet of Ecclesiastes, who wrote, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity! What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” The only truth we can absolutely know, Tolstoy believed, is that life ends with death and is punctuated by suffering and sorrow. We and all that we hold dear—our loved ones, our accomplishments, our identities—will eventually perish.
Tolstoy eventually found his way out of nihilism. He began by searching for people who were at peace with their lives to see where they found meaning. Most people in his own milieu—aristocrats and the literary elite—were leading superficial lives and knew nothing about life’s meaning, Tolstoy argued. So he looked beyond his own social set and was struck to realize that millions of ordinary people around him had found, it seemed, a solution to the problem that had consumed him. These “simple people,” as Tolstoy called them, the uneducated peasants, derived meaning from faith—faith in God and the teachings of Christianity.
Though Tolstoy had fallen away from religion by the time he was in university, his midlife search for meaning led him back to it. Curious about the faith that was so indispensable to the peasants, he studied various religious and spiritual traditions, including Islam and Buddhism. During that spiritual voyage, he became a practicing Christian. He first found a home in his native Russian Orthodox church, but he eventually broke away and started living according to his own stripped-down version of Christianity, which focused on adhering to Christ’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.
Tolstoy’s definition of “faith” is vague: he sees it as a fundamentally irrational “knowledge of the meaning of human life.” What’s clear, though, is his belief that faith ties an individual to something larger or even “infinite” that lies beyond the self. “No matter what answers a given faith might provide for us,” he writes, “every answer of faith gives infinite meaning to the finite existence of man, meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation, and death.” Though Tolstoy did not believe in the miracles or sacraments of the church, he found meaning in living “a life as it was meant by God to be led,” as one of his biographers puts it—which, to Tolstoy, meant a Christ-like devotion to others, especially the poor.
Completing A Confession did not mark the end of Tolstoy’s search for meaning. He continued his quest in the final decades of his life. He adopted a simple lifestyle, giving up alcohol and meat, rejecting his aristocratic titles of “Sir” and “Count,” and learning the craft of shoemaking, believing that manual labor was virtuous. He devoted much of his time to improving the plight of the peasants in his community, and even tried to give all of his property to the poor (a plan his wife bitterly rejected). He also advocated progressive ideas like the abolition of private property, pacifism, and the doctrine of nonresistance to evil. With these beliefs, Tolstoy attracted a group of disciples who followed his teachings as they would a guru’s.
At the same time, his final years were not easy. His attempt to live meaningfully upended his life. The Russian government denounced him as a radical; the Russian Orthodox church excommunicated him; and his marriage was left in ruins. Weary of constantly fighting with his wife, and yearning for an even more spiritual life, he fled their estate in October 1910, journeying by train to the Caucasus. He hoped to live the remaining years of his life in religious solitude. It was not to be: he died of pneumonia during the journey. His ideas, though, continued to make their mark on the world—and not just through his novels. His doctrine of nonresistance to evil inspired Gandhi’s political campaign in India—which, in turn, helped spark Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement.

Camus illustrates this point by ending his essay with an ode to the ancient Greek hero Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to carry a boulder up to the peak of a mountain only to have it come tumbling down right before he reaches the summit. He performs this futile task for all of eternity. It’s difficult to imagine a more meaningless existence than the one that Sisyphus ekes out. But Camus wants us to see that Sisyphus’s life is extremely valuable. In fact, it serves as a model for us all.
To Camus, living a meaningful life requires adopting an attitude of defiance toward the absurd, which is precisely what Sisyphus does. Sisyphus, who is being punished for deceiving the gods and attempting to escape death, does not lament his fate or hope for a better life. Rather, in contempt of the gods who want to torment him, he embodies the three qualities that define a worthwhile life: revolt, passion, and freedom.
Each time he returns to the base of the mountain, he faces a choice: to give up or to labor on. Sisyphus chooses the struggle. He accepts his task and throws himself into the grueling work of carrying the boulder up the mountain. Having scorned the gods, he becomes the master of his own fate. “His rock is his thing,” as Camus puts it—it’s what gives his life meaning and purpose. Though his labors may seem pointless, they are endowed with meaning through the triumphant attitude with which he approaches his task. “The struggle itself toward the heights,” Camus writes, “is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
The struggle itself. When Camus tells us to imagine Sisyphus happy, he does not mean a feel-good kind of happiness. He is talking about the sense of accomplishment and contentment that results from devoting yourself to a difficult but worthwhile task. Camus wants us to see that like Sisyphus, we can live our lives to the fullest by embracing the struggle with dignity—by embracing, as he puts it in his notebooks, the “misery and greatness of the world.”
Camus obeyed this imperative in his own life. As he was working on “The Myth of Sisyphus” in Paris in 1940, he wrote a letter to a friend expressing his state of mind: “Happy? Let’s not talk about it….But even if my life is complicated, I haven’t stopped loving. At this time there is no distance between my life and my work. I’m doing both at the same time, and with the same passion.” If Tolstoy found meaning in the infinite, Camus finds it in the finite, in the daily task of living. The epigraph to “The Myth of Sisyphus” is a verse from Pindar, the ancient Greek poet: “Oh my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
Rather than give up on the world, we can confront it directly and with passion, and create for ourselves a meaning out of the pain, loss, and struggles that we endure. “To the question of how to live without God,” Camus’s biographer Olivier Todd writes, “Camus had three answers: live, act, and write.”
Just as Sisyphus’s rock was the “thing” that gave his life meaning, Camus’s “thing” was his writing. Everyone, Camus believed, needs some “thing,” some project or goal, to which he chooses to dedicate his life, whether it’s a large boulder—or a small rose. Consider the beloved children’s story The Little Prince, which is a wonderful expression of this wisdom. The prince lives on a tiny planet where he spends his time tending the plants and flowers in his garden. “It’s very tedious work,” he says, “but very easy.” One day, he notices a rose that is growing on its surface—a flower unlike any he’s seen on his planet before. The prince falls in love with the mysterious rose, whom he devotedly waters and shields from the wind. But she is a vain and needy flower, and the prince eventually grows weary of her, deciding to leave his planet and explore the broader universe.
He is on a quest for knowledge and understanding, and sees many strange sights during his travels. After visiting a few other planets, the prince finds his way to Earth, where he comes across a rose garden. Though the prince left his rose behind, he still cares for her, and seeing these other roses makes him disconsolate; he thought that his rose was the only flower of its kind in the universe, but now he sees that there are hundreds of others like her.
Just as he has reached the bottom of his despair, a wise fox calls out to him. The fox teaches the prince many lessons, but the most important one concerns the rose the prince left behind. The rose is not just another rose out of many, he tells the prince; it is special because of what the prince gave to the flower: “It’s the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important…You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”
When the prince returns to the field of roses, he takes the fox’s wisdom with him and addresses them: “You’re lovely, but you’re empty,” he tells them. “One couldn’t die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass. Since she’s the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three for butterflies). Since she’s the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she’s my rose.”
In other words, it was the prince’s investment of time, energy, and care into the rose that made her special—and that made their relationship meaningful.
This is not just literary or philosophical fancy. Social scientists, too, have found that when we put effort into building something, we tend to value it more—a phenomenon psychologists call the “IKEA effect.” Putting together IKEA furniture makes people like it more, and what holds true for cheap Swedish furniture can also be applied to our lives more broadly. When we devote ourselves to difficult but worthwhile tasks—whether that means tending a rose or pursuing a noble purpose—our lives feel more significant.
The converse, of course, is also true. The most important parts of life require hard work and sacrifice. This is a lesson that many of us learn as children as we’re first trying out sports, struggling through a hard class, learning how to play an instrument, or discovering how to nurture and maintain close friendships. Unfortunately, as we grow up, we tend to forget that lesson. The busyness of adult life makes quick and easy solutions to difficult life problems alluring. But to live well, we should take to heart the wisdom we learned in our younger years. Only by facing challenges head-on can we truly find meaning in our lives.

Though the meaning of life may remain obscure, we all can and must find our own sources of meaning within life. This was the great insight of existentialist thinkers like Camus—and, a decade before “The Myth of Sisyphus” was published, Will Durant came to the same conclusion. After reading through the responses to the letter he sent to his friends and colleagues, he discovered that each of them found meaning in their own way. Gandhi wrote that he found meaning in the “service of all that lives.” The French priest Ernest Dimnet found it in looking beyond his personal interest. “You ask what life has done for me?—It has given me a few chances to break away from my natural selfishness and for this I am deeply grateful.” The filmmaker Carl Laemmle, one of the founders of Universal Studios, mentioned his children: “You ask ‘where in the last resort my treasure lies?’—I think it lies in an almost frenzied desire to see my children and my children’s children well cared for and happy.” Owen C. Middleton, who was serving a life term in prison, found meaning in simply being part of the world: “I do not know to what great end Destiny leads us, nor do I care very much. Long before that end, I shall have played my part, spoken my lines, and passed on. How I play that part is all that concerns me. In the knowledge that I am an inalienable part of this great, wonderful, upward movement called life, and that nothing, neither pestilence, nor physical affliction, nor depression—nor prison—can take away from me my part, lies my consolation, my inspiration, and my treasure.”
In 1930, the year that the suicidal man approached Durant in his yard, several others wrote to the philosopher expressing their desire to kill themselves. Durant wrote back, explaining, as best he could, why he believed life was worth living. Later, he synthesized his responses into a single statement that concludes On the Meaning of Life.

Each of the responses to Durant’s letter and Life’s survey was distinct, reflecting the unique values, experiences, and personalities of the respondents. Yet there were some themes that emerged again and again. When people explain what makes their lives meaningful, they describe connecting to and bonding with other people in positive ways. They discuss finding something worthwhile to do with their time. They mention creating narratives that help them understand themselves and the world. They talk about mystical experiences of self-loss.
As I conducted my research for this book, those four themes came up again and again in my conversations with people living meaningful lives and those still searching for meaning. Those categories were also present in the definitions of a meaningful life offered by both Aristotle and the psychologists mentioned in the introduction—who argued, in different ways, that meaning arises from our relationships to others, having a mission tied to contributing to society, making sense of our experiences and who we are through narrative, and connecting to something bigger than the self. I found them, too, in the emerging social science research on a meaningful life and how people can achieve it. And I found them in works of philosophy, literature, religion, and popular culture—in Buddhist teachings, in American Transcendentalism, in novels, and in film.
They are the four pillars of meaning: belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence.
For Laemmle and Borysenko’s patient, for instance, meaning came from loving others and connecting to them with compassion and empathy. For Gandhi, as for young Jason, living a meaningful life involved doing some kind of good in the world so that others could live better lives. Then there was L’Engle, who found meaning in understanding life as a story. Rabbi Kelman and Middleton, meanwhile, found meaning by losing themselves in something bigger, whether a spiritual reality or the mystery of the tangible world itself.
These pillars are central to religious and spiritual systems, and they are the reason why those traditions historically conferred (and continue to confer) meaning in people’s lives. They situated individuals within a community. They gave them a purpose to work toward, like getting into heaven, growing closer to God, or serving others. They offered them explanations for why the world is the way it is, and why they are the way they are. And they provided them with opportunities for transcendence during rituals and ceremonies. Each of these pillars was present in the lives of the Sufis I knew, which is why their lives were so meaningful.
But the beauty of the pillars is that they are accessible to everyone. Both with and without religion, individuals can build up each of these pillars in their lives. They are sources of meaning that cut through every aspect of our existence. We can find belonging at work and within our families, or experience transcendence while taking a walk through the park or visiting an art museum. We can choose a career that helps us serve others, or draft our life story to understand how we got to be the way we are. We may move from one city to another, change jobs, and lose touch with friends as the years go by, but we can continue to find meaning by harnessing the pillars in new ways in our new circumstances. And when we keep the pillars in mind, we find meaning in even the most unexpected of places, whether we’re on our commute, inside of a prison, at the top of a mountain in West Texas—or on an island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.

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