This aspect of significance is related to psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s idea of finding beauty and meaning in life through lived experience. Significance is augmented when your behaviors, or experiences more broadly, matter to yourself. The feeling that your life is significant is related to more than feeling that your actions are influential to others. Existential mattering then is often rooted in a sense that you matter to others-from helping strangers in need and providing social support to loved ones, to simply being a reliable friend. Research shows that feeling that you have made a positive influence on others is, unsurprisingly, almost always associated with the belief that your life is meaningful. While the concept of existential mattering often evokes images of famous (and infamous) people who have done extraordinary things in their lives-like Mother Theresa, Cesar Chavez, or Bill Gates-many people gain a sense of mattering through avenues more easily traversed. This conviction is referred to as “ existential mattering” and is a strong component of the experience of meaning in life. There is great comfort in believing that your life and actions matter in the grand scheme of things. Other research further corroborates the idea that significance (mattering), coherence (making sense), and purpose (orienting toward goals) represent three interrelated facets of, or perhaps direct pathways to, the experience of meaning in life.įrom the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.īased on those three pathways, here are some relatively simple things you can do to maintain or enhance your experience of meaning in life. Researchers’ definitions of meaning in life typically incorporate three themes: the belief that your life and contributions matter to others and yourself, the feeling that your life makes sense, and the feeling that you are actively pursuing fulfilling goals. Although actively constructing meaning may be required in some cases-for example, when your world is turned upside down after a traumatic event-cultivating meaning in life may be as simple as detecting the meaning that is already there. But we now know that most people, most of the time, report that their lives feel more meaningful than not. For most of the 20th century, philosophers, psychologists, and psychiatrists argued that meaning in life is a rare, profound experience, attainable through an active search, deep self-reflection, or some other arduous way of creating meaning in a seemingly meaningless world.
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