Think about the most delicious meal you’ve eaten recently. What, specifically, was so good about it? Were you trying a new dish or was it a familiar comfort food?
Now, what is the most meaningful event you’ve experienced recently? It could be as small as having coffee with a good friend, or as big as a graduation or wedding. Perhaps recalling a recent meaningful event is easy, but if you’re struggling to come up with something, you’re not alone. As I covered in my last post, our modern meaning infrastructure does not nurture meaning as emotional significance, but there are things we can do as individuals to craft meaningfulness in our lives.
It’s not just a metaphor to say that meaning is a form of nourishment. More than 70 years of research shows that meaning is essential for human wellbeing and that lack of meaning in life is linked to depression, stress and anxiety (references below). So it really makes sense to consider meaning as an essential nutrient and to pay attention to our meaning diet, which includes not just the quantity of the meaning we’re “consuming,” but also the quality.
I suggest that many of us, and perhaps most of us, are starved of nourishing meaning – and we’ve tried to just get used to it, to the detriment of our wellbeing. There are indications that people who say they are happy, but also say that meaning isn’t important to them, have gene expression patterns of people suffering from chronic stress.
The beauty of paying more attention to our meaning diet is that this act, by itself, typically starts to increase the amount of meaning we experience in our lives. Imagine recalling satisfying meaning in your life in the same way that you remember a satisfying meal.
Just as creating a good meal takes some time, effort and attention, so too with our meaning diet. I recently read that all meaning is post-hoc, that we only create meaning about an event after it occurs. I strongly disagree. In fact, just like a good actual meal, a healthy meaning “meal” takes preparation, thoughtful execution, and then savoring of the food itself.
Here’s my working definition of a meaningful experience: It’s an experience that leaves you feeling satisfied, maybe even deeply satisfied, on an emotional, intellectual and even on a physical level (e.g., less stressed) – feel free to add a spiritual level, if you like. It’s an experience that sticks in your memory, for days, weeks or maybe years, and when you remember it, you re-experience some of the same sense of satisfaction.
And with this definition in mind, let’s start to look at some simple ways we can make our experiences more meaningful.
So, consider an upcoming event in your life that you would like to make more meaningful, whether big or small. It could even be something you do on your own, such as working in the garden. Of course, we’re not trying to make every event in our lives deeply meaningful – that would be exhausting, but pick out some activity or event that you would like to bring more meaning to.
In my practical meaning framework, I suggest we focus attention on the three opportunity windows that we can use to increase our chances of making an event (from the grand to the small) more meaningful. I’ll introduce each of these here and cover them in more depth in later posts.
The Prep: Anticipatory Meaning
In popular cooking shows, the camera crew often follows the chef to a local farmers’ market where they fawn over the beautiful seasonal veggies or the pasture-raised meat they’re going to cook. Then we join the chef in the kitchen where they transform these raw ingredients into an amazing dish. These are positive acts of “anticipatory meaning making,” which get us excited about what’s to come.
If the chef simply picked up a frozen meal at the supermarket and then threw it in the microwave, we wouldn’t have a show worth watching. Low-effort, habitual eating and low-effort, habitual meaning-making are both problematic. How often do we resort to the microwaved dinner approach for the events in our lives?
If we want to improve our meaning diet, anticipatory meaning can be an important ingredient. As I discussed in my prior post, one of the key creators of meaningfulness is to move beyond meaning as intellectual understanding and into meaning as emotional significance.
So, what could be emotionally significant about your upcoming event? Is it your relationship with a particular person or group? Is there significance to the activity you’ll be doing (e.g., an anniversary, a ritual, etc.)? What about the place where the event will occur?
The most potent way to develop anticipatory meaning is through journaling (I’ll cover meaning journaling in future posts), but you can also do it through conversation and/or just thinking about it in your head. Focus on the aspects of your future event that you could feel emotionally connected with.
The Meal: Immediate Meaning
In terms of food, this is the enjoyment of the meal itself, from appreciating how it appears on the plate, to noticing the aroma, to savoring the flavor in your mouth. Think of what a sommelier does with wine. The opposite of savoring is absentmindedly shoving food in your mouth while watching Tiktok videos on your phone.
I find that savoring food is a bit easier than savoring meaning in the moment, but immediate meaning can be experienced with a bit of practice. This kind of meaning requires the seemingly contradictory tasks of being in the moment as fully as possible, but also doing some witnessing and reflecting. Imagine being at your wedding altar with your beloved, taking in the precious moment and this precious person, and at the same time, having the realization that, “Wow, I’m actually marrying this amazing person – right now!”
This is immediate meaning, and at its best, it can form a delicious feedback loop in which what is happening in the moment, and the meaning I’m making about it, expand and enhance each other. In the example of a wedding, the moment of the vow, or exchange of a kiss is both experientially pleasurable and emotionally significant.
The Dessert: Reflective Meaning
When I asked you to remember a recent meaningful event, it was a simple attempt at reflective meaning. Whereas the sensory memory of a particular meal can fade relatively quickly, the beauty of reflective meaning is that it can get better and better as time passes.
Even if we can’t get that more elusive immediate meaning, we always have the chance to reflect on our experiences and enhance the meaning after the fact. This reflective process is probably what most of us think of when it comes to meaning making. Many of us have at some point kept some type of diary or journal and written about things that have happened to us. Or we’ve debriefed with a friend about a particularly meaningful or provocative experience (meaningful experiences can definitely be provocative).
The mere act of recounting an experience does not necessarily make it more meaningful. If we are just going through the motions of telling someone about our relatively uneventful and rather meaningless day, this probably won’t do much to add nourishment to our meaning diet. The meaning making process requires a bit more intention and, usually, some basic structure.
In upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing some suggested structure, including templates for meaning journaling.
References for meaning and wellbeing:
Multiple article links: https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/determinants-purpose
https://www.nobascholar.com/chapters/50/download.pdf
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19414613/
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/meaning-is-healthier-than-happiness/278250/