Full transcript of psychology professor Michael Steger’s talk: What Makes Life Meaningful at TEDxCSU conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio: What Makes Life Meaningful – Michael Steger at TEDxCSU
TRANSCRIPT:
Michael Steger – Professor of Psychology
I need to start with a confession. I learned almost everything I know about life from John Cusack movies from the 1980s. And in these movies the hero just through the sheer force of trying to be a good guy and speaking from the heart wins true love in the end and the widespread admiration of all.
I tried to put this plan into effect – this John Cusack plan – and most importantly came when I met this amazing woman in college, and I fell head over heels almost instantly and nearly as instantly when John Cusack and declared my undying love.
The John Cusack plan took about four years to work in my case but you know, John Cusack also teaches us to be persistent, right? Not creepy but persistent.
And so it got serious pretty quickly, moved from Minnesota out to Oregon together about three years later we’re on a beach in Manzanita, Oregon, leaning back against a weathered driftwood log sitting in the cool dry sand, the Pacific surf had kicked up a haze around us. And in my pocket I had this this contraption I built out of some shells I brought back from a road trip to Baja, Mexico and using tape and glue and the cotton ball, I had — don’t laugh this is serious — I had created this little nestling thing for this diamond ring I brought.
But I realized it’s going to be a little strange if at a beach I pulled a shell out of my pocket.
And so I got up and I left and she looked at me like many of you are, like this makes no sense but I didn’t care, because I was on a mission. And so I looked at the — I tested the contraption out, it was working. I had my crib sheet of this passionate speech I’ve written and I said I’ve got this.
I looked around, I tried to memorize every sensation I was experiencing at the time, and I walked back. And I said, hey, honey, look what I got, and she was… oh that’s nice.
So I said now look it opens and closes, because that’s what you say when you find a shell, right?
So she takes it, she looks inside, and there’s the ring. She looks at me. I’m on my knees and I launch into about 92% of my prepared remarks and conclude with, will you marry me? And she looks at me, and she says, beep, I don’t know.
So this was a surprising answer and I’ve thought about this moment many times in my life since then. And I think it’s really an interesting response in a lot of ways, because I was asking something pretty huge. I was saying can you turn your life into our life? And I was asking for the most precious thing that she has, that any of us have, that weeks, the years, the days that we’ve been given.
Life is our moments. We have an unknowable number of moments. All we know is that once we spend them we can never get them back and we can never get more. And I was asking for dibs on all of her moments. That’s a serious thing.
And another thing that was going on around the same time, first of all, John Cusack thanks for ruining my life.
Second, around the same time there was a popular T-shirt and had this spirally galaxy looking thing, and an arrow said you are here and I love this — I love this image, because we are this little speck of dust in the middle of the abyss. We are ourselves, a tiny speck of dust. We live on a speck of dust in the middle of oblivion of nothingness.
And it’s actually worse than that, right, if you think about it, because if you look at images from space we only live on the outer crust of a speck of dust, like the shell of a robin’s egg. That’s where life is for us. It’s incredibly, almost unfathomably fragile and precious.
And in that life we have all these moments that we’ve been given and we have to make those moments matter. You’re going to meet a lot of people today who go right to the edge of oblivion. They go to the fragility of existence and it yawns and further may be out of a door of an airplane, maybe down the sheer face of a mountainside, the jaws of a shark.
Other people find that fragility of existence in the eyes of another person — a starving child, a bruised woman, a shattered veteran. Other people find it in a damaged and destroyed landscape but these people are going and embracing the fragility of existence and finding ways to enhance what we all have, what we all share, they’re making their moments matter and that’s all we can ask.
How can we find ways to connect and contribute and consider how to make these moments matter?
At the same time there are people out there who discard those moments, like fast food wrappers out a car window, littering the landscape with toxic throwaway moments in life, casual cruelty, thoughtless destruction, mindlessly squandering this one thing that we’ve got.
The contrast between these two groups is a psychological study of meaning in life and in a sense what psychologists are trying to do with this question is turn that from you are here to why are you here. And that’s what we’re trying to figure out.
Now in the psychological study of meaning, we think that meaning is at least two things. Meaning is purpose and significance. And purpose is the need to do.
The University of Minnesota psychologist Eric Klinger argued that we didn’t evolve from passive rooted organisms that can stand around and wait for what we need to come to them. We evolved from creatures that need to move, we must move to find and seek and obtain what we need in life. And that entails risks but it also entails doing. We can’t just stop; it’s in our very being to do.
I think a purpose as an anchor we throw it out into the future. This aspiration we have, this big dream, we throw it into the future and it keeps the future alive in us and sometimes when the present is too hard, it serves as asset as a source of solace. We can transcend what’s happening now because we know that out there is a big dream that we’re pursuing. So in our very being is the need to do.
But what are we supposed to do? What kind of purpose are we supposed to pursue? The answer comes from significance. The need to make sense. Raise your hand if you see a camel, right?
So there’s no camel there. Obviously it’s just a little squiggly thing and if you didn’t see a camel initially when I said do you see a camel it became a camel. Someone people think it looks like an old person with glasses and a cane, it can be that too. It can be almost anything because our brains are created and have evolved incredible capacity to combine and recombine and find associations and link and relink and find patterns and maps and meaning everywhere.
The question isn’t can we find meaning in life, we cannot find meaning in our lives; it’s happening all the time. It’s happening a hundred times today for you.
The question is, can we build powerful meaning if we forge a powerful purpose that transforms our life and helps transform the lives of our shared future. That’s really what we’re trying to understand with significance and purpose combining it to a meaningful life.
Meaning tends to have the sort of intuitive appeal. It sounds good, right, if I said hey you get it your choice, meaningful life, meaningless — meaningless life. A lot of us choose the meaning side right. But we can do better than that. We’ve been studying this for over 50 years in Psychology and we can take a look and we can say does meaning matter, yeah it’s associated with a whole constellation of amazing and cherished psychological attributes.
People are full of vitality and happy and energy; they pursue the future, they’re goal-directed; they care about other people. They’re kind, they’re benevolent. They seem better equipped to cope with the adversity, that’s inevitable for all of us.
But I want to see if I can even do a little bit better than that and ask does meaning matter, and maybe put the seed in your head that maybe meaning is a life-and-death issue. I want to choose one study here. This is by Patricia Boyle, her colleagues at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois. There are couple studies like this. They’re concerned with longevity among older adults and it’s kind of interesting I think that the way we study longevity is by setting who dies and who dies first.
So on the left-hand side here we have cumulative hazard of dying and you can read those numbers as if they’re kind of like percentages so 5%, 10%, 15% hazard of dying. On the bottom we have the number of years this study. They followed the adults for five years and we’re concerned about two groups.
The first group of the people in the top 10% are feeling their lives are rich and abundant and overflowing with meaning. That’s the blue group.
The red group are the people who score in the lowest 10% of meaning in life. They’re telling us — these older adults — my life is meaningless; my life has no purpose. And what we see when we run this study is that over time one of the truths of life emerges: the longer our life the less life we have left.
And so even for the people who are in the highest 10% of meaning, their hazard rate — their hazard of dying was somewhere around 11%. But if you look at what happens with the people in the lowest 10% of meaning, there’s a big gap here. Their hazard of dying is close to 21% over the course of this study. And that gap is significant. It translates to 57% less hazard of dying for those whose lives are abundant and overflowing with meaning compared to those whose lives are bereft of meaning.
Now we all know that a lot of things are associated with longevity and this study is great because it controls for these things. Over and above depression, disability, neurotic personality traits, the tendency to approach life in a negative fashion, over and above chronic medical conditions and income, 57% less hazard of dying for people whose lives are rich in meaning compared to those whose lives are bereft of meaning.
So maybe — just maybe meaning is a matter of life and death, and that’s not where the story ends, right, because well, hey, I’m saying meaning is this great thing. I can’t say and then you can’t have it.
So how can we try to find meaning and this has been the question that’s really kind of obsessed me over the last several years. And I think there’s a good news/bad news situation, you know, of course social scientists always have a little bit of this, a little bit of that. We never commit.
The bad news is I can’t tell you how to find meaning in your life. You are going to go out and find your purpose and you are going to forge the sense that you make in your own lives. There’s no answer from me or anybody.
The good news is that you can all do it. Anyone can do it and when we take a look at research we find patterns emerging and that’s what I’d like to share with you in the last little bit of my talk today.
We did a very simple study — we simply gave digital cameras to college students, said take pictures of what makes your life feel meaningful, come back and tell us what you took a picture of.
The number one answer was people — almost 90% of these students mentioned explicitly a form of relationship, brothers, sisters, parents, grandchildren, colleagues, lovers, co-workers, people — relationships are the ocean in which we find meaning, is the landscape of meaning.
But beyond that we find some other interesting and compelling ways to look for meaning in our own lives and I’m going to share with you a few of these pictures from the actual study.
So this is what one person took a picture and what she told us about this picture is this picture represents the beauty of the world: stopping and taking it all in helps make life meaningful. So we see a 20 year old college student rediscovering thousands of years of wisdom about the secret of meaning in life which is there’s no secret at all; it’s all around us.
There are invitations and opportunities to find meaning and get meaning all around us all the time. I grew up in a rural area so this isn’t a quite unusual picture for me but the story behind it is deeper than I suspected. This person says the main focus is a tractor. I picked it because I wanted to show how farming was a large influence in my life. It shows that there are still people who work hard just put food on the table and that those are my roots.
We see this person connecting with family and connecting with heritage and tradition contributing working hard and finding a way to make something important of the way that he spends his moments.
The last picture I’ll share with you is a scene that plays out countless times all around us in malls and airports, restaurants, everywhere. But are we missing something — are we missing a chance to find something deep because what this person says is: This is my work in the Lory Student Center. Though I am a custodian I’m proud to be one. This is the first job that will not get me in trouble. I am proud because the job pays for my family.
Again this vital connection, the ability to contribute to other people, to weave our futures together and for this person to consider ways in which the moments he’s spending at work are building something powerful important for himself.
So we come to this question: what makes life meaningful?
And maybe it’s the biggest question we can ask: why are you here? What are you going to do with your life? What makes your existence matter and maybe the answer to that is a matter of life and death, just maybe right.
But maybe the answer this hugest of all questions is very small, all around us, opportunities to build together meaning through connecting, contributing and consuming ways to make all of our moments matter.
And this question is really important to me because if I can bring you back to Manzanita beach in that moment where I got a little bit of surprising answer, I think that doesn’t happen in the John Cusack movies. But John Cusack says stay with it and so I kind of — I didn’t run away crying like it was part of my plan at that point.
But you know, later she asked me question, and she says, are you sure? I want to say I built a clam thing. That’s being sure.
I said yeah, I’m sure. And now many years later we have two kids, and this is — this isn’t a plea for sympathy, they’re great kids. I’m lucky. They’re going out into this world though and I can already see it in them. They want to make a difference. They want to make moments matter and they’re no different than the other kids in their class.
And the world they’re going into has a lot of people like the people who are here, who are doing the same thing, who are grabbing life and spending their moments wisely to make a difference and make things matter. But they’re also all those other people right who litter all of our collective landscapes with these tragically misspent moments, these destructive ticking time bombs of a life not considered.
And the question for me is what if everyone tried to live a meaningful life. Life is short, it’s easy to waste and hard to use. It’s not easy to say I’m going to go live a meaningful life. I’m sure everyone says that from time to time. But my background is in clinical and counseling psychology and we say to clients all the time, we can’t do anything about everybody, I can do something about me and you can do something about you.
So what if you and I, starting today, taking advantage of what we’re given and this opportunity to hear so many great ideas and share so many great ideas, what if today you and I tried to live a meaningful life?
The concern I have is what if meaning becomes just another commodity. What if meaning is something I want more of and I want the best kind of meaning and so meaning becomes like this bottled water that we have to get from some South Pacific Island, it’s made out of raindrops or something.
Is there a better way to do this? What if we changed this question just a little bit. What if instead I think there’s a great question don’t get me wrong. What if you and I tried to live a meaningful life. What if you and I tried to give a meaningful life what if instead of only harvesting meaning from life around us. What if we try to help other people find it too and give some of the meaning that drives us some of the purpose share the energy for purpose in the drive, share the sense that we make that the world is worth investing in, that there’s a great future that we can build together out there.
Can we give meaning away? That’s the question I hope you’ll explore for the rest of today.
Thank you.
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