You have read an article on how to find meaning in life and would like to recommend it to other readers. Write an essay in which you:
• introduce the topic and summarize the issues mentioned in the text,
• discuss the implications of these issues for the well-being of students,
• summarise your key points and suggest who would benefit from reading the article.
Support your arguments with relevant examples from the extract. Do not copy directly from the text but summarize, paraphrase or quote short phrases. Write your answer in 300–350 words. You have 80 minutes to complete the task.
Having a sense of meaning in life is good for you – so how do you get one?
Lisa A Williams
The pursuit of happiness and health is a popular endeavour, as the preponderance of self-help books would attest. Yet it is also fraught. Despite ample advice from experts, individuals regularly engage in activities that may only have short-term benefit for well-being, or even backfire.
The search for the heart of well-being – that is, a nucleus from which other aspects of well-being and health might flow – has been the focus of decades of research. New findings recently reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences point towards an answer commonly overlooked: meaning in life.
University College London’s psychology professor Andrew Steptoe and senior research associate Daisy Fancourt analysed a sample of 7,304 UK residents aged 50+ drawn from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Survey respondents answered a range of questions assessing social, economic, health, and physical activity characteristics, including: “to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?”
[…] One key question addressed in this research is: what advantage might having a strong sense of meaning in life afford a few years down the road?
The data revealed that individuals reporting a higher meaning in life had:
lower risk of divorce
lower risk of living alone
increased connections with friends and engagement in social and cultural activities
lower incidence of new chronic disease and onset of depression
lower obesity and increased physical activity
increased adoption of positive health behaviours (exercising, eating fruit and veg).
On the whole, individuals with a higher sense of meaning in life a few years earlier were later living lives characterised by health and well-being.
You might wonder if these findings are attributable to other factors, or to factors already in play by the time participants joined the study. The authors undertook stringent analyses to account for this, which revealed largely similar patterns of findings.
The findings join a body of prior research documenting longitudinal relationships between meaning in life and social functioning, net wealth and reduced mortality, especially among older adults.
There’s a high degree of overlap between experiencing happiness and meaning – most people who report one also report the other. Days when people report feeling happy are often also days that people report meaning. Yet there’s a tricky relationship between the two. Moment-to-moment, happiness and meaning are often decoupled.
Research by social psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues suggests that satisfying basic needs promotes happiness, but not meaning. In contrast, linking a sense of self across one’s past, present, and future promotes meaning, but not happiness.
Connecting socially with others is important for both happiness and meaning, but doing so in a way that promotes meaning (such as via parenting) can happen at the cost of personal happiness, at least temporarily.
Given the now-documented long-term social, mental, and physical benefits of having a sense of meaning in life, the recommendation here is clear. Rather than pursuing happiness as an end-state, ensuring one’s activities provide a sense of meaning might be a better route to living well and flourishing throughout life.
Williams, L. (2023, May 3). Having a sense of meaning in life is good for you – so how do you get one?. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/having-a-sense-of-meaning-in-life-is-good-for-you-so-how-do-you-get-one-110361