The Pursuit of Happiness: How Do We Find Purpose and Fulfillment in a Chaotic World?

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
–Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement speech in 2005
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1. Happiness Is a Bore?

Happiness has many fans. But, there are also many doubters, ranging from the Stoics to Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet, “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.” In a similar spirit, Tony Schwartz wrote an article entitled “Happiness Is Overrated” in the Harvard Business Review, saying, “‘Happy’ people are some of the dullest people I know.” Shel Silverstein’s poem “The Land of Happy” might be the most poignant critique of happiness. He describes the land of happy as a place where everyone is happy and everything is jolly. He ends his poem with: “What a bore.”

Why so down on happiness? One common critique is that a happy life might be a selfish one. In reality, there is lots of evidence that suggests otherwise. For example, spending money on others as opposed to on oneself increases happiness. Happy people volunteer more than unhappy people. But, for now, let’s assume the critique of happiness-as-selfishness and proceed with a question: What makes for a good life, if not happiness?

The novelist Donna Tartt suggested that it is “to make other people happy even at the expense of one’s own happiness”—in other words, what many scholars call a “meaningful life.” Meaning in life is typically defined by significance, purpose, and coherence. First, a meaningful life is a life that matters. It matters not just to one’s family members and friends, but also to strangers. A meaningful life is a life that makes a difference in the world. Second, a meaningful life has a clear purpose. A person who leads a meaningful life knows where they’re going. There is a clear sense of direction and a guiding principle. Third, a meaningful life is well organized. All of a person’s divergent experiences fit together under their own guiding principles.

In contrast, a meaningless life is a life that does not make any difference in the world. Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, argues that there are millions of people around the world who are toiling away their lives in meaningless jobs. He defines a bullshit job as a job that the person who is doing it can’t really justify the existence of that job. Meaningless jobs, according to Graeber, are not just repetitive factory or clerical jobs, but also include corporate lawyers, public relations consultants, telemarketers, and brand managers. For instance, he claims that most corporate lawyers secretly believe that the world would probably be a better place if they did not exist.

Of course, people can make a difference in the world outside of their jobs. So this doesn’t mean corporate lawyers and public relations consultants lead meaningless lives. But if you are not making any positive difference in the world, your life may feel pointless. Likewise, a meaningless life has no clear purpose. People without a clear purpose tend to go through their lives aimlessly. Finally, a meaningless life feels torn and highly fragmented. The different roles one plays do not add up to a coherent whole.

2. Be Great?

Needless to say, a meaningful life sounds a lot more appealing than a meaningless one. Thus, people say you should find a reason for living—whether via career, religion, social roles (e.g., parenthood), scientific discovery, or social change. Many commencement speakers preach along these lines, including Michelle Obama in her speech to CUNY’s class of 2016: “Be great. Build great lives for yourselves.  And please, please, always, always do your part to help others do the same.”

Dr. Donna Adams-Pickett did exactly what Michelle Obama promoted. As a child, she learned that her paternal grandmother, who lived on a tobacco farm, died while giving birth. The baby died as well, and her father was left motherless at age twelve. After hearing this story, she was determined to become an ob-gyn doctor. As she shared with PBS NewsHour, Dr. Adams-Pickett delivered over 6,000 babies over the last twenty years in Augusta, Georgia, an area located in a maternity care desert.

Her life is certainly meaningful, as she has a clear purpose (provide good maternal care to the people of Georgia, especially Black women, who have a much higher rate of maternal mortality before and after delivery than other women) and significance (some mothers and babies might have died without her care). Her family tragedy also gives a convincing narrative and coherence to the course of her life.

When we think of people who live meaningful lives, we might think of those who have done great things, like Dr. Donna Adams-Pickett, Michelle Obama, or Barack Obama—the kind of people who give graduation speeches! These are extraordinary achievements. These people are heroes. However, these accomplishments are so rare that it’s hard to imagine ever achieving such feats. Like the happiness trap, there is also a meaning trap. The first element of the meaning trap is that the type of accomplishment associated with a meaningful life is so grand that aiming for it will set us up for a failure.

3. Life Is Pretty Meaningful

The second element of the meaning trap is that people tend to misunderstand what is required. These images of heroes with supersized ambitions do not necessarily fit with the research findings. Although many people think that the number of people who lead a meaningful life is small, survey data show that, in fact, most people say they do have a meaningful life. In the cleverly entitled paper “Life Is Pretty Meaningful,” Samantha Heintzelman and Laura King report that 90 percent of Americans said they have meaning in life, according to the Gallup World Polls.

How is it possible that we think the meaningful life is for over-achieving heroes, yet most people say their lives are meaningful? One answer might lie in how the question about meaning in life was asked. The Gallup survey phrased it like this: “Do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning?” with a yes-or-no answer format. To say, “No, my life has no purpose nor meaning,” is almost to say one’s life is pointless. Those who did not feel like their lives were utterly pointless were likely to say yes to this question. This means that even if someone did not feel their life was particularly meaningful, they might have said yes.

Another Gallup survey that focused on purpose (“My life has a real purpose”) found that 28.5 percent of Americans “strongly” agreed (a 5 on a 1 to 5 point scale), while 1.1 percent “strongly” disagreed (a 1 on the same 1 to 5 point scale), and 9.1 percent disagreed (a 2 on the 1 to 5 point scale). The percentage of people who strongly disagreed or who disagreed with the statement “My life has a real purpose” matches up quite well with the original Gallup data (10 percent said no vs. 10.2 percent disagreed).

4. But Why?

Still, the fact that 28.5 percent of Americans report having a real purpose in life and another 54.9 percent report having a more or less real purpose is impressive. Are there so many heroic individuals making a difference in the US? Or is this some kind of overly positive illusion? It turns out that this is not simply a self-reporting bias. Psychologist Michael Steger and colleagues asked participants to report how meaningful they feel their lives are. In addition, he asked their friends and family members to report the participant’s meaning in life. If the high percentage of self-reported meaning in life is only an illusion, informant reports would not correlate with self-reports.

What he found was different: self-reported meaning in life is correlated with informant-reported meaning in life. The self-informant correlation on meaning in life was similar to that in studies testing more familiar personality traits such as extraversion and neuroticism (a tendency to worry excessively). Scientifically, then, self-reports of meaning in life are quite valid.

So who are these 28.5 percent of Americans who say their lives are meaningful? For one, they tend to be religious. Religious people follow certain principles of faith, which help them interpret difficult life situations accordingly and give them clarity. When Hurricane Katrina swept away some neighborhoods of New Orleans in 2005, many residents struggled to understand why it happened. Religious people were better able to psychologically deal with this catastrophe than non-religious people. So you don’t have to be a maverick inventor like Steve Jobs to feel like your life is meaningful. One way to find meaning is by following a traditional religion.

Steger’s research also finds that people who say they have a meaningful life tend to be optimistic about the future, extraverted, non-neurotic, agreeable, conscientious, and have high self-esteem. Meaning in life is by nature very subjective. Some well-respected, well-liked, award-winning scientists nonetheless see their lives to be meaningless and die by suicide. In contrast, some ordinary people see their lives as linked to a significant mission. In a famous folk legend, when John F. Kennedy once visited NASA he said to a janitor, “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?” The janitor replied: “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon!”

Second, people with high self-esteem are more likely to say that their lives matter than those who do not like themselves. Non-neurotic people (those who don’t worry too much or are not too stress prone) are more likely to say that their lives have a clear purpose and direction than neurotic people. Conscientious people achieve more of their goals than unconscientious people. Therefore, they are also more likely to feel that they are moving toward a larger goal in life than unconscientious people. They are likely to feel that their lives have a sense of direction, purpose, and meaning. To the extent that the majority of Americans have high self-esteem, are optimistic about their futures, and say they are extraverted, non-neurotic, agreeable, and conscientious, it makes sense that a lot of people say their lives have meaning.

These personality traits and attitudes express themselves in predictable ways. People tend to choose one or two causes they care about dearly (e.g., a soup kitchen, a church), volunteer in the same location for an extended period of time, and achieve meaning by trying to make a difference in a well-defined area. Others derive meaning in life from their work, family, and community, again a narrowly defined realm of life. Research on meaning in life shows that successfully achieving a meaningful life often comes with focus and narrowness. In most cases, this is not a problem.

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From Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life by Shigehiro Oishi, PhD. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Shigehiro Oishi.