Happiness, Values, & Meaning
Happiness, values, and meaning are all interrelated but all have unique attributes. It’s important to understand how each of these works together to provide alignment and optimal happiness. At a high level, the idea of “meaning” is the deep down “Why” of your existence. It could be supporting people to live to their fullest expression, or caring for the environment, or evolving within your field of education. Whatever it is, to be truly happy, you must be feeding this deep-seated meaning.
Values are significant because they inform the “How” you do the “Why.” For example, if “collaborating with other people” is a core value and “caring for the environment” is your “Why”, you won’t be truly happy if your main vocation is writing journal articles on your own for an environmental magazine, because even though you are indeed living a life aligned with your meaning, you’re not living a life aligned with your values.
Enter happiness. Happiness is a result of living aligned with meaning and values. While values and meaning can evolve as we age, they are more constant than happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of intentional living. It’s possible to be living aligned with meaning and values and still have periods when you’re unhappy; it’s simply more likely that your “set-point” of happiness will be higher.
You can think of it like this… You plant a garden and care for it in an ongoing fashion. The garden represents values and meaning. If you’ve planted the vegetables that nourish you, when they are ready to be harvested, they will bring you happiness. They are not ready to be harvested all the time, but you are continuously tending it.
Researcher Roy Baumeister explains the relationship between happiness and meaning like this, “We experience happiness in the present when our needs are satisfied, while meaningfulness involves tying together the past, present, and future in a way that makes sense and reinforces our positive attributes.
Journal & Exercise (30 minutes)
Russ Harris, Author of The Happiness Trap, says, “If you aren’t living according to your values, you won’t be happy, no matter how much you are achieving.” Some people, however, don’t know what their values are. One way to discover them is to answer the following question: “Imagine you could wave a magic wand to ensure that you would have the approval and admiration of everyone on the planet, forever. What, in that case, would you choose to do with your life?”
Take 20 minutes in your journal to answer that question. Once you feel finished, reflect on what you’ve written. What are some of the values that surface? Are you needing to be in nature? Are you needing spaciousness? Are you needing creativity? Once you’ve jotted down a handful of values, feel free to look at this list from James Clear for some more inspiration.
Once you have compiled a list, circle those that feel essential, combine the ones that are similar and cross off the ones that just don’t make the cut. Continue until you’ve narrowed the list down to 3-5 core values.
Once you’ve gained some clarity on these core values, take an inventory of your current life status. Are you living aligned with those values? or are you off? If you’re off, what actions could you take to live more aligned? What is one action that you can commit to over the next 30 days to live more aligned with your values?
