In a recent Positive Psychology study, happiness and meaning-seeking were compared. Among the findings, Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study reported “happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others.”
Additionally, “while happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting… Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future.”
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Victor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Read the full article by Emily Esfahani Smith in The Atlantic:
There is More to Life Than Being Happy