Happiness Hypothesis

A summary of major points and takeaways from Jonathan Haidt's book on the pursuit of a meaningful life.

Introduction: Too Much Wisdom

There is so much information in the world it is easy to skim over the most valuable advice without realizing it. The major ideas presented in this book are ideas found scattered throughout recorded human history.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Our life is the creation of our mind.

Studying the nature of the mind is going to be key to finding meaning. We will study reciprocity, hypocrisy, virtue, morality, growth, fulfillment, and other human constructs in order to obtain a deeper understanding of what people intend to find when they look for meaning in life.

The Divided Self

The mind is more than one stream of thought forming decision and action. More accurately, our minds are deep webs of interacting parts with opposing goals. If we are simple rational entities exercising reason, then why do we constantly fail to adhere to our own willed decisions?

The image that I came up with for myself, as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I'm holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn't have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I'm no match for him.

While there is only one person in each body, we behave like there is a committee of individuals in our mind with opposing objectives.

First Division: Mind vs. Body

There is a network of neurons in every person's gut that forms a small brain of its own. Many bodily processes happen without us consciously willing them and occasionally they betray our intents in unexpected and undesirable ways.

Second Division: Left vs. Right

The left and right halves of the brain are connected to form a whole, but when the connection is severed each half behaves (and functions) like a separate individual. Clearly in a whole brain, the differences between the two halves must be reconciled somehow.

A part of our brain is devoted to constructing reasonable explanations for decisions and actions. These justifications feel true when we say them out loud, but the part of our brain that constructs the explanations doesn't actually know the true explanation. Even without the truth, our brain will always attempt to guess why we've done something.

Third Division: New vs. Old

The old brain is the evolved part which is presented in the form of gut feelings and emotions. It often conflicts with our newer found ability to consciously reason.

Fourth Division: Controlled vs. Automatic

As we make the same conscious decisions repeatedly, they become automatic. This is convenient because it allows us to consciously focus on other things. Unfortunately the automatic processes often engage in situations where they should not be activated or when they are counterproductive to what we are trying to do.

Failures of Self Control

We struggle most to not think about something. It is difficult for us to divert our attention away from a prized objective or goal. The happiest thinkers are capable of shifting their attention to alternative goals (when waiting for something else).

Mental Intrusions

Our attempts not to do something can flood our mind with only thoughts about that thing we do not want to do. These invasive thoughts are hard to stave off and they do not say anything about us as people, they only show what your conscious mind finds shocking or actionable (with a bias towards negativity).

The Difficulty of Winning an Argument

We often feel convinced we know something even though we cannot explain it with words. This is the elephant inside of us deciding while the rider tries to justify the elephant's decision. These deeply ingrained feelings are nearly impossible for outsiders (other people) to convince you out of.

Changing Your Mind

Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.

The Like-O-Meter

A part of our brain is designed to immediately decide whether or not we like something. This is part of the elephant. We must learn to observe the responses of this part of our mind in order to understand where our feelings are coming from.

Negativity Bias

Negative events are nearly an order of magnitude more powerful in our minds than positive events. This is almost certainly built into our minds by evolution.

The Cortical Lottery

People have a natural baseline level of happiness that they feel. The baseline for individuals is largely genetic, with some wiggle room allowing people to guide themselves to a new happiness set point by large amounts of willpower and conscious effort.

The two born brain styles coincide with increased activity in either the left or right frontal cortices of the brain: right frontal cortex activity trends with fear, anxiety, and shame while higher left frontal cortex activity is associated with a greater baseline level of happiness.

The cortical lefties are often comfortable exploring ideas and re-framing things in positive ways while the cortical righties have a tendency to be more anxious about novel situations and reserved.

How to Change Your Mind

It is possible to control your happiness baseline, the following three methods are some of the best ways to go about doing that.

Meditation

This typically eastern practice is aimed at reducing all background activity in the brain. The reduction in all activity reduces the levels of anxiety felt by individuals. Keep in mind, it will also reduce the level of positive activities as well (but negative emotions are much more powerful than positive, so this is worthwhile in a negative-biased mind).

Cognitive Therapy

This therapy technique is aimed at making you pause to observe your own impulsive thoughts throughout the day. It reorients the thought style of your mind by instantiating habits of contemplation rather than mindless reaction.

Prozac

This medication (along with its many variants) produces the effect of a higher happiness set point (increased activity in the right frontal cortex). The only disadvantage to this technique are the side effects of taking the medication itself. This option is very appropriate for people who were unlucky in the cortical lottery.

Reciprocity with a Vengeance

People intuitively believe in reciprocity.

Ultrasociality

Somehow, evolution needed to create mechanisms for people to effectively cooperate in huge societies (where individual interests are at odds with group interests).

You Scratch My Back, I'll Scratch Yours

The first principle we see is that people tend to immediately reciprocate the behaviors and actions of new individuals they meet. If someone is nice to you, you feel the need to be nice back.

You Stab His Back, I'll Stab Yours

The same notion for positivity works for negative emotions as well. We also have another powerful mechanism to prevent wrong-doers, gossip. We tell each other with words when individuals or entities cannot be trusted to play the game of life fairly.

Use the Force, Luke

Being aware of our own tendency to reciprocate is important. Salesman, for example, often take advantage of this behavior to manipulate people. Take time to observe your own innate desire to reciprocate.

The Faults of Others

It's easier to see flaws in other people than it is to see flaws in ourselves. We are all naturally hypocrites.

Keeping Up Appearances

Being an ultrasocial species, it is vital for us to maintain a good outward appearance. Our minds are particularly tuned to try and make sure people think well of us.

Finding Your Inner Lawyer

There is a part of your mind whose job is to tell a convincing story. This part of the brain does not look for the truth, rather it attempts to justify whatever point it is that you want to make. It is naturally engaged whenever we are asked to explain something or argue a point, and it will conveniently ignore facts that are in opposition to the story we are trying to tell.

The Rose-Colored Mirror

We have an abundant tendency to think of ourselves as good people. We tell our inner lawyer to justify how we are good to ourselves and we believe that justification. This is dangerous and it is why everyone thinks they are in the right.

I'm Right; You're Biased

Our tendency to avoid the truth is dropped when we are analyzing other people, however. We immediately catch the bias in other people's arguments, but almost never in our own.

Satan Satisfies

The idea that there is good and evil is satisfying to us. It makes explaining the proper course of action easy. Our allies are good, our enemies are evil. People want this to be true in order to keep life simple.

The Myth of Pure Evil

Almost all groups of people with a collective belief system have deemed something good and something else evil. When the evil thing is another group of people and their beliefs, a paradox forms. Each group has used their inner lawyers to justify the goodness of themselves and the evil of the others by casting the others' beliefs under a convenient light. Pure evil almost never exists, because it has been evolved out of humans (the individual that kills for the sake of killing is very unlikely to reproduce).

Finding the Great Way

The first step is to see [life] as a game and stop taking it so seriously.

Finding fault with yourself is also the key to overcoming the hypocrisy and judgmentalism that damage so many valuable relationships.

You can still believe that you are right and the other person is wrong, but if you can move to believing that you are mostly right, and your opponent is mostly wrong, you have the basis for an effective and nonhumiliating apology.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Ancient wisdom suggests that happiness is found entirely from within. However, the ancients may have taken things a little too far.

The Progress Principle

Our elephant feels pleasure from taking a step in the right direction, yet we often focus on achieving happiness at the completion of some task. Our old brain is not designed to withhold all pleasure until some ultimate objective is achieved, that simply doesn't work. We receive most of our joy from incremental progress.

The Adaptation Principle

While it may be easy to say you'd be happier if you won the lottery, or sadder if you suddenly became a paraplegic, these thoughts are ignoring something. Our minds have evolved to adapt to our surroundings. We adapt to the shift in lifestyle provided by lots of money and we adapt to the shift in lifestyle caused by loss of our limbs. While happiness does change temporarily, we almost always bounce back to our happiness set point within a few months.

An Early Happiness Hypothesis

Turn inwards, or toward God, but for God's sake stop trying to make the world conform to your will.

We should focus on putting ourselves into places where our happiness is increased, but cannot be adapted. This excludes most forms of material wealth (beyond being able to provide food and shelter for yourself).

The Happiness Formula

Happiness is the sum of your biological set point, the conditions of your life, and the voluntary actions you perform. Since we cannot control the set point (other than by using medication), we will focus on conditions and voluntary actions. The following conditions have been shown to not be adaptable.

Noise

In particular, irregular noise such as that of cars at a stoplight cannot be adapted. People tend to notice noise every day anew, so be sure to surround yourself with noises you enjoy.

Commuting

The act of traveling (such as driving) is often mildly stressful. Longer and anxious commutes rapidly decrease life satisfaction.

Lack of Control

For no reason other than the ability to exert will, people are happier when they are in control. For example, people placed in the exact same situation are less happy if the choices are made for them than when they are allowed to make the choices themselves (even when the outcome is the same!).

Shame

Often this is in reference to body image. If you constantly think something about yourself is shameful, then this feeling will likely remain until the source is gone. Whatever is necessary to reduce your own self-shame should be done.

Relationships

We never fully adapt to the people in our lives. These people can be a constant source of happiness, or a constant source of agony. It is important that we surround ourselves with people who evoke in us the behaviors we want to regularly experience.

Finding Flow

Recall that the happiness formula also had voluntary actions.

There is a [mental] state many people value even more than chocolate after sex. It is the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one's abilities. It is what people sometimes call "being in the zone." [We] call it flow.

It is imperative that we find activities that we enjoy and that set us in flow. Voluntary actions that produce flow are the ones most likely to improve our sense of happiness in life.

Misguided Pursuits

From a social-evolutionary perspective, there are two types of ways we spend our time and effort. Conspicuous consumption is that spent on things that will be socially visible and are likely to affect your social status. Inconspicuous consumption is that spent on things for ourselves away from society.

People have a tendency to focus on improving their social status through conspicuous consumption, but the material gains rarely increase our happiness. While evolution has told us we must achieve high social rank, that part of us is ignoring our need for happiness.

Spend more time on vacation, with family, and with friends instead of on flashy material objects and work for the sake of money.

Those who think money can't buy happiness just don't know where to shop.

People would be happier if they reduced their commuting time, even if it meant living in smaller houses ... People would be happier and healthier if they took longer vacations, even if that meant earning less ... People would be happier and wealthier if they bought basic functional [material objects] instead of designer brands and superfluous features, then invested the money they saved for future consumptions.

The Happiness Hypothesis Reconsidered

Perhaps ancient practices were right for their times. When Buddah suggested people drop all attachment to the external world, it's because that was the safest thing to do in a time where land, money, and personal belongings could be lost at any point in life.

In much of modern society, it is safe to assume a certain societal stability and make long term plans for our lives. In this world, happiness seems to come from an appropriate combination of internal practice and material interaction.

Love and Attachments

Our human lives at the most basic levels are composed of personal love for others and attachment to things that we find important.

[This] is about that need--the need for other people, for touch, and for close relationships. No man, woman, or child is an island.

To Have and to Hold

Human children need stable physical contact to develop healthy minds. Evolution has predisposed human children to prefer the physical contact of a mother (or most like, if a mother is not available). Contact serves as a child's base of safety, that lets them know "everything is alright."

The comfort derived from human touch (or similarly, soft and warm objects) stays with us into our adult lives. These things will usually continue to comfort us and make us feel safe for the rest of our lives.

Love Conquers Fear

If you want children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore then conquer the world on their own.

The feeling of love is one of the most effective ways to dispel fear from the mind.

The Proof is in the Parting

Most children exhibit one of three attachment styles in research studies.

Secure attachment -- Comfortable exploring and playing in the presence of a parent, when the parent leaves they become less comfortable and eventually make some attempt to draw the parent back (crying, arms up). Once the parent returns, they return to exploration and play. (about ~66% of children)

Avoidant attachment -- Explores and plays regardless of the presence of the parent. These children experience stress, but attempt to mostly manage it on their own. Usually, this is the result of an inconsistent or unreliable parent-child relationship. (about ~22% of children)

Resistant attachment -- Never really comfortable playing, exploring, or doing anything without the parent. They resist any attempt to be separated from the parent. (only ~12% of children)

These attachment styles may give us insight into how people address the balance between exploration (trying new things) and comfort (seeking safety) throughout their lives.

It's Not Just for Children

A majority of adults end up having the same attachment styles from when they were children. Secure behaviors manifest in generally trusting individuals. Avoidant behaviors are revealed in initially low-trust, independent individuals. Resistant behaviors trend with high-attachment personalities preferring lots of time and contact.

Attachment styles can be changed, but the important thing is knowing what style you prefer. The attachment styles that children use to stay connected with parents are reused (in the brain) when we develop companionate love for another person.

Love and the Swelled Head

The attachment styles and caregiving systems (bonding hormones between mother and child) are constantly at work in the brain and body. It is likely that these phenomena were important in the evolution of humans. Our heads could not be any bigger at birth (or mothers would not survive). Hence, we are the only species whose born young have unfinished brains and need to be thoroughly attended for many years before independence is achieved.

Two Loves, Two Errors

There are two major types of love that are witnessed in people. Each has its own purpose and we must be aware of the important differences between the two.

Passionate love is a wildly emotional state in which tender and sexual feelings, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy coexist in a confusion of feelings. Passionate love is the love you fall into.

Companionate love is the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined. Companionate love grows slowly over the years as lovers [begin] to rely upon, care for, and trust each other.

It is important to realize that passionate love, while gripping and exciting, does not naturally transform into companionate love. Passionate love also, by nature, cannot last forever. A balance between the two types of love, companionate with a healthy dose of passion, is sustainable for a lifetime.

Why Do Philosophers Hate Love?

Passionate love drives (especially young) individuals to do wildly irrational things. Religions have historically attempted to control misbehavior by either vilifying passionate love or focusing on caritas and agape. Caritas is intense benevolence and good will; agape is selfless, spiritual love with no sexuality, no clinging to a particular other person.

Freedom Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

Although it may seem counterintuitive, once a person has too much social freedom (too few obligations or constraints regarding other people) their life expectancy goes down.

If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live, you should find out about her social relationships. Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life, speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.

Connections and obligations to others actually empower us. They give us purpose, and that purpose is invaluable.

The Uses of Adversity

If we had the ability and opportunity, it would be tempting to strike all adversity from a loved one's life in order to render their life perfectly happy. However, research suggests that adversity may be good for us (in reasonable quantities).

Posttraumatic Growth

Trauma, crisis, and tragedy come in a thousand forms, but people still manage to benefit from each in three primary ways.

1. Rising to a challenge reveals your hidden abilities. Seeing these abilities changes your self-concept. None of us knows what we are really capable of enduring.
2. Adversity helps filter our relationships down to those that really matter. It strengthens relationships and opens people's hearts. We often develop love for those we care for, and we usually feel love and gratitude toward those who cared for us.
3. Trauma changes priorities and philosophies toward the present and toward other people.

Must We Suffer?

Perhaps we must suffer, but what does it do? While the growth oriented benefits listed above are uplifting, the outward personality of a person often doesn't change. Psychology considers three levels of personality.

Basic traits -- The traits of the elephant that largely come from our genes: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness (warmth/niceness), and conscientiousness.

Characteristic adaptations -- The developments people use to succeed in their roles: personal goals, defense and coping mechanisms, values, beliefs, and life-stage concerns.

Life story -- The evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing myth.

The basic traits of a person almost never change, but adversity has a way of teaching us about our characteristic adaptions and has its greatest impact on our own life story. To some degree, adversity is necessary for us to test our own adaptations and to develop our own life story.

Blessed Are the Sense Makers

Three coping mechanisms generally manifest in people after crisis.

Active coping -- Taking direct action to fix the problem.

Reappraisal -- Doing the work within--getting one's own thoughts right and looking for silver linings.

Avoidance coping -- Working to blunt one's emotional reactions by denying or avoiding the events through distractions.

Optimists tend to first try active measures, and if those fail they look to reappraisal. Along the way, they rewrite their life story positively under their new paradigm. Pessimists may not find the same natural tendencies, but that is okay! The key is not optimism, but the process that optimists use. We call this process sense making.

The key to sense making is almost surely disclosure. When you write or talk out your feelings (in a private setting like a journal), you are forced to produce a semi-coherent story of what has happened. Privacy is important to fend off the elephant's fear of social status digression.

For Everything There Is a Season

Adversity has the greatest positive impact on adolescents and young adults. These are the people old enough to be prepared to write parts of their life story and young enough to be likely to rewrite parts of their life story that already exist.

Error and Wisdom

Knowledge comes in two forms. Explicit knowledge is held by the rider and is the logical connection of facts. Tacit knowledge lives in the elephant and is gained by experiences that form complex connections of feelings.

Adversity is necessary, but only if we add the caveats: it should happen at the right time, to the right people, and to the right degree.

The Felicity of Virtue

It is easy to be skeptical when we hear people say that behaving virtuously is the easy path to happiness. However we must wonder, does the act of cultivating virtue in yourself make you happy?

The Virtues of the Ancients

Throughout religious and social texts in history, lists of socially ideal morals have been pronounced for all classes of people. It was expected that people attempt to cultivate these virtues in themselves.

How the West was Lost

When the western thinkers originally started to adopt the scientific method, they dropped support for vague and all-encompassing lists of ideals. Two major philosophies emerged. Deontologists based their moral decisions off of the categorical imperative: when pondering whether or not to perform an action, ask yourself if society would function were everyone to perform that same action. Consequentialists encircled the idea: the ultimate goal of social code is the good of the people; and the more good, the better.

These two thought styles competed--the former focusing on individual rights and behaviors, the latter focusing on societal utility. Both of these thought styles focused on quandary ethics while lowering the emphasis on character ethics. Retrospectively this was bad for our happiness because it emphasized our focus on the rider, leaving our elephant to steer itself.

I saw the right way and approved it, but followed the wrong, until an emotion came along to provide some force.

The Virtues of Positive Psychology

Positive psychology is an attempt at reconciling the best parts of ancient philosophy and the scientific method. Across most known cultures there is a minimal set of shared virtues that are commonly promoted. These shared virtues are below, broken into six major categories with examples for each.

Rather than focusing on fixing our weaknesses, we should focus on exercising our strengths. Virtues can be achieved just as any other skill, by effort and practice.

Hard Question, Easy Answers

Is it true that acting against my self-interest, for the good of others, even when I don't want to, is still good for me?

Religion would say "yes," but why? Science says that virtue is good for your genes under some circumstances. Kin altruism (nice to shared genes) and reciprocal altruism (nice to strangers who are nice to you) do indeed explain nearly all altruism among nonhuman animals, and much of human altruism too.

Hard Question, Hard Answers

Does altruism pay off even when there is no postmortem nor reciprocal payback? (no heaven, no hell, or no returned favor)

Yes because it is not about altruism in those cases. It's about forming healthy social connections and writing a satisfying life story for ourselves.

The Future of Virtue

Diversity has been widely celebrated, on bumper stickers, in campus diversity days, and in advertisements. For [many], diversity has become an unquestioned good--like justice, freedom, and happiness, the more diversity the better. ... I wonder whether celebrating diversity might also encourage division, whereas celebrating commonality would help people form cohesive groups and communities.

There are two main types of diversity--demographic and moral. Demographic diversity is about justice and inclusion of previously excluded groups. Moral diversity (as has been seen in history) discourages consensus on moral norms and values. It is only on rare occasions that people want moral diversity.

Divinity With or Without God

Our life is the creation of our minds, and we do much of that creating with metaphor. We see new things in terms of things we already understand. [With] the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are blind.

The three social dimensions that humans are preconditioned to perceive are closeness (interpersonal kinship), hierarchy (social rank), and divinity (personal character). The latter of these is less attended by secular thinkers, yet still important.

Are We Not Animals?

Disgust initially evolved with our increased consumption of meat. Now it plays an important role in social and moral decisions as well. Disgust has helped us internally justify the division between animals and humans along the dimension of divinity.

The Ethic of Divinity

People who think about morality have thoughts that cluster into three ethic groups:

Ethic of Autonomy -- protect individuals from harm and grant them the maximum degree of autonomy to pursue their own goals.

Ethic of Community -- protect the integrity of groups and value obedience, loyalty, and wise leadership.

Ethic of Divinity -- protect the divinity in each person, live free from lust, greed, and hatred.

It is widely observed across culture that divinity and disgust must be kept separate at all times. Divinity is maintained in an individual by treating others well and treating your body like a temple. Divinity is lost by conceding to your baser motives.

Sacred Intrusions

Western culture is largely trying to do away with socially enforced divinity and hierarchy (where possible). However, sacredness has not disappeared from the minds of the people. Sacredness has become more personal--tied to meaningful objects, places, events, and individuals (but not necessarily about God).

Elevation and Agape

The six "basic" emotions in psychology are joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise. What then, is the feeling in response to an individual performing divine (noble) acts?

A typical emotion is defined in research by:

Triggering conditions

Physical changes in body

Motivation

Characteristic feelings (beyond bodily sensations)

Elevation is the emotion felt in response to good deeds and likely correlates with the release of oxytocin (hormone associated with love, trust, and openness). While observing skillful acts motivates people to do better, observing morally uplifting acts motivates people to be better. Agape is a love with no specific object and is triggered by elevation.

Awe and Transcendence

Feelings of divinity can be triggered by personal moral code and by observing natural or profound beauty. Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence and comes in response to two conditions:

1. A person perceives something vast (physically or conceptually).
2. The vast thing cannot be accommodated by the person's existing mental structures.

The vastness can make people feel small, powerless, passive, and receptive. Feelings of fear, admiration, elevation, and a sense of beauty might follow. Awe creates openings for deep personal change.

Awe is often tied to moments of internal (religious) transformation that happen in peak experiences, after which a person feels that their entire view on life has suddenly and dramatically changed for the better.

Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society.

The Satanic Self

Humans are unique animals in that they spend time thinking about themselves. While the self helps us form societies, it causes internal struggle and prevents spiritual advancement. Trivial egocentric thoughts lock people in the material world and spiritual transformation succeeds by reducing the self, which the self resists.

Flatland and the Culture War

People who prioritize the ethic of divinity will often be at ends with those who prioritize the ethic of autonomy. The former construes the self as something to be suppressed while the latter emphasizes the self as the ultimate freedom that should be maximized.

It is important, regardless of personal opinion, to attempt to revoke the myth of pure evil and to understand that all opinions held by others are justified under the appropriate lens.

Happiness Comes from Between

Everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail. [Embrace] it, rather than throw it away...

What was the Question?

The human question "What is the meaning of life?" is one of paramount value, however incredibly difficult to answer. Neither a definition of the word nor symbolic description satisfy the question, rather this thought is a plea for guidance. The real question becomes, "what do I need to know in order to understand life?" In this, there are two subquestions. Why are we here (on Earth)? How ought I live (to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life)?

Love and Work

In order for people to find deeper satisfaction with life, they seem only to need a certain set of conditions. First and foremost of those is love. Second is the creation and selection of goals (or work) that is fully engaging. While love was discussed earlier, there are four important components of happy work.

Progress -- We (almost always) derive more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them.

Self-direction -- People who have more latitude in deciding how they approach varied and challenging work tend to enjoy their work much more.

Calling -- Work can be one of three things: a job that must be done; a career composed of long term effort and progress; or a calling whose tasks are intrinsically fulfilling. Happiness finds the latter most often.

Strengths -- People who pick work that uses their strengths are most likely to be engaged and happy in their working environment.

Happiness then, does not come from strictly within ourselves nor does it come from some combination of internal and external factors. Happiness comes from between.

Vital Engagement

Those people who enjoy widely admired lives and careers of passion tend to share a common characteristic. Each successful person has vital engagement with the world, maintaining a balance of enjoyed absorption and personal meaning / significance.

This engagement is not something within a person, nor is it entirely external to a person. Engagement is between a person and their environment.

Cross-Level Coherence

People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the physical, mental, and societal levels of their existence.

It is difficult to ensure that our subconscious feelings agree with our conscious thoughts. Likewise it is difficult to ensure that our bodies, minds, and communities cohere well. By connecting personal practices and thoughts with communal efforts we can improve our overall coherence.

God Gives Us Hives

Morality and religion are naturally intertwined across almost all human cultures through values, identity, and daily life. But, in evolution morality is a problem. Why do people help each other so much?

Evolution for people happens at two levels. On a person level, individuals reproduce and propagate their genes. However, at the cultural level individuals also share and propagate ideas about how to live. From this idea it follows that our genes have developed to allow for survival through culture. Culture has simultaneously evolved into its many present branches.

Harmony and Purpose

Interestingly, when people enter a mystical state (that state preceding and consisting peak experiences) they tend to loosen their concept of self while becoming part of a larger body.

The mystical state is often triggered by synchronized collective movements / actions by groups of people. It is believed that the intense emotions of mystical states were selected by evolution to improve group dynamics. This mental state allows people to willfully sacrifice themselves for the good of a larger population while simultaneously obtaining a feeling of ideological immortality through the survival of their peers.

The Meaning of Life

We were shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige, and we were shaped by group selection to be hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger. We are social creatures who need love and attachments, and we are industrious creatures with needs for contribution, able to enter a state of vital engagement with our work. We are the rider and we are the elephant, and our mental health depends on the two working together, each drawing on the others' strengths.

It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.

Conclusion: On Balance

There are lots of seemingly opposing forces in the world, but they all act in an inevitable symbiotic harmony. It is upon us as individuals to realize that the best parts of humanity are divided across many ideologies whose reconciliation will forever seem impossible. It is in an effort to find balance between the rider and the elephant, ourselves and our surroundings, that we will find meaning in life.