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By Emily Esfahani Smith

“It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”

Kacper Pempel/Reuters

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna,
was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years
later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished
— but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man’s Search for
Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that
the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing:
Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his
science teachers declared to the class, “Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process
of oxidation.” Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, “Sir, if this is so, then what can be
the meaning of life?”

As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances
were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. “Everything can be taken from a man
but one thing,” 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.”

http://books.google.com/books/about/Viktor_Frankl.html?id=3AXDwL6HwRAC

http://www.theatlantic.com/

Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal
inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and
thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. “In both cases,”
Frankl writes, “it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something
from them; something in the future was expected of them.” For one man, it was his young child,
who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that
he needed to finish. Frankl writes:

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his
existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the
impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for
his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious
of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an
unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence,
and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

In 1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club listed Man’s Search for Meaning
as one of the 10 most influential books in the United States. It has sold millions of copies
worldwide. Now, over twenty years later, the book’s ethos — its emphasis on meaning, the value
of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self — seems to be at odds with our
culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for
meaning. “To the European,” Frankl wrote, “it is a characteristic of the American culture that,
again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued;
it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.'”

According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high — as is, it seems,
the number of best-selling books with the word “happiness” in their titles. At this writing, Gallup
also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy without a lot of stress or
worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10
Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their
lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly
a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives
meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-
being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances
self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of
happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. “It is the very
pursuit of happiness,” Frankl knew, “that thwarts happiness.”

***

This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new
study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive
Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they
thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward
meaning, happiness, and many other variables — like stress levels, spending patterns, and having
children — over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/13/americans-happy-emotional-health_n_1511071.html

http://www.gallup.com/poll/106915/gallup-daily-us-mood.aspx

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1758-0854.2010.01035.x/abstract

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-kashdan/whats-wrong-with-happines_b_740518.html

http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/SomeKeyDifferencesHappyLifeMeaningfulLife_2012

http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/SomeKeyDifferencesHappyLifeMeaningfulLife_2012

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rpos20/current

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rpos20/current

overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists
found, is associated with being a “taker” while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being
a “giver.”

“Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life,
in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing
entanglements are avoided,” the authors write.

How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling
good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy,
they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want.
While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to
be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress
or worry.

Nearly a quarter of Americans do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful.

Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish
behavior — being, as mentioned, a “taker” rather than a “giver.” The psychologists give an
evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a
desire — like hunger — you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other
words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy.
Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy,
the researchers point out.

“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,” explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the
authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words,
meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People
who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. “If anything, pure
happiness is linked to not helping others in need,” the researchers write.

What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all
across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to
Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent
book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists
at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to
others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P.
Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life “you use
your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the
self.” For instance, having more meaning in one’s life was associated with doing activities like
buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels
of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of
happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they

http://www.fsu.edu/faculty/fachonors.html#isi

also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people.
Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice,
but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this
study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are
less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching
television.

“Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes
life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy,” Baumeister told me in an interview.

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment
— which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. 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. The amount of time people report feeling
good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.

Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future.
“Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively
meaningful but unhappy life,” the researchers write. “Happiness is not generally found in
contemplating the past or future.” That is, people who thought more about the present were
happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and
sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.

Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases
the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that
people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their
satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a
clearly defined purpose. “If there is meaning in life at all,” Frankl wrote, “then there must be
meaning in suffering.”

***

Which brings us back to Frankl’s life and, specifically, a decisive experience he had before he
was sent to the concentration camps. It was an incident that emphasizes the difference between
the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of happiness in life.

http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-23/living/do.not.want.children_1_happiness-cultural-beliefs-children?_s=PM:LIVING

http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-23/living/do.not.want.children_1_happiness-cultural-beliefs-children?_s=PM:LIVING

Peter Andrews/Reuters

In his early adulthood, before he and his family were taken away to the camps, Frankl had
established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna and the world. As a 16-year-old
boy, for example, he struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and one day sent Freud a
two-page paper he had written. Freud, impressed by Frankl’s talent, sent the paper to the
International Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. “I hope you don’t object,” Freud wrote
the teenager.

While he was in medical school, Frankl distinguished himself even further. Not only did he
establish suicide-prevention centers for teenagers — a precursor to his work in the camps — but
he was also developing his signature contribution to the field of clinical psychology:
logotherapy, which is meant to help people overcome depression and achieve well-being by
finding their unique meaning in life. By 1941, his theories had received international attention
and he was working as the chief of neurology at Vienna’s Rothschild Hospital, where he risked
his life and career by making false diagnoses of mentally ill patients so that they would not, per
Nazi orders, be euthanized.

That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change his life.
With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl had applied for a
visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding
up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl
knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew
that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the
trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man with his visa in
hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself
even further in his field.

As Anna S. Redsand recounts in her biography of Frankl, he was at a loss for what to do, so he
set out for St. Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to the organ music, he
repeatedly asked himself, “Should I leave my parents behind?… Should I say goodbye and leave
them to their fate?” Where did his responsibility lie? He was looking for a “hint from heaven.”

When he returned home, he found it. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His father
explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues that the Nazis had
destroyed. The marble contained the fragment of one of the Ten Commandments — the one about

http://books.google.com/books?id=3AXDwL6HwRAC&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=viktor+frankl+suicide+prevention+center&source=bl&ots=SUcBDaT87f&sig=2RlvqNiKZMwxTw-FRbS1n6W_Vmo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=drbhUIfvHoXD0QGv8IGYCg&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=viktor%20frankl%20suicide%20prevention%20center&f=false

http://books.google.com/books/about/Viktor_Frankl.html?id=3AXDwL6HwRAC

honoring your father and your mother. With that, Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo
whatever opportunities for safety and career advancement awaited him in the United States. He
decided to put aside his individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates in the
camps.

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The wisdom that Frankl derived from his experiences there, in the middle of unimaginable
human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then: “Being human always points, and is
directed, to something or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another
human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve
or another person to love — the more human he is.”

Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human
beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something
larger than ourselves — by devoting our lives to “giving” rather than “taking” — we are not only
expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the
good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/theres-more-to-life-than-being-
happy/266805/

Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/no-flowers-on-the-psych-ward/264923/

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/no-flowers-on-the-psych-ward/264923/

There’s More to Life Than Being Happy
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