Emily Esfahani Smith

And I think that I'm constantly trying to remind myself that all of these things that my husband and I are doing

for our kids, even though they can seem frustrating or tedious or boring, folding laundry, whatever, that they're all part of caring for and loving these children.

And so cooking the meals, folding the laundry, washing the bottles, those can turn into acts of love.

And so

that then endows those things with a greater sense of meaning and kind of just brings a little bit more peace and comfort when things feel chaotic and uncertain at home.

So I think reframing what we're doing, I think can be a really powerful way to align our everyday tasks with those broader goals, reframing them to connect them to something meaningful.

The other thing is, I mean, I would say like finding micro moments

in your day to cultivate meaning?

If you're working, for example, in the office, can you have a brief maybe conversation with someone where you're really tuned into them

and connected with them, and that can be a moment of belonging.

In my talk, I tell the story of a friend of mine, Jonathan, and this sense of connectedness that he has every morning buying a newspaper from this street vendor in New York, and the two of them kind of getting to know each other and walking away from that moment feeling lifted up

feeling like they've been really seen by the other person.

So these little moments of meaning that we can build into our lives as well.

If you think about transcendence, for example, maybe you create a playlist for yourself on Spotify or Apple Music, whatever, that is your kind of transcendence playlist, your beauty playlist.

And you listen to that in the morning or at night, whenever.

So these little ways to kind of bake meaning into our lives, I think,

We just have to think about what is it that's meaningful to us and how can I bring it into that playlist or bring it into that interaction that I'm having with that person at work or on the street or whatever.

Yes, absolutely.

Our own mortality can be the greatest kind of instigator towards getting us to think about meaning and what really matters to us.

In my book, I write about something that psychologists call the deathbed thought experiment.