Emily Esfahani Smith

And that's a therapy for people who have a terminal cancer.

And the whole idea behind the therapy is, okay, like your life, you know, your life is going to end sooner than you thought it would.

And so, you know, with this time that you have left, how can we help you

find meaning in your life, reflect back on the sources of meaning in your life, on what right now still gives you meaning.

And what the researchers find is that that intervention does increase the sense of meaning that people have in the face of death.

And so that tells us that

there is something about mortality which kind of forces us to come to terms with our lives in a way that feels very pressing and can bring that sense of meaning.

Yeah, that's a great question, Maryam.

I think so.

I think, you know, in Western cultures, especially or just, you know, in cultures that are the wealthier culture becomes, the more individualistic it becomes.

And there is this pull then between individualism and community.

You know, if you look across the world, like different, you know, different parts of the world,

have different emphasis on which one they think is more important, you know, the individual or the community.

You know, in a lot of kind of Asian cultures, there's a greater sense of community, a sense of emphasis placed on community and community-oriented values like honor and serving other people than in places like the United States where there's greater emphasis obviously on individualism, you know, do your own thing, follow your own path kind of thing.

And so I think that, you know,

for people who are living in individualistic cultures, you're always negotiating that tension between the self and other and how to cultivate that sense of belonging.

And I think that one of the things that we're seeing as a result of this rising individualism is that people are lonelier.

And so that leads to rising rates of mental illness more broadly.

what can we do about that?

You know, we can't necessarily force people to engage with us, but we can create opportunities, you know, in the