Emily Esfahani Smith

And for a lot of us, that, like I said, is a stabilizing force.

If happiness can kind of come and go, if it's more ephemeral, meaning is there no matter what our kind of emotional state is.

We're always, if your family is a source of meaning, your family will continue to be that source of meaning, even if you're having a bad day.

I think that, yes.

So, you know, when people, when people come to you, you know, for me, you know, as a therapist or even just, you know, your friends or people you love and they feel stuck, that they feel unhappy.

I think there's this really natural connection.

tendency to want to cheer them up, to make them happy.

Hey, look on the bright side, or hey, let's go do this fun thing and you'll feel better.

But what we actually know, we know this from the research and I know this from my own clinical experience, is that happiness kind of lives on the surface.

It doesn't penetrate deeply.

And so

When people are feeling depressed or hopeless, lonely, or anxious, and we know that all of those markers of suffering have been rising in recent years, when people are feeling those ways, what they need is something more than happiness.

They need something deeper.

So the research shows that people who pursue and value happiness the way that our culture wants us to do, they actually end up feeling less happy.

But when they pursue meaning, when they search for meaning and seek it out, there is this deeper kind of well-being that follows as a result.

And so a lot of times, yes, when I'm seeing people who feel stuck,

There's this kind of unmoored feeling, you know, they don't feel like they have a sense of purpose.

They're kind of drifting from this to that, don't really have a sense of who they are.

And once you are able to kind of help them, you know, recognize, you know, what their purpose is.

then things start to fall in line a little bit more.