Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. It happens to the best of us. The resolutions we set at the beginning of a new year become harder to accomplish, and maybe we've already given up on a few. And yet, at the start of every year, many of us continue to turn our attention to goals or resolutions.
What is the deeper question that sits behind this yearly cycle of planning? For journalist and psychologist Emily Esfahani-Smith, it's what truly gives our lives meaning and how we stay grounded in what matters most.
In a conversation from January, Emily joins TED curator Whitney Pennington-Rogers to explore questions around how to cultivate purpose, belonging, and a deeper sense of fulfillment as we continue into this year and beyond.
the New Year's resolution is a thing that many of us at least know about and maybe participate in some way, thinking about how we want to resolve to do things for the year. How do you make the distinction between chasing achievement and cultivating a meaningful life?
So I think, so yeah, the idea of resolutions, I personally, I like the idea of resolutions if they're done
you know, I think the right way, I guess you could say a lot of times, you know, we, we do resolutions that are focused on these really discreet goals, like, you know, lose 10 pounds by, you know, such and such a date or things like this, you know, and I think that if we, you know, especially tying it into meaning, if we can think about
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Chapter 2: What is the deeper question behind our New Year's resolutions?
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.
Yeah, I mean, it feels so important. And I guess if you look at it from the other lens, like I know that you in your work are spending lots of time talking to people who are sort of contemplating these big questions about what is the meaning of their own lives? And then also what does happiness look like for them in that moment?
And when you find that people are coming to you and they say that they're feeling stuck or unhappy or dissatisfied in some way. I guess, what are you noticing that they're most often missing? Is it, is it purpose and connection or is it something else entirely?
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.
The classic example of this is Viktor Frankl, the Jewish Holocaust survivor from Vienna, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, a beautiful book. And it's about his experiences in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. And he writes about how the inmates in the camps had lost everything. They'd lost their families, they'd lost their homes, their freedom.
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Chapter 3: How can we distinguish between chasing achievement and cultivating a meaningful life?
How do you feel like when you, especially Victor Frankl, like how do you think these collective experiences have sort of reshaped the way you think about the way you give your life meaning or the way you think about the meaning of life and if they have at all?
Yes, I'll take the example of the pandemic, because that is something, obviously, that we all went through. It was several years long. We saw a lot of people in major transitions losing their jobs, deciding to leave work, or suddenly being plunged into an environment where they were around their children all the time and tried to do work, just navigating a lot.
Or maybe the work that they did was not possible anymore because of what was happening. And so that source of meaning was gone. And so what the pandemic was basically for a lot of people was a life transition. And we all experience life transitions. Personally, ever since I wrote my book in 2017, I've become a parent. That was a major life transition for me.
But the pandemic, the political atmosphere, things have changed. And I think that in these moments of transition, what can happen is our sense of self gets shaken up a bit. And definitely, whatever happiness we may have been feeling, whatever comforts that we had, may not be in place as much as they were before.
I remember seeing a statistic during the pandemic saying that Americans were the unhappiest that they've been in decades. And of course, all those indicators of suffering that I talked about a moment ago, they had been rising. But during the pandemic, that rise became even steeper. And so transitions don't feel good all the time.
but they can be these opportunities to reflect, to kind of pause, kind of like the way the new year is, to pause and think about, okay, what do I really want? What do I value? And I saw a lot of people doing that during the pandemic.
They were kind of foisted into this situation, not by choice, and they took it as an opportunity to kind of reflect a little bit more deeply on their lives and what they wanted. And they came out of the pandemic with a new sense of direction.
So I think with transitions, we have to recognize that it's totally normal for them to feel bad and for us to feel unmoored, both in terms of our happiness and our meaning because things are changing. And yet, if we kind of continue the search, use that time, as uncomfortable as it may be, as an opportunity to reflect on what we want, where we want our lives to go, what our purpose is,
it can lead to these opportunities, these new directions in our lives that can feel really, you know, life affirming once we come out of it.
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Chapter 4: Why does pursuing happiness often lead to feeling less happy?
It's that forward pointing arrow that leads you into the future, helps you kind of get, you know, move through the bumps of life.
And so let's talk a little bit about what that looks like then. So Deja, a member of Deja, has a question about how you can integrate big goals into an everyday schedule, routine, or plan. What are some of the small everyday practices you think can help us stay oriented towards meaning?
Yeah, that's a great idea. I mean, that's a great question. I think that there are a lot of small things that we can do. So for example, I think, I'll give an example that's personal to me. So there's, like I said, I've had children since I wrote my book. One is four years old, the other is two, the other is 12 weeks old.
And so a lot of my time these days is spent doing things like laundry and washing bottles and preparing meals and trying to coax my kids to eat those meals. And it can feel like, I don't know, it's hard. It's hard being a parent sometimes. It's wonderful, it's joyful, it's beautiful as well, but it can also feel hard.
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.
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Chapter 5: What defines a meaningful life according to Emily Esfahani Smith?
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.
I love that. And we have other questions about how you can use other other tools to help you more thoughtfully consider meaning in your life. And member Shoshana has a question about whether practicing or pondering and reflection on your own mortality can help you build a life of meaning. Do you feel like that's something that's also useful
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. And so if you're sitting on your deathbed reflecting back on your life, are you going to be happy with what you see there?
Are you going to be satisfied, I should say, with what you see reflecting back? Are you going to feel like you did the things that were important to you, that you did your best to kind of live out your values, to love and be loved, those kinds of things? Or are you going to feel despair that you didn't? What regrets might you have?
And that can be a way that we can determine, okay, if I'm dying right now and sitting on my deathbed, maybe these are the changes that I need to make. Mortality is one way that we can really kind of get into thinking about what makes our lives meaningful. And then regret, I think actually
is another way regret can speak to us, too, because it tells us what's important to us, what we want our lives to be about. So nobody feels comfortable. Well, I shouldn't say nobody. Maybe some people do. But a lot of people don't feel comfortable thinking about their own deaths. A lot of people don't feel comfortable thinking about the things they regret.
These are really painful topics to sit with. And yet they can be these, you know, they can give us hints and clues about how we can make our lives more meaningful. In my book, I write specifically about something called meaning centered psychotherapy developed by a psychiatrist, Dr. William Breitbart at Sloan Kettering in New York City. And that's a therapy for people who have a terminal cancer.
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