One Golden Meaning Opportunity: Appreciation

[This post is the thirteenth in a multi-part series called Everything You Thought You Knew About Meaning is Wrong. To be in touch about it, you can always reach me at [email protected] or visit me at https://ericmaisel.com/. Please enjoy the series!]

Many people live a gloomy, pessimistic, critical and self-critical life. They may have abundant reasons for living this way, ranging from a cultural imperative to not take pleasure from life to a harsh upbringing that made them sadder and smaller than they otherwise might have been. These reasons are powerful and pertinent—but they do not amount to a life sentence. Even people who have been harmed in these ways still have as one of their golden meaning opportunities the possibility of appreciating life.

To say it in an everyday way, life feels more meaningful when you appreciate what can be appreciated: a juicy apple, a day of rest, an accomplishment, a child at play, a summer breeze. If each of these meaning opportunities is dismissed the instant it is experienced—if the instant you see a child smile, you say to yourself, “Just wait until she has to find a job!”—then you are robbing yourself of the chance of having that moment produce the feeling of meaning. You have blocked that feeling by your toxic pessimistic attitude. You may well be right that that little girl has a hard life ahead of her—but thinking that when you see her smile robs your life of the experience of meaning.

Here’s an example of the power of seizing a golden meaning opportunity like appreciation. I was working with a senior software engineer who had left the corporate world to work as a high-paid consultant. He had a lot: money, prestige, a big home, a healthy, loving family, friends, and more. But he was pestered by three thoughts: “I’m not doing enough,” “I could be creating a billion-dollar start-up,” and “Life isn’t feeling all that meaningful.” Those three thoughts plagued him.

A cognitive therapist might have wanted to work with him on “changing those thoughts.” Another sort of therapist might have wanted to help him discover “where those thoughts came from.” A coach might have supported his desire to create that billion-dollar company, helping him articulate steps, strategies, goals, benchmarks, etc. I went in a different direction.

“You want more feelings of meaning?”

“That’s an odd way to put it. But yes.”

“Right now? Or do you want to wait until you have a billion-dollar company up and running?”

He laughed. “Now would be better.”

“Plus, the instant you created that company, you’d want to sell it, wouldn’t you? Because you’d be bored within a month, yes?”

He smiled ruefully. “Sounds like you know me.”

“So, shall we get you some experiences of meaning right now?”

He shook his head. “That is such a weird way to think of it! Can you please explain what you mean?”

I did. I explained that meaning was merely a feeling and that life purpose was a choice. I explained the difference between “the purpose of life” and identifying and living one’s life purpose choices. I explained that while meaning was merely a feeling, it was nevertheless a feeling we craved—and so, it was natural that he wanted more of them. I said a bit more, then I stopped.

“Interesting,” he said. “I need to wrap my head around this a little.”

“Of course.”

“But I think I get it. So … I could have more of those experiences right now?”

“With luck. That’s why I call trying out things ‘meaning opportunities,’ because they may potentially produce that feeling but there are no guarantees that they will. There are things to try—and then you get to see if they come with the feeling of meaning or not.”

“It is still sounding very weird. These ‘feelings’ seem hardly worth going after, if they are just feelings. Really, that’s all meaning is? Feelings.”

We chatted a bit more. Then he asked the logical next question.

“Well, okay, what should I try?”

I thought about that.

“I could make many recommendations. And we could chat about those many recommendations. But I want to float one in particular—appreciation.”

“Appreciation?”

“You have a lot to appreciate in your life but you are dashing forward, pestering yourself with ‘next’ and ‘more’ and this and that. To trot out the cliché, you are not stopping to smell the roses. Tell me: do you appreciate what you have?”

“I do.”

“Do you?”

“I do!”

“Do you?”

He hesitated. “No, I don’t think I do.”

We made a plan. That night, he would appreciate his dinner. He would appreciate his wife. He would appreciate his son. He would appreciate his daughter. He would appreciate the basketball game he intended to watch and appreciate that he could watch it, that technology brought his favorite team into his living room. He would appreciate his garden, his study with its view of the mountains, that his parents were still healthy, that … the list was long, rich, and lovely.

The following Monday he reported via email that, despite the weirdness of the enterprise, he was feeling a great deal better. By virtue of him appreciating, life had become “more meaningful” immediately. He had to laugh. He signed off with, “That was all there was to it?”

Could he now stop chasing the billion-dollar company dream? Not quite. Could he now stop pestering himself about all that he might or could be doing? Not quite. But while those hungers and cravings were bound to continue, he at least now had one mechanism for bringing experiences of meaning into his life: appreciating.

And if a person doesn’t have all that this lucky software engineer possessed? Well, that less lucky person can still appreciate. If he is down on his luck, down on life, upset about life’s inequities and tribulations, it will be much harder for him to appreciate—and, indeed, appreciation may not prove a meaning opportunity for him. Maybe rebellious activism or creative effort will be his feeling generators. To repeat the headline: a given meaning opportunity will not work for everyone. But a meaning opportunity like appreciation is free to everyone to try. Number it among your opportunities.