As I conducted my research for this book, those four themes came up again and again in my conversations with people living meaningful lives and those still searching for meaning. Those categories were also present in the definitions of a meaningful life offered by both Aristotle and the psychologists mentioned in the introduction—who argued, in different ways, that meaning arises from our relationships to others, having a mission tied to contributing to society, making sense of our experiences and who we are through narrative, and connecting to something bigger than the self. I found them, too, in the emerging social science research on a meaningful life and how people can achieve it. And I found them in works of philosophy, literature, religion, and popular culture—in Buddhist teachings, in American Transcendentalism, in novels, and in film.
They are the four pillars of meaning: belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence.
For Laemmle and Borysenko’s patient, for instance, meaning came from loving others and connecting to them with compassion and empathy. For Gandhi, as for young Jason, living a meaningful life involved doing some kind of good in the world so that others could live better lives. Then there was L’Engle, who found meaning in understanding life as a story. Rabbi Kelman and Middleton, meanwhile, found meaning by losing themselves in something bigger, whether a spiritual reality or the mystery of the tangible world itself.
These pillars are central to religious and spiritual systems, and they are the reason why those traditions historically conferred (and continue to confer) meaning in people’s lives. They situated individuals within a community. They gave them a purpose to work toward, like getting into heaven, growing closer to God, or serving others. They offered them explanations for why the world is the way it is, and why they are the way they are. And they provided them with opportunities for transcendence during rituals and ceremonies. Each of these pillars was present in the lives of the Sufis I knew, which is why their lives were so meaningful.
But the beauty of the pillars is that they are accessible to everyone. Both with and without religion, individuals can build up each of these pillars in their lives. They are sources of meaning that cut through every aspect of our existence. We can find belonging at work and within our families, or experience transcendence while taking a walk through the park or visiting an art museum. We can choose a career that helps us serve others, or draft our life story to understand how we got to be the way we are. We may move from one city to another, change jobs, and lose touch with friends as the years go by, but we can continue to find meaning by harnessing the pillars in new ways in our new circumstances. And when we keep the pillars in mind, we find meaning in even the most unexpected of places, whether we’re on our commute, inside of a prison, at the top of a mountain in West Texas—or on an island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.
Everywhere you go on Tangier Island, Virginia, there are graves. There are graves in the front and back yards of the island’s small houses, where people bury their dead family members. There are cemeteries near the beach, alongside the church, in the shadow of the powder blue water tower, and creeping into the narrow roads, their headstones crowded right next to each other. And there is the old island graveyard, now fifty feet under water. During severe storms, its skeletons and casket debris wash up in the surf.
Unlike modern urban and suburban communities, where cemeteries are marginalized, the cemeteries of Tangier are, by necessity, part of daily life. They serve as a constant reminder of the past. To the nearly five hundred residents of this tiny island, this is as it should be. Their community, they say, includes not just the living, but also the dead. Many of today’s islanders can trace their line of descent to the original settlers who came to Tangier in the eighteenth century. Many of them still carry their ancestors’ last names: Crockett, Pruitt, Park, Thomas.
Tangier sits in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay and is an hour away by ferry from both the Virginia and Maryland coasts. Only 1.2 square miles in size, it emerges from the water as little more than a sandbar, its harbor surrounded by a maze of docks, where the island’s watermen keep their fishing boats. On the docks sit ramshackle shanties, with wire crab traps, or “pots,” as the watermen call them, haphazardly stacked outside. Considered the soft-shell crab capital of the world, Tangier is also one of the last communities of its kind.
Swain Memorial Methodist Church is the physical, communal, and spiritual center of Tangier. On Sunday mornings, rows of golf carts, the island’s principal mode of transit, line up outside the white clapboard building. The congregation, diminished over the years but still vibrant, fills up half of the church’s pews. I attended a service hoping to catch a glimpse of the community in action, and on the morning I was there, worship began with a memorial for the recently departed: the preacher commemorated one former parishioner’s “first birthday in heaven,” and invited congregants to recall those they had lost. Everyone referred to each other, and to their dead, by their first names.
The service was intimate, more like a family reunion than a religious gathering. As an outsider, I felt self-conscious and out of place. At the end, I tried to slip out of the church without drawing attention to myself. But before I could, half a dozen people came up to me and formed a line. Each of them extended a hand to shake mine. “You must be staying at the Bay View,” one woman said. “Well, we are so glad to have you in Tangier with us.” Outsiders do not go unnoticed on Tangier. Nor do they go unwelcome.
“It’s like one big family here,” said Peggy Gordy, a lifetime resident of Tangier. “When someone is grieving, we grieve with them. When someone is celebrating, we celebrate with them. When there’s a fundraiser, everyone goes. When there’s a bridal shower, everyone chips in. Even if it’s twenty dollars, everyone helps.” It’s inconceivable to the residents here that people on the mainland have neighbors whose names they do not know. “There are 480 people on this island,” said Gordy, “and we all know each other.”
The congregants spoke with a lyrical brogue that is unique to the people of Tangier. Though travelers over the years have attributed the accent to the remaining vestiges of Elizabethan England, its likely explanation is simpler: physically isolated from the world, Tangier’s idiosyncratic folkways have managed to survive the homogenizing tides of language and culture.
But isolated though Tangier may be, cultural and economic forces have been crashing down on its shores in recent years. The distance between the island and the mainland is far more easily bridged today than it was in the past, thanks, in large part, to the recent adoption of wireless Internet and the growth of satellite television. The influx of media is not just exposing islanders to new ideas, but also giving them another vision of living well. Younger generations see people on television who are going to the mall and driving around in their cars, and—though they love Tangier—decide that that is the kind of life they want for themselves. For better and for worse, Tangier is entering the modern era.
The economics don’t add up in Tangier’s favor, either. The island’s main industry is fishing and crabbing. But the state of Virginia has put a cap on fishing licenses and enacted catch limits to preserve the limited stock of fish and crab, making it nearly impossible for aspiring watermen to get into the business. “The younger guys,” Tangier’s mayor, James “Ooker” Eskridge, told me, “can’t get a crabbing license unless somebody older drops out.”
So they leave. Young men graduating from high school today typically find work operating tugboats out of cities like Baltimore, while many of the women go on to college. Few return home. It used to be that people who grew up in Tangier would stay in Tangier their whole lives. But with every passing year, that has become less and less true. Fifty years ago, there were about 900 residents on the island and over 100 students at the island’s only K–12 school. Today, there are fewer than 500 islanders and only 60 grade-school students.
Tangier has been called “the vanishing island” due to the erosion that has washed away twenty-five feet of its shore
in the last few years. But it is vanishing in another way, too. The community of Tangier—its people and their way of life—is slowly disappearing.
—
Edward Pruitt is one of those who left. But in 2013, he returned for Memorial Day. Memorial Day is a big deal on Tangier, as residents come together to remember and celebrate those islanders who served—and died—for their country. That morning, American flags fluttered along the narrow streets. Someone was giving out paper cups of lemonade to the passersby. A handful of children wearing red, white, and blue ran through the small openings in the crowd that had gathered outside Swain Memorial Methodist Church. Pruitt, a thirty-two-year-old senior chief petty officer in the navy who had recently returned from a tour in the Middle East, stood on the porch of the church in his white uniform and sailor’s hat, looking out at the faces of several hundred of his neighbors and friends. All of the islanders, it seemed, had turned up to hear him speak.
Edward’s speech was about the importance of community. When he was getting ready to set off for college, he said, his school librarian—who is now the principal—gave him some advice. She told him not to be afraid to tell other people that he was from an island and not to be afraid to tell people that he was from Tangier. They would know from his accent that he was from somewhere unusual anyway, she had said, and when they asked him what it was like, he should proudly tell them that Tangier Island was a special place.
“Don’t shy away from where you’re from,” Edward recalled her saying, “because it’s a unique place and worth talking about.”
It took Edward some time to fully heed her wisdom. Edward left Tangier in 1998 to attend Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, three hours away from the island. It was the first time he had been away from home—and it was an uneasy transition for him. Newport News was enormous compared to Tangier, and he wasn’t used to having so many options and so much freedom. “In Tangier,” he said, “there’s just one grocery store. Off Tangier, there’s a million.”
But the hardest adjustment was learning how to make friends. Growing up, Edward knew all of the kids on the island; they were like his brothers and sisters. School was a comfortable and nurturing environment. There were seven people in his class year and, because all of the children of Tangier attend the same schoolhouse, the teachers he had in kindergarten were still around when he was in high school. “It’s like growing up with an extended family,” he said.
As wonderful as that tight-knit community was, it had one major drawback: when Edward got to college, he didn’t have a whole lot of experience meeting new people. “I was shy,” he said, “and I was self-conscious about my accent because most people start teasing you about it.” Edward met a few people through his freshman year roommate—another young man from Tangier, who was a couple of years ahead of him in school—but he didn’t really connect with any of them. So from time to time Edward got, in his words, “the college blues”—he felt lonely. He missed his friends and family. He missed Tangier.
In Tangier, Edward explained, you could always find someone to hang out with. In the evenings, young people would congregate at a seafood shack called Lorraine’s or at Spanky’s, an ice cream shop. Once together, they wouldn’t do a whole lot. They’d grab some food, catch up, and maybe, later at night, wander around the island. In college, though, there was no equivalent of Lorraine’s or Spanky’s, no preexisting community in which he felt comfortable. “You don’t realize how important those daily interactions are until they’re gone,” he said. “It’s those conversations that are trivial and don’t mean much that you miss—the daily stuff, not the big stuff. It was the same thing with the conversations you’d have every morning at school with the same people. In college, that was gone, and I didn’t know how to fill that gap.”
Edward didn’t get good at making friends until he joined the navy after graduation. “The navy forces you to get to know people,” Edward said. “You are being moved every couple of years or so, so you have to build new relationships all the time.” As Edward got older and more self-assured, he no longer felt as self-conscious as he did when he first left home.
“A lot of people who leave Tangier Island,” Edward said, “they’ll drop the accent, and they’ll try not to draw attention to themselves. But, after school, I realized that it could be a conversation starter, an easy way to break the ice with someone. They’ll hear you talk and ask you where you’re from. Some people think it’s southern or Australian or English. So you have to explain you’re from an island, and you start talking about your hometown—and then conversation just goes. They’ll talk about their hometown, and a friendship can be made from there.”
Edward’s closest friends are still from Tangier, but he has found community in places beyond his little island. He has been in the navy for over a decade and has formed many close bonds there. “The connections you form on a ship when you’re deployed are unlike anything else,” he said. “You understand what each other has left behind and the difficulty of being gone, but you come together to complete the mission.” When he sees shipmates from a previous deployment, he feels close to them, even if they were not good friends on the ship, because of that shared experience.
And, in 2010, Edward fell in love with a woman from Iowa. Their relationship has been through some trying times—several weeks after they were engaged in 2009, Edward was deployed to Iraq for a year. But though they were half a world apart, he and Katie talked almost every day. Those conversations, Edward said, sustained him. They married in 2011. Today, they live in Norfolk, Virginia, where they met, and have a three-year-old daughter named Laura.
Edward visits Tangier every five or six weeks, though he doubts he’ll ever move back. Still, he said, “it’s always good to be home.”
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We all need to feel understood, recognized, and affirmed by our friends, family members, and romantic partners. We all need to give and receive affection. We all need to find our tribe. In other words, we all need to feel that we belong.
Research has shown that among the benefits that come with being in a relationship or group, a sense of belonging clocks in as the most important driver of meaning. When people feel like they belong, according to psychologists, it’s because two conditions have been satisfied. First, they are in relationships with others based on mutual care: each person feels loved and valued by the other, just as Edward did when Katie called him regularly during his deployment. When other people think you matter and treat you like you matter, you believe you matter, too. Second, they have frequent pleasant interactions with other people. Those moments can be joyful and fun, like when a parent and child play, or more emotionally neutral, like when a content couple watches television together. But the key is that they happen on a regular basis and are not negative. When Edward was living on Tangier, he saw and spoke to his friends every day at school and around the island. In college, he had fewer of those daily interactions, which is why he felt lonely.
Though we all share a need to belong, in the first decades of the twentieth century many influential psychologists and physicians—those guardians of the mind and body—did not acknowledge this fundamental aspect of human nature. The idea that children needed parental love and care to live a full and meaningful life was not only considered medically dangerous; it was dismissed as immoral and mawkish. But the fruits of their labor reveal how fundamental it is for us to find belonging from our very first moments on earth.
Doctors’ mistrust of parental care was a natural response to the horrific fact that children were dying all around them. Over a quarter of all children born in the United States from 1850 to 1900 died before they turned five. Yet thanks to the groundbreaking work of scientists like Louis Pasteur, doctors were beginning to understand that tiny pathogens caused certain diseases, an idea known as “germ theory.” Medical professionals “still didn’t fully understand how those invisible infections spread,” explains the science writer Deborah Blum, but their “logical
response was to make it harder for germs to move from one person to the next.” Doctors established antiseptic environments in children’s hospital wards where, as a pediatrician in New York wrote in 1942, “masked, hooded, and scrubbed nurses and physicians move about cautiously so as not to stir up bacteria. Visiting parents are strictly excluded, and the infants receive a minimum of handling by the staff.” They also advised parents to minimize the amount of affection they gave to their children at home. Kissing, touching, hugging—all were ways to spread disease and therefore were discouraged for the sake of the child’s health.
Meanwhile, behavioral psychology was coming into vogue, and academic psychologists began turning their attention to child-rearing. In 1928, John B. Watson, a former president of the American Psychological Association and founder of behaviorism, published an important new book called Psychological Care of Infant and Child. In it, Watson warned against the “dangers of too much mother love.” Showering a child with affection, he said, will spoil his character by breeding “weaknesses, reserves, fears, cautions and inferiorities.” Activities that we today take for granted—hugging a child, kissing her, letting her sit on her parent’s lap—were roundly criticized by Watson as “sentimental.” So destructive was parental love that Watson “dreamed of a baby farm where hundreds of infants could be taken away from their parents and raised according to scientific principles,” writes Blum.
People took Watson’s ideas seriously. His book became a bestseller and was widely praised in the press. But what Watson’s book didn’t discuss is that places much like those baby farms already existed. They were called foundling homes, or orphanages. In the early twentieth century, the mortality rate for children in orphanages could approach 100 percent—that is, almost every single child in the orphanage died before they were one or two years old. To spare the children from the pathogens that were surely the cause of their untimely deaths, scientifically minded caregivers established conditions of complete sterility and cleanliness, the same sort of conditions that doctors were implementing in hospital wards and that the medical community was advocating parents implement in their homes. The attendants in the foundling homes isolated the children from most human contact. They separated the children’s beds from one another, covered their cribs with mosquito netting, and touched them only when absolutely necessary, which is to say hardly ever.
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