The Power of Meaning

by Emily Esfahani Smith

  The researchers followed up with the participants three years later, toward the end of their college careers, and found that the story-editing intervention had significant consequences—but only for the African American students. Their GPAs rose steadily over the three years, while the GPAs of the black students in the control condition did not change. Their improvement in academic performance was so dramatic that it cut the minority achievement gap in half. Three times as many were in the top 25 percent of their class. The students also reported being healthier and happier, and said they went to the doctor less often. Reading the belonging narrative helped them navigate college life more effectively. When those in the control condition experienced a setback, they doubted themselves and whether they belonged at their school. When those in the experimental condition faced similar stresses, their belonging was not threatened, which helped them weather the challenge successfully.

  Walton and Cohen did not see these effects among the white students. In fact, the GPAs of the white students in both the control and experimental groups increased between their freshman and senior years. Reading the narrative had made no difference to their grades or to their physical or psychological well-being. As a majority group on campus, white students didn’t attribute their stresses to not belonging, so they didn’t need an intervention to help redefine their challenges; the black students did. When they were able to change the story they told themselves about their transition to college, they were better off years later. This kind of intervention is not a magic bullet for inequality, as Walton points out—“it doesn’t give people opportunities when they lack them,” he said—but it does reveal how a shift in mindset can elevate a traditionally marginalized group.

  The pillars of meaning can help people recover from the trauma of abuse, imprisonment, and racism. But these serious hardships are not the only forms of adversity people will face. Daily life is filled with stressors both major and minor, like moving to a new city, finding a job, or completing a difficult assignment for work or school. As is the case with trauma, some people are more resilient to these quotidian sources of stress than others—and here, too, meaning plays a valuable role.

  In a study published in 2014, a group of researchers led by James Abelson at the University of Michigan wanted to find out how a meaning mindset might affect an individual’s performance during a stressful job interview. In the study, the researchers gave each participant three minutes to prepare a five-minute talk to a selection committee about why he or she was the best applicant for a job. Before the mock interview, the researchers told some participants that rather than focusing on promoting themselves in the interview, they should focus on how the job would enable them to help others and to live out their self-transcendent values. The meaning intervention, it turns out, dampened the body’s physiological response to stress.

  The benefits of adopting a meaning mindset are not just short-lived artifacts of a lab experiment—they have lasting results in the real world. Research led by David Yeager and Marlone Henderson at the University of Texas at Austin shows that high school students who wrote about how their schoolwork allowed them to fulfill a life purpose got better grades in math and science several months later. In the same set of studies, college students who thought about their purpose were more likely to persist through a tedious set of math problems, even though they were free to play online games at any time during the experiment. The reason these exercises worked, Yeager and Henderson found, is that the students developed a “purpose for learning.” Those who remembered their sources of meaning were able to reframe a tough class—or, in the case of Abelson’s study, a nerve-racking interview—as a necessary step toward accomplishing their purpose and living according to their values rather than as an annoyance to be avoided or feared.

  Keeping meaning in mind also protects us against the damage stress can do. As Stanford’s Kelly McGonigal writes, summarizing a large body of research: “Stress increases the risk of health problems, except when people regularly give back to their communities. Stress increases the risk of dying, except when people have a sense of purpose. Stress increases the risk of depression, except when people see a benefit in their struggles.”

  In his classic work on grief, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner captures the complicated nature of finding meaning in adversity. Writing about his growth after the death of his young son, he explains: “I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of Aaron’s life and death than I would ever have been without it. And I would give up all those gains in a second if I could have my son back. If I could choose, I would forgo all of the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experiences, and be what I was fifteen years ago, an average rabbi, an indifferent counselor, helping some people and unable to help others, and the father of a bright, happy boy. But I cannot choose.”

  As much as we might wish, none of us will be able to go through life without some kind of suffering. That’s why it’s crucial for us to learn to suffer well. Those who manage to grow through adversity do so by leaning on the pillars of meaning—and afterward, those pillars are even stronger in their lives.

  Some go even further. Having witnessed the power of belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence in their own lives, they’re working to bring these wellsprings of meaning into their schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods—and, ultimately, they’re hoping to make a change in our society at large. It is to these cultures of meaning that we now turn.

  The interior of the “Holy Box,” as St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle is sometimes called, is basic and bare. Patches of the once-white walls are dirty and gray where the paint has worn away; the lightbulbs are out in some of the chandeliers. There are no stained-glass scenes from the Bible, no baroque crucifixes at the altar. And on the October morning that I visited the Episcopal church for the Sunday service, it smelled like wet dog. That Sunday happened to be the feast day honoring Saint Francis of Assisi, the medieval monk who loved nature. In his honor, the church encouraged the congregants to bring their pets to the morning service. There were dogs sitting on the pews and pacing around the back of the church—and every few minutes, one of them would let out a series of restless, high-pitched yelps.

  By nighttime, though, the cathedral had transformed into a sanctuary of peace and stillness. The church was completely silent when I entered and took my seat. Except for a few dimly lit lanterns above and some candles flickering on the altar, the space was dark. There was a woman with a service dog sitting nearby, a monk with a rope around his waist, and several families with children. Beyond those of us sitting in the crowded pews were dozens of people gathered on the benches along the walls of the church and some sitting and lying right on the floor. Others had made themselves comfortable beside the pulpit. All of us had gathered to listen in silence to an ancient monastic prayer service called Compline.

  Compline, from the Latin completorium (complete), originated around the fourth century. Made up of psalms, prayers, hymns, and anthems chanted before bedtime, it completes the cycle of fixed-hour prayers that monastics pray each day. Compline is a plea to God for protection from the unknown and unseen terrors of the night—and a plea, too, for peace in the face of death.

  It’s rare to hear Compline outside of monasteries, which is what makes St. Mark’s, and the handful of other churches that offer it regularly, unique. When Compline began at St. Mark’s in 1956, it marked the first time that the service had been chanted for the public in the United States. In its early years, it attracted only a few people, but by the 1960s, word had spread, and hundreds of hippies yearning for a “direct, unmediated experience of the Divine Presence” descended on the church on Sunday nights. Like a mass, Compline follows a specific order, though there are no sermons or priests—just a choir of singers who fill the cathedral with the holy sounds of chant.

  Nearly fifty years after the Summer of Love, the countercultural spirit
was still alive and well at St. Mark’s. Some congregants near the altar had hair dyed in fluorescent colors. Some of them had tattoos and piercings. Many were young—younger than you’d expect to find at an Episcopal church on a Sunday night in a city like Seattle. They brought blankets and cushions—and in a few cases, even sleeping bags—and lay down on the ground, staring straight up at the wood-beamed ceiling, waiting for the service to begin. One goateed man sat with his legs crossed like the Buddha, chin to chest, meditating. A college-aged woman leaned against one of the church’s massive white columns. She pulled her knees into her chest and gazed ahead contemplatively with her arms wrapped around her legs.

  An all-male choir stood in the back corner of the church, hidden from the congregants. One voice broke the silence: “The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end.” A chorus joined him, chanting: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.” Their disembodied voices filled the cathedral. “What is man,” they chanted from Psalm 8, “that you should be mindful of him? the son of man that you should seek him out?” They also sang a mystical anthem composed by the twentieth-century musician Francis Poulenc, using the words of Saint Francis of Assisi: “Lord, I beg you, let the burning and tender power of your love consume my soul and remove from it all that is beneath the heavens. And so I may die through love for your love, as you submitted yourself to die through love for my love.”

  At the end of the service, a great silence descended on the church. Some listeners filed out quietly. Others lingered in their seats. A woman and a man near the altar stood up and hugged before gathering their blankets to go. Some formed small groups outside the church, speaking to each other in hushed voices. The service was only thirty minutes long, but people were visibly different afterward—calmer, softer, gentler.

  Like those who gathered here in the 1960s for Compline, many of the congregants at St. Mark’s today are anti-establishment. There were certainly Christians there, but many were agnostics and atheists, some of them overtly hostile to organized religion. That just makes Compline all the more remarkable. There is something spiritually powerful that happens inside the walls of the church each Sunday night that attracts believers and nonbelievers alike.

  “It transports me out of my own mind,” said Emma, a twenty-year-old college student, on the steps outside of the cathedral. She has been attending Compline semiregularly for several years. “I was raised Jewish, so I don’t agree with the sentiment,” she said, “but there is something about the music that gets you in a holy space. It’s like taking a spiritual shower. It washes away a lot of your smaller concerns. Feeling the presence of a higher power makes you realize how superficial the little problems are.”

  Emma was with two friends, Dylan and Jake. Dylan, a twenty-five-year-old freelancer, had tied his hair back in a ponytail. Like Emma, he was moved by the music. “Music isn’t a community thing like it used to be,” he said. “People have their headphones on all the time. But here, you are in a space with tons of other people listening to the same thing. The voices of the choir are resonating all over—”

  “It’s like the whole church is singing,” Jake interrupted.

  “Yeah. Their voices sound bigger than just normal human voices,” Dylan added. “It reminds you that music goes beyond the self.”

  “It makes your ego feel smaller,” Jake said; “a bit quieter.”

  What happens at St. Mark’s is unique. People in our society are growing increasingly alienated from mystical and transcendent sources of meaning. As awe researchers Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner have written, “Adults spend more and more time working and commuting and less time outdoors and with other people. Camping trips, picnics and midnight skies are forgone in favor of working weekends and late at night. Attendance at arts events—live music, theater, museums and galleries—has dropped over the years.” Even when we do seek out mystery at a church service, in a museum, or in the woods, experiencing transcendence often requires attention, focus, and stillness, qualities that are difficult to cultivate in our distracted age. That became clear one Friday in 2007, when the master violinist Joshua Bell stood in a Washington, DC, Metro station at rush hour to play some of the most difficult and dazzling pieces in all of classical music, from Schubert’s “Ave Maria” to Bach’s “Chaconne.” He had been convinced to do this by a Washington Post journalist who wanted to know if people would stop and make time for beauty on their commute to work, or if they’d merely trudge along as usual. Sure enough, most of the commuters, living their busy lives, did not stop to listen to the music. Over a thousand people rushed by Bell that morning. Only seven stopped to watch him play.

  Compline attracts people seeking refuge from the white noise of daily life. They find meaning by coming together in a community and surrendering themselves to the music, to the silence, to the divine. Compline makes you feel “connected to something greater than—whatever that ultimately means for you,” says Jason Anderson, the director of the Compline Choir.

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  So far, this book has focused on the individual—what each of us can do personally to lead a more meaningful life. But meaning seekers face an uphill battle in our culture. The “work-and-spend” mentality that characterizes life today, as the author Gregg Easterbrook has written, alienates people from what really matters. In neighborhoods and offices, social connections are becoming less and less frequent. The fast pace of modern life, with all of its distractions, makes introspection almost impossible. And in a world where scientific knowledge is supreme, transcendent experiences are looked upon with suspicion.

  These trends have left many people unsatisfied and yearning for something more. Now they’re starting to push back and looking for a deeper way to live. All across the country, medical professionals, business leaders, educators, clergymen, and ordinary people are using the pillars of meaning to transform the institutions in which we live and work, creating communities that value and build connections, celebrate purpose, provide opportunities for storytelling, and leave space for mystery. Their efforts are part of a larger shift in our society toward meaning. As Easterbrook writes, “A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale—involving hundreds of millions of people—and may eventually be recognized as the principal cultural development of our age.”

  Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, directs the World Values Survey, which has tracked people’s values, motivations, and beliefs since 1981. In his research, Inglehart discovered that postindustrial nations such as the United States are in the middle of a major cultural transformation. They are moving from a focus on “materialist” values emphasizing economic and physical security to “post-materialist” values emphasizing self-expression and “a sense of meaning and purpose.” The late Robert William Fogel, who was a Nobel Prize–winning economist at the University of Chicago, detected a similar trend. He wrote that we are in the middle of a “fourth great awakening,” which is defined by an interest in “spiritual” concerns like purpose, knowledge, and community over “material” ones like money and consumer goods.

  Unfortunately, not all of the cultures of meaning that have arisen to fill the existential vacuum are admirable ones. Cultures of meaning can be good or evil depending on their values and aims. Just like positive cultures of meaning, evil ones—like cults and hate groups—use the four pillars to attract individuals who are searching for more. The Islamic State, for example, offers adherents a community of fellow believers, a purpose thought to be divinely sanctioned, an opportunity to play a part in a heroic narrative, and the chance to get as close as possible to God. Many educated Westerners are attracted to its message and have joined its ranks. Others will continue to seek fulfillment within such groups if our society does not offer better alternatives.

  The cultures of meaning highlighted in this book use the four pillars to amplify
positive values and goals. Their members recognize and respect the dignity of each individual. They promote virtues like kindness, compassion, and love rather than fear, hatred, and anger. They seek to lift others up, not to inflict harm on them. Rather than sowing the seeds of destruction and chaos, these cultures contribute positively to the world.

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  Positive cultures of meaning help us all grow, but they may be especially important for adolescents. Many teenagers are unsure of their path in life, which can make them vulnerable to the lure of gangs and other negative influences. Having something to believe in and work toward helps inoculate them against those threats.

  That’s the idea behind The Future Project. Founded by Andrew Mangino and Kanya Balakrishna, the organization has a goal to unlock the “limitless potential of every young person.” Mangino and Balakrishna have put together an all-star team of advisers to advance their mission, including researchers like Stanford’s William Damon, the University of Pennsylvania’s Angela Duckworth, and Stanford’s Carol Dweck. Damon, Duckworth, and Dweck are known for their groundbreaking work on purpose, “grit,” and “growth mindset,” respectively, and Mangino and Balakrishna use their scientific findings to help young people find their purpose and work to achieve it.

  The fruits of their labor all came together on a wintry Saturday morning in 2014, at the Edison Ballroom in Times Square. Nearly seven hundred teenagers were dancing in the glow of baby blue pin lights to the music of Kanye West, Jay Z, and Alicia Keys being spun by a charismatic DJ at the front of the room. The kids were standing on chairs, climbing on stage, and hanging over the balcony above as they moved their bodies in sync with the music, which was blasting from the speakers around the room. Two boys with wild hair did the robot while a girl in a hijab moved her hips like Elvis. The whole place was shaking like a nightclub.