Meaning in life
Also known as: Perceived meaningfulness, Presence of meaning
The sense that one's life makes sense, has direction, and matters.
What it means
Meaning in life is a person's sense that their existence makes sense, has direction, and matters. Researchers typically decompose it into three facets: coherence (life feels comprehensible and events fit a story), purpose (valued goals pull one forward), and significance (one's life has inherent value and feels worth living). Mechanistically it is an appraisal assembled from close relationships, valued goals, moral or religious frameworks, and a continuous sense of self, which is why threats to those sources — bereavement, illness, redundancy, reminders of mortality — trigger effortful attempts to restore it. It is measured by self-report and appears in work on well-being, coping, terror management, and job design. Its limits are those of any subjective judgment: it shifts with mood, is sensitive to question wording, and the evidence is mostly correlational. It matters because people knowingly trade money, comfort, and momentary pleasure for it, so accounts of motivation that ignore it mispredict.
Examples
A nurse working brutal shifts rates her life as highly meaningful because the work serves people she cares about, even while rating her day-to-day happiness as low.
A running app that frames each session as progress toward a charity goal borrows purpose from the cause, making an otherwise tedious treadmill hour feel worth repeating.
After retiring, a former engineer feels adrift despite more leisure and money, and regains a sense of purpose only once he starts mentoring apprentices at a local college.
First described in Frankl (1946); Steger et al. (2006).