What Makes Life Meaningful: Michael Steger at TEDxCSU

I need to start with a confession. I learned almost everything I know about

life

from the John Cusack movies of the 1980s and in these movies the hero, simply by the sheer force of trying to be a good guy and speak from the heart, wins true love in In the end and to the widespread admiration of everyone, I tried to put this plan of John Cusack into practice and the most important thing came when I met this incredible woman in college and fell madly in love almost instantly and almost instantly when John Cusack and declared my immortality.

I love it, in my case, John Cusack's plan took about four years to work, but you know, John Cusack also teaches us to be persistent, he's not creepy, he's persistent, so he got serious and we quickly moved in together from Minnesota to Oregon about three years later. We're on a beach and manzanita Oregon leaning against a weathered wooden log sitting in the cool dry sand, you know, the Pacific waves had kicked up a mist around us and in my pocket I had this contraption I built out of some shells. I brought it from a road trip to Baja Mexico and used duct tape, glue and the cotton ball I had, don't laugh, this is serious right?

I had created this little chick for this diamond ring that I brought, but I realized that it was going to be a little strange if on a beach I take a shell out of my pocket so I need a cover story and I said I'm going to go to go spelunking and see

what

's going on and then I got up and left and she looked at me like a lot of you are like that it doesn't make sense but I didn't care because I was on a mission so I looked at the contraption and proved it was working.

I had my crib sheet of this passionate speech I wrote and said. I have this. I looked around. I tried to memorize every sensation I was experiencing at that moment. I came back and said, "Hey, honey, look

what

I have and she, oh, that's cute, so I said now look, it opens and closes because that's what." You say when you find a shell, then she picks it up, looks inside and there's the ring, she looks at me. I get down on my knees and launch into about 92% of my prepared remarks and conclude with: Will you marry me and her?

He looks at me and says beep, I don't know, look at me, so this was a surprising answer and I've thought about this moment many times in my

life

since then and I think it's a really interesting answer in a lot of ways because I was asking a pretty big question, I was saying: can you turn your life into our life? and she was asking for the most precious thing that she has and that any of us have that week, the years, the days that have given us life, are our moments. we have an unknowable amount of moments, all we know is that once we spend them we can never get them back and we can never have more and I was calling dibs on all of his moments, that's a serious thing and another thing that was going on. at the same time, first of all, John Cusack, thank you for ruining my life.

Secondly, around the same time, there was a popular t-shirt that had this thing that looks like a spiral galaxy and an arrow that said, you are here and I love it. I love this image because we are. this small speck of dust in the middle of the abyss we are ourselves a small speck of dust we live on a speck of dust in the middle of the oblivion of nothingness and it is actually worse than that, if you think about it, because if you look at images of space only We live on the outer crust of a speck of dust like the shell of a robin's egg that's where life is for us, it's incredibly almost unfathomable and precious and in that life we ​​have all these moments that we've been given and we have to make them Those moments matter, today you will meet many people who reach the edge of oblivion, reach the fragility of existence and yawn and the father may be outside the door of a plane, perhaps in the background. the pure face of a mountain, the jaws of a shark, other people find the fragility of existence in another person's eyes, a hungry child, a bruised woman, a broken veteran, as people find in a damaged landscape and destroyed, but these people go and embrace the fragility of existence and find ways to improve what we all have, what we all share, they are making their moments matter and that's all we can ask, how can we find ways to connect and contribute and consider how to make these moments matter at the same time?

There are people who discard those moments like fast food wrappers out of a car window, littering the landscape with toxic, disposable moments in life, casual cruelty, thoughtless destruction, mindlessly squandering this one thing we have. The contrast between these two groups is a psychological study. of meaning in life and in a sense what psychologists are trying to do with this question is that since you are here, why are you here and that is what we are trying to discover now in the psychological study of meaning, we believe that meaning is at least two things: meaning is purpose and importance, and purpose is need to do.

Psychologist Eric Clinger of the University of Minnesota argued that we did not evolve from passive organisms with roots that can sit still and wait for what we need to arrive, we evolve. of creatures that need to move we must move to find, seek and obtain what we need in life and that involves risks but it also involves doing we cannot simply stop it is in our own being to do I believe that a purpose is an anchor to throw it into the future this aspiration We have this big dream we throw it into the future and it keeps the future alive in us and sometimes when the present is too difficult it serves as an asset, as a source of comfort, we can transcend what is happening now because we know there is a big dream that we are chasing, so in our very being there is the need to do it, but what are we supposed to do?

What kind of purpose are we supposed to pursue? The answer comes from importance, the need to do. sense, raise your hand if you see a camel so there's no camel there obviously it's just a little scribbled thing and if you didn't see a camel initially when I said do you see a camel it turned into a camel someone thinks that looks like an old person with glasses and a cane, it can be that too, it can be almost anything because our brains are created and have developed an incredible ability to combine and recombine and find associations and link and relink and find patterns, maps and meanings in all parts of the world.

The question is not: can we find meaning in life? We cannot not find meaning in our lives. It's happening all the time. It's happening hundreds of times today for you. The question is: can we build powerful meaning by forging a powerful purpose that transforms our lives? life and helps transform the lives of our shared future, that's really what we're trying to understand with meaning and purpose combining it with

meaningful

living, meaning tends to have the kind of intuitive appeal, sounds good right? your choice life with meaning nothing without meaning life without meaning many of us chose the side of meaning well, but we can do better than that.

We've been studying this for over 50 years in psychoecology and we can take a look and say that meaning matters. Yes, it is associated with a whole constellation of incredible and appreciated psychological attributes. People are full of vitality, happiness and energy. They chase the future. They head towards their objectives. They care about others. They are friendly. They are benevolent. They seem to be better equipped to cope. adversity that is inevitable for all of us, but I want to see if I can do a little better than that and ask its meaning and maybe put the seed in your head that maybe meaning is a matter of life and death.

To choose a study here, this is by Patricia Boyle, her colleagues at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, her partner studies like this, they are concerned about longevity among older adults and it is something interesting. I think the way we study longevity is by setting up who dies and who dies first, so on the left side here we have the cumulative risk of dying and you can read those numbers as if they were percentages, so 5% 10% 15 % risk of dying at the bottom we have the number of years in this study, they followed adults for five years and we are concerned about two groups: the first group of people in the top 10% who feel that their lives are rich, abundant and overflowing with meaning, that is the blue group.

The red group are people who score in the lowest 10% for meaning in life. They are telling these older adults that my life has no meaning. My life has no purpose. And what we see when we do this study is that over time one of the truths. of life arises the longer we live, the less life we ​​have left and therefore, even for people who are in the highest 10% of meaning, their risk rate of dying was around 11%, but if we If you look at what happens to people in the bottom 10% of those who are compliant, there is a big gap here, their risk of dying is close to 21 percent over the course of this study and that gap is significant: it translates into a 57 percent lower risk of dying for those whose lives are abundant and full of meaning compared to those whose lives lack meaning, we all now know that many things are associated with longevity and this study is great because it controls for these things as well as depression, disability, neurotic personality traits that tend to approach life in a negative way over time. and above chronic medical conditions and income a 57 percent lower risk of dying for people whose lives are rich and

meaningful

compared to those whose lives lack meaning, so maybe just maybe meaning as a matter of life or death and that is not where the story ends. because well, hey, I'm saying meaning is a great thing that I can't say and then you can't have it, so how can we try to find meaning?

And this has been the question that has really obsessed me for the past few years. and I think there's a situation of good news and bad news, you know, of course, you know, social scientists always have a little bit of this, a little bit of that, we never do the bad news, I can't tell you how to find meaning in your lives, They are going to go out and find their purpose and they are going to forge the meaning that they have in their own lives. There is no response from me or anyone else. The good news is that everyone can do it, anyone can do it and when you take a look at the research, we find emerging patterns and that is what I would like to share with you in the last excerpt of my talk today.

We did a very simple study. We simply gave digital cameras to the university to take pictures of what

makes

your life meaningful come back and tell us what you took a picture of the number one answer was people almost 90 percent of these students explicitly mentioned a form of relationship siblings sisters parents grandchildren colleagues lovers co-workers people relationships are the ocean in which we find meaning is the landscape of meaning, but beyond that we find other interesting and compelling ways to search for meaning in our own lives and I'm going to share with you guys some of these images from the actual studio so this is what one person took a photograph and what he told us about this image is that this image represents the beauty of the world, stopping and taking it all in helps make life meaningful, so we see a 20 year old college student rediscovering thousands of years of wisdom about the secret. of the meaning of life, which is no secret, it is all around us, there are invitations and opportunities to find meaning and achieve meaning around us all the time I grew up in a rural area, so this is not a very unusual image for me but the story behind it is deeper.

I suspected this person says the main focus is a tractor. I chose him because he wanted to show how farming was a big influence on my life. He shows that there are still people who work hard and just put food on the table. and that those are my roots we see this person connecting with family and connecting with heritage and tradition contributing by working hard and finding a way to do something important the way he spends his moments the last photo I will share with you is a That scene is repeated countless times around us in shopping malls and airport restaurants everywhere, but are we missing something?

Are we missing the opportunity to find something profound? Because what this person says is that this is my job at the Lauria Student Center, although I am a janitor. I'm proud to be. This is the first job that won't get me in trouble. I am proud because work pays for my family again. This vital connection. The ability to contribute to other people to weave our future together. And let this person consider ways. in whichThe moments you spend at work are building something powerful and important for yourself, so we come to this question: what

makes

life meaningful and perhaps the most important question we can ask, why are you here, what are you going to do? to do with your life, what makes your existence matter and perhaps the answer that it is a question of life and death may be correct, but perhaps the answer to this great of all questions is very small.

All around us are opportunities to build meaning together through connecting, contributing, and consuming ways to make all of our moments come true. matters and this question is very important to me because if I can bring you back to Manzanita Beach in that moment where I got a little bit of a surprising answer, I think that doesn't happen in John Cusack movies, so you know, John Cusack says. Stay with it, so I didn't run away crying like it was part of my plan at the time, but you know then she asked me questions, she says are you sure?

I mean I built a clam, that's it, to be sure. I said yes, I'm sure and now, many years later, we have two children and this is not a sympathy flight, they are fantastic children, but I am lucky that they are out in this world and I can already see it. There is in them that they want to make a difference, they want the moments to matter and they are no different from the other children in their class and the world they go to has many people like the people who are here, we are doing the same, we are grasping life and spending their moments wisely to make a difference and make things matter, but they are also all those other people littering all of our collective landscapes with these tragically wasted moments, these destructive time bombs of an unconsidered life and the question for me is What if everyone tried to live a meaningful life?

Life is short, it's easy to waste and hard to use it's not easy to say I'm going to live a meaningful life. I'm sure everyone says that from time to time, but my background is in clinical and counseling psychology and we say it to clients all the time. We can't do anything for everyone I can do something for me and you can do something for you, so what if you and I started today to take advantage of what we are given and this opportunity to hear so many great ideas and share so many? Big Ideas What if today you and I tried to live a meaningful life?

The concern I have is what would happen if meaning became just another commodity? What if meaning was something I wanted more of and I wanted the best kind of meaning? Then the meaning becomes like this bottled water. that we have to get from some island in the South Pacific is made of raindrops or something. Is there a better way to do this? What if we change this question a little? What if instead I think there is a big question? Do not misunderstand. What if you and I tried to live a meaningful life? What if you and I tried to give a meaningful life?

What if instead of just harvesting meaning from the life around us? What if we tried to help other people find it too and give it some meaning? that drives us part of the purpose share the energy for purpose in the drive share the sense that the world is worth investing in that there is a great future that we can build together out there we can give it meaning that is the question, I hope You will explore through the rest of the day. Thank you.