Book Review: The Power Of Meaning – Emily Esfahani Smith

Review by Steven O’Brien

Emily Esfahani Smith is a journalist and author. Her articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other notable publications. She is an editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution where she advises the Ben Franklin Circles project, a collaboration with the 92nd street Y and Citizen University to build meaning in local communities. She was born in Zurich, Switzerland and grew up in Montreal, Canada. She now lives in Washington DC with her husband Charlie. This is book is a real gem and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Here is my response;

When I closed the last page of this book I had a sense of finding an author who is singing off the same hymn sheet as myself. The truth that I have discovered in my life is that chasing happiness actually makes us unhappy. It is living a meaningful life that brings a sense of happiness and peace. The question that this brilliant book asks is: What makes life worth living? It is a question that we all need to reflect on if we are to uncover meaning in our lives.

As Emily says in the introduction, “for millions both with and without faith, the search for meaning here on earth has become incredibly urgent, yet more elusive”. I lived in an existential vacuum for nearly twenty years before I found meaning. Much like Tolstoy quoted in this book, I eventually found my way out of nihilism by uncovering meaning in it. The meaning I uncovered was this: The meaning of life is discovering that we have already been living a life full of meaning. When we discover this meaning we must take responsibility. The reward of this responsibility is a happier and more meaningful life. The foregoing is has been my live experience and has become my life philosophy.

The research quoted in this book is most interesting and thought provoking. When researchers crunched the numbers, they discovered a striking trend: happiness and unhappiness did not predict suicide. The variable that did, they found, was meaning or more precisely the lack of it. The countries with the lowest rates of meaning, like Japan for example, also had some of the highest suicide rates. It seems that Japanese people are suffering from a crisis of meaningless.

I created this website to help people to live happier and more meaningful lives. In my professional line of work as a firefighter I have attended a lot of harrowing suicides, mostly drownings and hangings. I have often wondered who these despairing people were and what lead them to murder themselves. If meaning is the mother of happiness then it is also the antidote to despair. Meaning is the key to our global suicide epidemic. But what do I mean by meaning? What I mean is that suffering is a path full of meaning and not a pathology as western society promulgates. When we shift from taking ourselves literally to understanding ourselves metaphorically we will uncover meaning where once all we saw were red herrings.

The backbone of this most insightful book is the four pillars of meaning. They are, belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence. As the author says 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. While all of that is very true I would say that we need to belong to ourselves first before we can belong to another.

Self-belonging is the sine-qua-non for a happier and more meaningful life. Otherwise we live totally dependent on the existence of another for our very existence. By self-belonging I don’t mean living your life as if it is a solitary quest. I mean owning everything that arises in you as being about you and for you. When you do that you are independent and can reach out to our tribe without any strings attached. However, we will never thrive until we find a tribe that is conducive to conscious awareness. The truth is that birds of a conscious feather flock together so seek out a tribe that will help you stand on your own two conscious feet.

The second pillar of meaning is purpose. According to a developmental psychologist in Stanford, purpose is the desire to make a difference in the world, to contribute to matters larger than the self. My life experience verifies that. When my youngest son became chronically ill from kidney failure I got involved in raising money for other sick children. Not only did it help me to forget my own worries for a while but also it gave me a sense that I was making a difference in this world. Interestingly, my depression began to lift and my stress levels dropped. As counter-intuitive as it sounds sometimes we need to light up someone else’s cave to light up our own. Living a life of purpose requires self-reflection and self-knowledge. There is an important distinction to be made here. We always know, but we are not always conscious. It is not until we reflect on our lives that knowing will bubble into our conscious awareness in the form of ‘aha’ moments.

The third pillar of meaning is storytelling. There is a line in this chapter that jumped out at me immediately because I have asked the exact same question in my book The Four Home Truths. In the midst of my despair over my son’s life threatening illness, I asked myself: Where is the good in all this? Now here I was reading it again in this book from another person’s perspective. Yet another synchronicity that tells me I am on the right road by telling my story. We all have a storytelling impulse. We need to make sense of this world. We have a primal desire to impose order on a chaotic world. For me, I found meaning in my son’s suffering when I found the answer to the question. The good was all around me from the start. That good was the incredible kindness shown to us by others during an ordeal that nearly burned us out.

The fourth pillar of meaning is transcendence. The paradox of transcendence is that it simultaneously makes individuals feel insignificant and yet connected to something massive and meaningful. The mystical experiences of astronauts are used in this book to convey what a shift in perspective might look like. As one astronaut said  that out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. Many of these astronauts were so profoundly moved by their experiences that they went on to make the world a better place. My transcendental experience was holding my son’s hand after surviving a high risk kidney transplant that saved his life. If my tears blurred my vision that day they also gave me a whole new vision. Adversity helps us to grow in conscious awareness. It scatters the seeds of hope in our harrowed lives by cultivating a new crop of meaning.

This book is up there in my top five. It is such an inspirational read and I would highly recommend it. I feel that the author is a kindred spirit. It has resonated so much with my life experience and my philosophy of opt4happy.com. You see, we humans are meaningful creatures and meaning is the key to a happy life.