Other Peoples' Perspectives on Meaningful Life

What makes a life meaningful? What are the most meaningful aspects of our lives? Do we find our own lives meaningful? I posed these and other questions, all related to the big question, "How should we live?", to numerous people I know, people in the street, and during classes. To make sense of all the different answers I constructed categories for them. The distinction I found most thought-provoking was the one between individualist & collectivist responses. Collectivist responses centered on relationships, structures, and groups. Individualist answers focused more on a single person’s achievements, hopes, and processes.

The most popular collectivist answer was that the family is the most meaningful aspect of our lives. This was probably the majority answer in the people I spoke with. Is this as self-evident as it seems to most people? What is it about families that makes them such centers of meaning in our lives? When I asked a black middle-school student to elaborate on his immediate answer of “family” he said that, “They are there for you when you need them and take care of you” and “They love me.” I asked him if the important aspect was that they loved him, or that he loved them and he said, “Both.”

This sense that a life's meaning emanates from loving bidirectional relationships - from relationships characterized by trust and mutual support - was dominant. But support for what? Love based on what grounds? It seems that most of the people I spoke to are living in a role based game - a kind of Dickens world - where all the actions we take outside the family have their ultimate purpose in just kind of hanging out at home together. You are supposed to love the people you hang out at home with and support them through various struggles and expect the same from them. Love doesn't have to be earned and mutual support is assumed. Family is a kind of warm & cuddly nest and a refuge from the cold and pokey world outside.

But is this really the most meaningful aspects of our lives? When I asked a gringo middle-school student to describe why family mattered most to him he also spoke of love and support. But when I asked if, after high school, he would be leaving the family nest and moving away to go to college he unhesitatingly said, "Yes." I tried to sharpen the contradiction, "If your family is the most meaningful aspect of your life why would you ever leave it?" But he didn't seem to see one - in our culture these days we center our emotional lives around our birth family as children and then abandon the birth family for career and individual "success" and then create a new family as adults. We try (often unsuccessfully) to merge the childhood families and adult families rarely - at Thanksgiving Day dinners or Christmas gatherings.