Happiness and meaningfulness are both aspects of the good life but are related to different outcomes.

Meaningfulness is associated with helping others, while happiness is linked to taking care of oneself.

The costly life (high in meaningfulness, low in happiness) involves struggle in service of a higher purpose.

To live a costly life is to live courageously, love deeply, serve others, and commit to a worthy cause.

Are you happy? Is your life meaningful? Most of us intuitively sense that those are not quite the same question. A person can feel happy, yet adrift, or deeply purposeful, while carrying grief. In this post, I explore the difference between happiness and meaningfulness and what happens when the two pull apart.

Happiness is relatively easy to understand. Happy people tend to experience more pleasant emotions than unpleasant ones and generally feel satisfied with their lives.

Meaningfulness, however, speaks to something deeper. Psychologists George Login and Crystal Park define meaning in life as the extent to which life feels coherent, purposeful, and significant. A meaningful life is one in which you feel that your existence matters.

Both happiness and meaningfulness are dimensions of the good life, so it is not surprising that they are strongly correlated with each other. But how are they different?

Disentangling Happiness From Meaningfulness

One of my favorite psychology studies examined this very question. Researchers Roy Baumeister and his colleagues surveyed a national sample of U.S. adults about how happy and meaningful they perceived their lives to be. They also gathered information about participants’ habits, relationships, emotional experiences, and priorities. They then tested the correlations between both happiness and meaningfulness and these other outcomes, adjusting for the others.

Their findings were fascinating.

Participants who described their lives as easy, healthy, and........

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