Much of that has since been dismantled without a clear replacement, leaving us to reckon with the social and economic costs. This matters because relationships are not optional—they are foundational to how humans thrive.

It’s also something that virtually all Americans agree is of top importance. We feel better when we are connected, supported, and part of something larger than ourselves. Yet across the country, people are feeling more isolated than ever. Nearly one in three Americans say they feel lonely every week, and trust in neighbors, coworkers, and institutions has fallen to record lows.

New data from the US Chamber of Connection’s Six Points of Connection 2026 report paints an even clearer picture. More than half of Americans report patterns associated with higher vulnerability to loneliness and disconnection. Only 42 percent say they have a neighbor they could count on in an emergency. Twenty-seven percent lack reliable social support, and 45 percent say they do not trust others.

This is not because people no longer care about connection. Most people want more of it. They just do not know where to start, or they do not want to start alone.

At the same time, volunteering, one of the most enduring ways people have built trust and solidarity, is also underused. While more than 90 percent of Americans say they want to volunteer, only about one in four actually do, often due to a lack of free time and inflexible volunteering schedules.

The gap is not just about time. It is about how we design opportunities for people to come together.

Many volunteer activities focus on essential tasks, like serving food, supporting events, tutoring, or helping with logistics. These efforts make a real difference. But they are not always set up to help people connect with one another in meaningful ways. The human moments that turn service into belonging often depend on chance.

The good news is that when service is designed with connection in mind, volunteering becomes one of the most powerful tools we have for strengthening well-being, trust, and resilience.

The habits that help connection take root

Connection isn’t just a feeling. It’s something we build through everyday habits, not one-off moments.

Drawing from decades of research across psychology, public health, and sociology, the Six Points of Connection identify six ordinary, place-based behaviors that play a foundational role in helping individuals and communities thrive:

• Neighborhood contact: knowing and interacting with the people around you;
• Community of identity: belonging to a group shaped by shared experience or values;
• One-on-one relationships: nurturing close friendships over time;
• Third places: spending time in social spaces outside home and work;
• Community of play: gathering around shared activities that bring joy;
• Community service: showing up for others and the broader community.

These aren’t personality traits or special skills. They’re habits that anyone can practice.

Yet participation in many of these habits is surprisingly low. Fewer than half of Americans report regular neighborhood contact. Only about a quarter regularly spend time in third places or engage in community service. These gaps help explain why so many people feel disconnected and unsure how to rebuild a sense of belonging.

At a recent national convening hosted by the US Chamber of Connection, leaders from business, government, academia, and community organizations came together around a shared focus: community service. They explored how volunteering, when thoughtfully designed, can help people reconnect not just to causes, but to one another.

A shared insight emerged. Volunteering may be one of the most scalable ways we have to rebuild the muscle of social connection, if we design it for relationships as one of the core outcomes.

Designing volunteering for connection

Research shows that close relationships grow through three key ingredients: consistency, positivity, and vulnerability. Volunteering can naturally create all three, but only when experiences make space for them.

In many traditional settings, people volunteer side by side without ever really meeting. They complete tasks efficiently, then go their separate ways.

Connection-centered volunteering brings the human moments to the foreground. This might include:

• Working in small groups where conversation can unfold;
• Partnering people rather than assigning solo tasks;
• Sharing a meal or taking a few minutes to reflect together;
• Mixing people across roles, ages, or backgrounds;
• Inviting brief storytelling, such as why someone chose to show up;
• Creating opportunities for reciprocity, where everyone both gives and receives.

These choices do not change what people are doing. They change how it feels to do it together. When connection is intentional, service becomes something people return to, not just something they check off.

Connection as a cause

Many of today’s challenges, from loneliness and burnout to polarization and declining trust, share a common root. They are shaped by how disconnected many people feel in everyday life.

This is where the idea of “connection as a cause” comes in. It means treating social connection not as something that happens by accident, but as something we can intentionally build and sustain. For too long, connection has been essential but invisible, assumed rather than supported. Recognizing connection as a cause means valuing and reinforcing the everyday actions and social structures that help people feel welcome, known, and part of a community.

In practice, this is often informal and looks familiar:

• Checking in on a neighbor;
• Hosting a small gathering or shared meal;
• Starting a walking group or social club;
• Helping someone new find their footing;
• Showing up consistently in a park, library, or community space.

One example of this type of community service is the Welcome Committee, a growing national volunteer effort organized by the US Chamber of Connection. It modernizes earlier forms of civic service by training volunteers on the frontlines of their local communities to help people feel known and included in their neighborhoods through simple, regular, and intentional acts of connection.

These acts have always been foundational to community life. What has changed is the time people once spent doing this. Over the last few decades, that everyday civic labor has quietly dissolved, and now needs to be revived.

There is a growing opportunity to re-activate volunteers across the country to rebuild the muscle of social connection and welcome people back into community. Not to create something new but to restore what once held communities together and design it for the world we live in now.

Measuring connection

For a long time, volunteering has been measured by hours served or tasks completed. Those metrics matter, but they miss something essential: whether people felt more connected when they left than when they arrived.

Measuring connection does not take humanity out of service. It helps bring it into focus. It helps people choose experiences that meet their social needs, and it helps organizations notice and support what truly builds trust and belonging.

It also broadens what counts as service. Acts like block parties, walking groups, community meals, and social clubs can be formally recognized and encouraged. When trust deepens or people bridge across difference, connection itself becomes the service.

Tools like the Social Connection Index help make this visible. They give communities a shared way to understand how people are connecting and where support is needed, without turning relationships into something mechanical.

Why this matters for well-being

Building everyday connection isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s one of the strongest predictors of longevity, happiness, mental and physical health, and resilience during stress.

Volunteering sits at the intersection of purpose, empathy, and shared effort. Research consistently shows that people who volunteer experience higher life satisfaction, lower loneliness, and stronger social ties.

In places like New York City, volunteers who served together across differences reported higher levels of trust and empathy toward people with different life experiences. When service becomes a regular practice rather than a one-time event, it helps communities weather challenges and recover together.

Most people want more connection. They just do not know where to start, or they do not want to start alone. You might begin by looking for community service opportunities that invite interaction, making it a small but regular part of your routine, or showing up with someone you want to grow closer to. Or you might gather people around a shared interest, share a meal and conversation, or spend meaningful time with an older neighbor.

What matters is not doing it perfectly. What matters is showing up, together.

“We are living through a social health crisis, a profound breakdown of the relationships that once protected us,” writes journalist Jennifer Breheny Wallace in her new book, Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose. She continues:

We’ve lost track of our most basic human needs for connection and contribution. Now we often feel tempted to fill that void with counterfeit forms of mattering—chasing attention over connection, prestige over purpose, and money over meaning. The rise in loneliness, burnout, and anxiety is the predictable consequence of a society that has forgotten how to make people feel valued.

I spoke with Jennifer about the research on mattering, her book’s conclusions, and tactics for increasing our sense of mattering. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Katherine Reynolds Lewis: Let’s start with the big question: What is mattering, and why is it so crucial right now?

Jennifer Breheny Wallace: Mattering is a universal human need that all of us have to feel valued for who we are deep inside, and to have an opportunity to add value to the world around us, to our families, friends, colleagues, and communities. That is a need that is going unmet today in too many people.

Young people feel a sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness in their lives. Retirees who once felt depended on no longer feel relied on anymore in any meaningful way; they feel adrift.

When people don’t feel like they matter, when they don’t feel valued or know how they add value, they can turn against themselves: become anxious, depressed, turn to substances to try to alleviate the pain, or lash out in anger. We’re seeing that, I think, in a lot of the political discourse today, road rage, and people who go online and attack people.

What is great about mattering is that it’s actionable. There are steps we can take in our everyday lives to build back that sense of mattering and thrive.

As a society, we are confronted with too much input every day, and too much output being demanded of us. In order for us to get through our days, we’re often just going on autopilot.

KRL: In the book, you talk about how some people matter too much, but find it draining rather than sustaining. Can you explain?

JBW: This is caregivers, teachers, and people on the front lines that our society relies on too much. While being relied on in this way can feel meaningful and give purpose to our lives, when we feel like we’re never prioritized, that’s when we burn out. There are a few ways we can start to prioritize ourselves again.

The first step is learning how to matter to ourselves, learning how to prioritize ourselves every day–not when the to-do list is done, not when everybody else’s needs have been met. I’m not saying this is easy, but it is a practice that I have adopted now over the last two years.

When I wake up in the morning and I’m brushing my teeth, I say to myself, what is one small need that I must fill today for myself so that I can show up as my best self? For me, it’s often waking up early before everybody else is up to enjoy my cup of coffee, to think, to read, to do things that are not fitting into other people’s agendas.

All the self-care in the world will not give us the resilience that deep, nourishing relationships will give us. The second step to mattering to yourself and not mattering too much, is to find people in your life–one, two, three people–who know you, who you can rely on and open up to and who will remind you of your mattering.

Especially in those moments when you’re questioning, when you’re going through a rough transition, or life feels hard, it’s leaning on those friendships that will restore your sense of mattering.

Often the burden of mattering too much comes when we don’t feel like we can ask for help. When I don’t ask for help, not only do I deny myself the support I need and deserve, I also deny my friend the chance of being a helper, of knowing I rely on her for her wisdom, letting her know how much she matters to me, how valued she is and how much value she adds. So, instead of thinking about asking for help as a sign of weakness, look at it as a sign of strength. It is an act of generosity to give that sense of mattering to someone else.

In conversation for this book, I heard over and over again from people that they had friends, but their relationships, their friendships, had hollowed out because of so many demands on them through work, through parenting.

There’s research out of the Mayo Clinic that’s since been replicated about how to build these types of nourishing relationships. We don’t need hours of together time. We don’t need mom’s night out four nights a week. What we need is to find people in our life that we can be vulnerable with and who will be vulnerable, so it’s reciprocal, and to prioritize those relationships at least for one hour a week, which is completely doable.

Figure out a way to build that sort of network of support for yourself. One thing that’s been really helpful for me, about a year and a half ago, two women that I was friendly with, but not super close to started a club for very busy professional women aiming to read one article a month. So once a month, we carve out this time, we sit in each other’s kitchens. What’s amazing about it is that I didn’t even know these people. But we created this kind of scaffolding for deeper friendship.

KRL: How would you encourage people, if they’re the one in their social group who wants to do it, to not feel discouraged by the last-minute cancelations, or other folks who are not used to that way of being together?

JBW: Coming out of COVID, we have normalized staying home. We’ve normalized canceling on people at the last minute, so my number-one personal policy is: I don’t cancel plans unless I’m sick. That one simple rule has made me the trusted friend, the one that people know they can depend on.

If you are inviting and people are not coming, invite other people. Don’t be discouraged. Invitations are a bridge between the life you want and the life you’re currently living.

It takes a little bit of social courage. But be that person.

KRL: Can you talk about how to manage through transitions?

JBW: Transitions can really shake our sense of mattering, because the roles that we once relied on to feel valued and add value shift, whether it’s facing an empty nest, or retiring, or relocating.

The first step for anybody going through a life transition is just to know you’re not alone. It’s not personal. We all go through these painful life transitions.

Look for people who’ve done something similar. Look for role models. Invite them to coffee. Let them know their story, their hard-earned experience matters. If you don’t have people in your life that you could turn to, look for podcasts, look for nonfiction books, articles about how other people have navigated hard transitions.

I just want to tell people, if you are going through a hard time, you have agency. Look for those role models, accept or issue invitations, remind other people in your life why they matter.

Our sense of mattering is not like a trophy we collect and put on our bookshelves. It’s something that’s always in transition.

Something I strive to do is to imagine everyone I meet–strangers, friends, family–wearing an invisible sign that says, “Tell me, do I matter?” We can answer that longing, that deep longing, with a smile, with warmth, with recognizing people, with connecting them to the positive impact they’ve had in our life or in the world around them.

KRL: Can you talk about mattering at work?

JBW: You look at the data, and 70% of employees report feeling disengaged at work. Disengagement is not laziness. Disengagement is a protective coping strategy. When you feel like you don’t matter and it’s painful, you disengage to stop that pain.

We could change the framework in our workplaces in small ways: greeting people in the hallway instead of being down on your phone and ignoring them, appreciating a colleague for staying late to help you on a project. Relying on each other, closing the loop, connecting people with their impact.

Many employees feel invisible. With AI now coming, people feel threatened that they are going to be replaced. It doesn’t take much to let employees know they matter, and even the least human-centered companies are financially incentivized to make employees feel like they matter, because that is the driver of engagement. And engagement is the driver of creativity, productivity, and profit.

KRL: I’d also love to hear about the decline of third spaces, why they’re so important, and ways to just have pop-up third spaces, or create them ourselves.

JBW: The first place is the home, the second place is the office, the third place is where you find yourself, where you can get a sense of belonging in your life, where you’re known, but you’re not as deeply known as you are in those other two domains. Third spaces have really dwindled.

One woman for years went to this exercise class where people would congregate before and after, and they would connect. But the owners of this exercise group wanted to make more money, so they said to people, you cannot congregate. You have to walk in and walk out. And so she stopped going, because this place that was a mattering space became very transactional.

When he retired, my dad found it in small ways, like going to the same restaurant once a week for lunch for a burrito. It was a casual restaurant. He got to know the employees so well that when he stopped going for a period of time, because my grandmother was dying, he went back, and they greeted him with a sympathy card, because they missed him. He mattered to that space. So, we can do that for each other. We can get to know the barista. We can get to know the person in the supermarket. We can create these small moments that remind us that we are a significant part of the world around us.

KRL: Can you talk about the tension between needing to see your impact and being valued with just being enough as you are?

JBW: There’s a great Jesuit motto: Not better than others, but better for others. I’m not anti-achievement. I like success. I like to feel like I’m making an impact, but it’s not just for me. It is because I want to impact the world around me. I want to do this research that impacts my life, but also that I can share it with others. If we keep that idea front and center in our minds, that we succeed, we achieve, not to be better than others, but to be better for others, that is how we keep that North Star of mattering in healthy ways.

If somebody is feeling like they don’t matter, I want them to know that they are just one action, one decision away from mattering again. That is reminding the people around them why they matter. And if you don’t have anyone close to you, remind the stranger, the cashier, the barista who always remembers your order. That is the fastest way to feel like you matter again.

Other times, they take a little more practice and work. That’s the case with many of this year’s top scientific insights, which deal with big topics like forgiveness, trust, morality, meaning, and purpose. While we probably can’t cultivate these overnight, they are no less important to living a good and happy life—and especially important for thriving societies. 

The final insights were selected by experts on our staff, after soliciting nominations from our network of nearly 400 researchers. We hope they help you consider what you’d like to invite into your life and your community as we head into 2026.

1. Feeling hopeful—even more so than just feeling good—may bring us a sense of meaning

Some of us may struggle to find a sense of meaning in life, especially when times are tough. But according to a new set of studies published this year in the journal Emotion, one important pathway to a meaningful life is by cultivating hope. 

Over the course of a college semester, students who felt more hopeful at one moment in time reported higher levels of meaning later in the semester. The researchers found unique effects for hope—general positive emotions didn’t have the same effect. In other words, among all the good feelings we can have, hope may play a particularly important role in a meaningful life.

Moreover, just feeling hopeful—even if we don’t necessarily think it’s realistic—seems to be beneficial. In one survey, the emotion of hope had a stronger link to meaning than did people’s beliefs about whether they could attain a good outcome.

In another study, researchers asked some participants to read an optimistic news story, while other participants read a pessimistic story. Those who read the optimistic article tended to report feeling more hope, and, in turn, readers who felt more hopeful reported a greater overall sense of meaning in life. This tells us that our feelings of hope and meaning can shift moment to moment, and they are influenced by the things we encounter in daily life.

When we’re facing tough times, taking time to cultivate hope—for example, by seeking out positive news or reminding ourselves that tough circumstances can improve—can help us to see the world around us as more meaningful.

2. A strong sense of right and wrong makes for a happier, more meaningful life

Does striving to be a good person feel good? Or does making ethical choices entail a certain amount of self-sacrifice?

Philosophical debates about the relationship between morality and happiness are longstanding, but this year a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology weighed in with evidence that doing good and feeling good go hand in hand.

Across three different studies, researchers asked groups of adults, from undergraduate students in the U.S. to engineers in China, about how happy they were, including how often they felt positive and negative emotions, and how satisfied they were with life. The researchers also asked how much they had a sense of meaning and purpose. Finally, participants nominated people they knew (like friends, partners, family members, teachers, and coworkers) who could weigh in on how moral the participants were. While there are many ways to think about morality, for the purpose of this paper it included traits like being compassionate, respectful, fair, loyal, dependable, and honest.

The result? In general, they found, people who were seen as more moral by family and friends themselves reported being happier and having a greater sense of meaning in life. 

Why would being moral make us happier? “Highly moral individuals might be happier in part because they have better relationships with other people,” the researchers found in some initial analyses. But because these are correlational studies, it could also be that being happy promotes more upstanding behavior. What’s clear, at least, is that being moral and being happy don’t seem to be in conflict.

In other words, treating people well doesn’t have to come at your own expense—which is perhaps more evidence that everyone’s well-being is interconnected.

3. Your well-being influences your mitochondrial health

Centuries of thought have been dedicated to the mind-body connection: the idea that mental states like contentment or distress directly influence the body in ways that shape physical health.

In a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, researchers identify one new pathway through which this may be occurring: our mitochondria.

Mitochondria, the tiny organelles in our cells that convert energy from nutrients in the blood into currency that the body can use, are sensitive to what is going on in our mental lives. They ramp up production to strengthen defense to threats; they trigger inflammatory responses to help the body fight off pathogens. Subjected to intense or long-term stress, they weaken and toss DNA debris into the bloodstream.

In the paper, the researchers highlight evidence that our psychological and social experiences affect our mitochondria in important ways. For example, they share the finding that people with a greater sense of purpose and more social support in life have higher levels of mitochondrial proteins in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, a region that supports paying attention as well as reinterpreting and expressing emotions in agile and constructive ways. Other research finds that factors like how big our social networks are, our social activity later in life, personal growth, and self-acceptance may make a difference to our mitochondrial health, too.

Currently, we tend to evaluate and treat mental and physical health independently, as separate conditions, rather than considering them as integrated or interdependent. While it may seem obvious that how we think and feel would impact how our bodies work, there is still some mystery around exactly how mental and social factors translate into physical processes that affect health. Looking more closely at mitochondrial function could help us better understand the mind-body connection and come up with better practices to support holistic well-being.

4. Just about every activity is more enjoyable in the company of others

Students use body doubling (online or in-person) to power through final exam studying. Reading and knitting groups congregate in coffee shops and on porches to engage in hobbies together—often in silence. Why this impulse to be together?

A study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that almost anything we do is more enjoyable with other people. Researchers at the University of British Columbia looked at surveys from 41,094 participants over four years, who rated 105,766 activities they engaged in. These fell into more than 80 categories of daily activities, from eating to yard work to crafting. For every single activity, participants consistently rated it as more enjoyable when engaged in alongside another person.

“Whether we are eating, reading, or even cleaning up around the house, happiness thrives in the company of others,” the authors conclude.

Not only does happiness thrive in the company of others, but another study this year suggests that happiness experienced together may be even better for our health than happiness experienced alone.

A study led by researchers at the University of California, Davis, analyzed interactions between couples in Germany and Canada (642 people total, all 56 to 89 years old). Multiple times a day, participants rated their mood, froze a sample of their saliva to be tested for cortisol, and noted whether they were with their partner.

The results were striking. Couples who experienced emotional resonance, meaning they were together and experiencing higher than usual connection, also measured lower cortisol levels as compared with their personal norm for that time of day—and lower than when they experienced positive emotions by themselves. Persistent high levels of cortisol can cause high blood pressure, high blood sugar, weakened immunity, and other harms to our health.

“Sharing in positive emotions with your relationship partner is really meaningful,” says the lead author of the study, Tomiko Yoneda of the University of California, Davis. “Even those small moments of joy or social connection can have a supportive effect on your physiology and, basically, support better health as we age.”

5. When you forgive, your memories don’t fade, but your misery does

When we’ve been wronged, it can be hard to forgive. Perhaps we worry that forgiveness means forgetting what happened to us, letting other people off the hook somehow.

But a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that this isn’t the way forgiveness works. Rather than helping us forget, forgiveness seems to keep our memories intact while lessening the suffering we feel recalling them.

In the study, participants recalled and wrote about a time when they were harmed by another person, noting how severe the transgression was and whether or not they’d forgiven the person. Then, they filled out questionnaires on the specifics of the harm (such as where it took place, how vivid it was in their minds, and sensory details) and its emotional characteristics (such as the intensity of the feelings they had at the time and how they felt now recalling the event).

By running analyses, the researchers found that people who had forgiven recalled just as much detail as those who hadn’t, but also felt less emotionally burdened thinking about the event. This implies that forgiveness does not equal forgetting.

“One possibility is to think that when we forgive, we change our judgment of what happened during the wrongdoing. But I think that’s just wrong,” says De Brigard, one of the study coauthors. “We still consider the people that wronged us as being culpable and morally responsible for what happened to us.”

This suggests that forgiving someone can protect our well-being without impacting our pursuit of justice or amends for the harm we’ve suffered.

6. Trusting in other people and institutions can improve our well-being across our lives

Trust is paramount to a functioning society, where we depend on each other to make things work. Yet a recent Pew Research Center poll suggests social trust may be eroding in many places.

A new paper published in Psychological Bulletin shows us how problematic this is. In an analysis of over 500 studies involving over 2.5 million participants around the world, researchers found that people who tended to trust others more at any level (i.e., within their relationships, institutions, or government) were happier and more satisfied with life than those who trusted less—and experiencing greater well-being fostered more trust down the road, too.

This suggests that fostering greater trust would be a worthy goal for bettering our lives. But how to do that? One simple way might be to realize that our distrust of others is sometimes misguided, as another 2025 study published in Nature Human Behaviour found.

In the study, students living in some freshman dorms saw a series of posters providing accurate messages about their classmates’ willingness to engage in positive social behavior (e.g., “95% of undergraduate students are likely to help others who are feeling down”). These students also attended a one-hour freshman workshop where, in addition to the regular curriculum, they were educated about their peers’ empathy and social goals. Some dorms had the campaign posters and added lessons, while others didn’t.

All first-year dorm residents took surveys later in the semester, reporting on how empathic their peers seemed, how much they themselves took social risks, and how much time they spent socializing. Those whose misconceptions had been corrected estimated their peers’ empathy levels more accurately and were more likely to take risks and socialize—a sign of social trust.

This finding tracks well with past studies finding that correcting wrong assumptions can improve trust and social interactions. For example, research has found that people generally share a desire to protect democracy, are more ethical, and want to connect across difference more than we think, and correcting those misperceptions has positive consequences. Perhaps, understanding that people are more trustworthy than we give them credit for might help build bridges between people, making us all better off.

7. Where purpose comes from and how it benefits us may be similar across cultures

Research finds that people with a sense of purpose in life tend to enjoy greater health, happiness, and economic success, among other benefits. Yet much research on purpose has been conducted in Western cultures using general surveys of purpose, making it unclear if cultural influences affect these claims.

But a study published this year in The Journal of Positive Psychology offers new insights, suggesting that people prioritize similar sources of purpose across very different cultural backgrounds, and benefit in much the same way from having a sense of purpose.

In the study, over 1,000 people from Japan, India, Poland, and the United States reported how happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich their lives were—all aspects of “the good life.” They also rated how 16 different sources of purpose guided their behavior and decision making, considering both self-focused sources of purpose (like health, wealth, and inner peace) and more outward-focused sources of purpose (like caring for family, having a positive impact, and serving your country and community).

In analyses, researchers found that happiness, self-sufficiency, and family were in the top five sources of purpose for each country, while religion and recognition were in the bottom five. There was also large agreement on which sources of purpose went along with elements of “the good life.” For example, people who said their purpose came from mattering were the most likely to have a more meaningful life, while people pursuing inner peace, positive impact, and physical health felt happier. Those pursuing service to others had the strongest sense of psychological richness (a form of well-being involving diverse, challenging, and interesting activities that evoke complex emotions and change your perspective).

While there were variations, too, the most striking parts of the study were the unexpected similarities.

“What stands out from our finding is just how much agreement there was within these four quite different countries about what kinds of purposes are associated with a good life,” says coauthor Stephen Heine. “Though the goal of our paper was to highlight many sources of purpose, our take-home message is that having any kind of purpose is key to having a good life.”

8. Children as young as five prefer adults who express doubt to those who are overly confident

Intellectual humility involves recognizing the limits of our own knowledge and staying open to changing our minds in light of new information. It helps us get along better with others and bridge differences, making it a virtue worth cultivating in our children.

While it may seem like intellectual humility is beyond the understanding of young children, a study published this year in Developmental Psychology found that even five and a half years olds already recognize the value of humility and prefer humbler adults to more arrogant adults.

In the study, 111 children were presented with an ambiguous object (e.g., something that could be a sponge or a rock) or an ambiguous word (e.g., “bat,” which could be an animal or sports equipment). Then, they watched two adults identify the object or word and express doubt (or not) about it.

Each adult presented themselves as amiable and initially identified the object or word in the same way. But the humbler person modeled more uncertainty, saying their identification could be wrong, while the more arrogant person said they were sure they were right.

Afterward, the children rated who they thought was smarter and nicer, and whom they liked more and would rather learn from. In analyses, the researchers found that children five and a half years and older, no matter their gender, preferred humbler people to arrogant people in every way, with that preference growing stronger with every additional year of age.

This suggests that young children recognize the benefits of humility and that adults can model uncertainty for children. Learning it’s OK to admit you don’t know something could help children in their future relationships, including across group differences.

“There is power in saying, ‘I’m not entirely sure and my knowledge is fallible and so is yours; maybe we can come together and talk,’” says coauthor Shauna Bowes of Vanderbilt University. “I think the earlier in life kids learn to do this, the better.”

9. People are forming relationships with robots—whether we like the trend or not

Artificial intelligence has invaded almost every aspect of human life, from media creation to food systems to transportation. Personal relationships are no exception.

AI companies such as Xiaoice and Replika explicitly market their chatbots as companions, boyfriends, and girlfriends. That label rings true for tens of millions of users who are developing bonds with these robots, whose algorithms are built to validate our feelings and respond to our bids for attention instantly.

About 20% of high school students have formed a romantic relationship with a chatbot, or know someone who has, according to a survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology. Among U.S. adults, about the same percentage have chatted with an AI simulating a romantic partner, with usage higher among young adults aged 18 to 30, about 31% of men and 23% of women, according to a study by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University.

Users describe daily lives intertwined with AI romantic partners, from watching television together to relying on them for nonjudgmental emotional support, according to a systematic review in Computers in Human Behavior Reports that examined 23 studies on romantic AI. While these interactions can foster self-reflection and personal growth, they also raise dangers such as emotional manipulation and erosion of real-life, human relationships.

An article in Perspectives on Psychological Science assessed the degree to which AI chatbot relationships mimic the functions of human relationships, and explored the risks. The authors, psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, concluded that humans and their chatbot partners can influence each other, generate feelings of closeness, and facilitate growth.

However, they identified areas of concern, including the risk of chatbots responding inappropriately in moments of crisis, normalizing problematic behavior, and creating dependency.

“Because chatbots make only superficial requests of their users, relationships with them cannot provide the benefits of negotiating with and sacrificing for a partner and may reinforce undesirable behaviors,” they wrote.

These developments “expose gaps in human connection and show how intimacy can be shaped by technology,” Sahar Habib Ghazi writes in Greater Good. “Understanding AI love may help us better understand ourselves, and the human bonds we continue to seek.”

10. If we put a country’s wealth aside, we can see what other factors bolster happiness

Every year, the World Happiness Report ignites conversations about which countries are thriving and which ones seem to be struggling—and why that might be. While in general wealthier countries tend to be happier, some nations do far better than their economic resources would predict, while others underperform despite relative affluence.

In a paper published in May by the European Journal of Social Psychology, psychologist Mohsen Joshanloo took the conversation to a new level with an idea called wealth-adjusted life satisfaction (WALS). Instead of asking simply “how happy is this country?,” WALS asks “how happy given its wealth?” By statistically isolating the portion of life satisfaction explained by a country’s GDP per capita, this measure reveals how effective each society seems to be in converting material resources into well-being.

The results are revealing. Countries like Nicaragua, Nepal, and Kyrgyzstan far outperform expectations, reporting levels of life satisfaction that rival or exceed those of much wealthier nations. Conversely, places such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Bahrain score lower than their GDP might suggest, indicating that wealth alone isn’t enough.

What distinguishes the happiness “over-achievers”? The study highlights several non-economic forces that seem to matter: job quality and meaningful work, a sense of autonomy and freedom, social connections and community engagement, and everyday enjoyment. These factors help explain why some societies—despite material limitations—are still able to sustain high levels of life satisfaction.

This study suggests that instead of focusing narrowly on economic growth as a key to human flourishing, governments and corporations might make targeted investments in community, meaningful work, personal freedom, and livable, lively cities and towns.

As Joshanloo concludes in a Greater Good essay, “Ultimately, building societies that prioritize the wise use of resources for human well-being may be the clearest path toward a more hopeful and humane future.”

Alas, no. Or at least, not all of them are very insightful about human goodness or adept at conveying how we become better. We’re sure most readers are familiar with the hits, especially the recent ones. Some of them are pretty great; others, not so much.

Here, we’d like to turn the spotlight on classics you may have forgotten, movies from outside the United States, a couple of controversial ones, and recent movies that we think are worth your time. These are movies that tackle some of the tough stuff behind the holidays, and they do it, in the estimation of our writers, with intelligence and wit.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Every Christmas for several years, I’ve seen people complaining about one of my favorite movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, which is about a small-town banker named George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart, who had just returned from flying combat missions during World War II). At the start of the movie, George is contemplating suicide—until an angel helps him to see his life in a new way.

The critics suggest that this story sends horrible messages: Sacrifice your dreams, don’t try; live small, eat dirt, and then smile and say it was caviar. In my opinion, however, It’s a Wonderful Life is about a man who gets few of the things he WANTED, but everything he actually NEEDED.

Oh, George had dreams of traveling and building great buildings and bridges, having adventures and seeing the world, getting out of Bedford Falls. And if those were the most important things to him, his life would indeed be a failure.

George has his “dark night of the soul” when someone he trusts makes a terrible error, and his nemesis Old Man Potter (Lionel Barrymore) finally crosses the line between “amoral” and “immoral.” Potter sacrifices his soul for petty revenge, and George is tested.

In stories like this one—tales of faith and miracles—it is reasonable to expect an appropriately symbolic divine intervention. An angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) magically reveals an alternate world without George, and George, being George, is ripped from his self-pity into an awareness that he had made his choices, is proud of them, and cannot be destroyed by Potter’s evil.

This is what George discovers, with the angel’s help: Our WANTS are transitory and often trivial, but our NEEDS are far deeper and more critical. It’s a Wonderful Life is about how one man learns to differentiate between his wants and needs.

And what is his need? That’s spelled out in one of the very first scenes: to be a man like his father, whom he admired above all others. A man of integrity, intelligence, and charismatic strength, the only force capable of standing against Old Man Potter, who symbolizes amoral wealth and power.

And against the siren song of ego, George stands strong. At every turn, every time he’s tempted and has a chance to “escape,” his real values emerge. Nobody and nothing “forced” George to stay in the town where he grew up and make sacrifices for those around him. He chose. He decided. And it HURT, like life sometimes hurts. For him, it simply would have hurt more to do otherwise. By his own values, stated in almost every scene, George really is “the richest man in town.” 

His ego hadn’t run his game; his true self had—his higher self. This, to me, is why this movie endures. George gets what he needs, not what he wants. I get that entirely, and could wish for no more for myself or my children, especially in this, the season of miracles.

May you all live so fully, and so well. —Steven Barnes

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

I’ve been watching A Charlie Brown Christmas for my entire life, first as a child, then as a parent. Now that my kids are preparing to leave the nest we’ve feathered, it shocks me to realize that I’ll probably watch it many more times before I finally kick the bucket.

One of the most interesting things about A Charlie Brown Christmas is that it’s a splendid example of American Christianity before it was infused with politics, a relic from a time when the story of the birth of Jesus was one that bound people together instead of tearing them apart.

The plot is simple enough: Christmas triggers a crisis of meaning in the depressive Charlie Brown. To lift his spirits and give him a purpose, his friends put him in charge of a school play—but that doesn’t go as well as anyone hopes. Things look bad until Linus takes the stage and explains “what Christmas is all about,” which is, he concludes, “peace and goodwill toward men.” The children call Charlie Brown back into their community, and together they decorate his bedraggled Christmas tree and sing carols.

It’s all so sweet that no one in their right mind, it seems to me, could argue with its message, which is that the followers of Jesus Christ have a responsibility to lift others up and to make everyone feel welcome, no matter how much they’re struggling. I may not be a Christian myself, but I definitely think that’s an idea worth considering! —Jeremy Adam Smith

The Snowman (1982)

In retrospect, the ’80s and ’90s were a strange time for Christmas movies. The ones we remember today—the “classics”—tend to deal explicitly with themes of greed, cynicism, and alienation.

In Edward Scissorhands, for example, an outsider finds he has no place in human society. Gremlins and Die Hard are good movies that are both nightmarishly violent. The cartoonishly brutal Home Alone has a nice speech about family that fuels reconciliation with the scary neighbor; but in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the yuppie neighbors are viciously satirized right up until the end. Movies like Scrooged and Trading Places are about ’80s-style avarice.

That’s why the 30-minute cartoon The Snowman stands out to me (you’ll find the entire thing embedded above, but you can also watch it on Amazon). In the English countryside, a young boy named James builds a snowman who magically comes to life. The two of them run wild through James’s house as his parents sleep, and then fly with a squadron of other snowmen to meet Father Christmas. The next morning, James awakes to discover that his friend has melted.

The Snowman is beautifully drawn and scored with haunting music by Howard Blake; there are no words, but the playful story doesn’t need them. Like the 1978 picture book by Raymond Briggs on which it’s based, the cartoon is aimed at preschoolers—and underneath the childish adventure, there’s a serious message about how the world works.

“I don’t have happy endings,” said Briggs in a 2012 interview. “I create what seems natural and inevitable. The snowman melts, my parents died, animals die, flowers die. Everything does. There’s nothing particularly gloomy about it. It’s a fact of life.” Of course, you don’t need to state that message so baldly to your children. You can just watch The Snowman beside them, and then talk with them about what they saw. —Jeremy Adam Smith

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

My buddy Cianna argues that The Muppet Christmas Carol is the most faithful of all adaptations of the Charles Dickens tale, best capturing the original’s tone and structure. This is an amusing thought, given that it’s a musical and a substantial part of the cast consists of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Animal, Fozzie Bear, and the rest of the Muppets ensemble. The actor Michael Caine famously plays Ebenezer Scrooge straight, lending pathos and depth to the hijinks.

Somehow, it works—and I believe that’s largely because director Brian Henson and writer Jerry Juhl understood what A Christmas Carol is about. Scrooge is not really greedy, a trait many contemporary interpretations have highlighted; he only asks of other people what he asks of himself, and he seems to genuinely believe that if everyone were as miserly and small-hearted as he is, then they would not be poor. (A Christmas Carol is very much about capitalism and inequality!)

In fact, Scrooge suffers from profound isolation and sees the resulting unhappiness as natural and inevitable; he simply can’t envision an alternative because he lacks the imagination to do so. Thus, the mission of the three ghosts who visit him on Christmas Eve is to reveal to him how other people live and what impact his actions have had, are having, and will have on them. It’s this cognitive and affective empathy that drives his personal transformation. This is something another film on this list, Spirited, got right about A Christmas Carol: seeing the value of other people’s experiences and values opens up possibilities for ourselves.

As Scrooge proclaims to the Ghost of Christmas Future, “These events can be changed! A life can be made right.” —Jeremy Adam Smith

Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

My teenage son turned me on to this Japanese anime, which is about what happens when a makeshift family living on the streets in Tokyo finds a newborn abandoned in a pile of garbage. It is a holiday movie, but one that is well outside of the American paradigm.

It’s a lot rougher, for one thing. In many ways, the story is about mental illness and its consequences. An American movie would make the characters misunderstood but lovable. In Tokyo Godfathers, they are lovable, but I think everyone in the story understands in an unsentimental way that serious mental illness can make love extremely hard to accept and express.

That love actually does triumph in the end is a given; what’s interesting is the lurching, violent, funny path the movie takes to get to that point. Everything changes for the three primary characters when a baby is thrust upon them. They all feel, in their different ways, a primal drive to take care of this helpless creature—but they lack experience and skills, both practical and emotional, and they each must fight against their own (often confused) needs in order to put the baby first.

The result is a fascinating, entertaining psychological study, and a meditation on family that starts out seeming silly and gradually becomes genuinely profound. —Jeremy Adam Smith

Love, Actually (2003)

That’s right, haters: It’s Love, Actually.

This is probably simultaneously the most loved and most reviled Christmas movie of the 21st century, for some really good reasons on both counts.

Why reviled? Well…Love, Actually is as much a romantic comedy as a Christmas movie, and most of its nine distinct storylines peddle some of the rom-com genre’s most sexist, heterosexist tropes. In addition to women being too often valued for only their looks, there’s a lot of bad behavior on the part of men that is never punished and is sometimes even rewarded.

Why loved? Oh, boy. Let’s start with the related facts that it’s pretty damn funny and extremely well-crafted. It’s tricky to weave together so many different kinds of stories in a way that stays compelling, and Love, Actually pulls that off with panache.

But what lifts Love, Actually above so many other rom-coms and Christmas movies are the peculiar balances it strikes between sordid and uplifting, vulgar and elegant, compassionate and cruel, thoughtful and stupid, ugly and beautiful, happy and melancholy.

There’s something cold at the heart of Love, Actually—and that’s good, in this case, because it cuts through so much of the movie’s abundant schmaltz. People in this movie are what they are, good and bad, and love is what wraps itself around all our good and all our bad. It’s a worldview crystallized in the famous opening voiceover by the fictional prime minister of the United Kingdom (played by Hugh Grant):

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge—they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion love actually is all around.

In the final scene, the movie returns to Heathrow, where most of the disparate characters converge, having found ways to connect over some chasms that were once very wide indeed. And that’s what makes Love, Actually a very Greater Good kind of Christmas movie. —Jeremy Adam Smith

Happiest Season (2020)

My partner Angela loves Christmas movies. Her theory is that most contemporary American Christmas movies are all about leaving your socially safe urban bubble to go “home” for the holidays. There, you have to re-integrate with family you don’t really know anymore, who don’t know you anymore, because you’ve been geographically separated and changing as time passes.

That very American dilemma definitely applies to Happiest Season, one of her favorites. It’s the story of a closeted lesbian (MacKenzie Davis) who brings her girlfriend (Kristen Stewart) home for Christmas, where they have to pretend to be straight with politically and culturally conservative parents. Hijinks ensue.

Happiest Season was a hit for Hulu back in 2020, when we were all caged up in our houses and Netflixing (without the chill) every single night. It seems to me that it’s largely forgotten today by everyone but Angela, who has watched it (by her estimation) about 25 times, which means I’ve re-watched it more than once.

It’s a very funny, charming little movie, despite how it touches upon some very serious issues (watch the clip embedded above). My own theory about why straight people are drawn to coming-out stories is that they dramatize every person’s internal debate about how authentic to be around the people they grew up with. If we show our true selves, we might fear, then they’ll stop loving us.

Happiest Season has a happy ending, of course; this isn’t the kind of movie where everyone ends up sad. It’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy about family reconciliation that doubles as a wish for Americans to bridge their political and cultural divides. It suggests—not unlike another movie on this list, 2022’s Spirited—that people can and do change for the better, but for that change to happen, we have to be brave. —Jeremy Adam Smith

Just Another Christmas (2020)

Tudo Bem no Natal que Vem (Just Another Christmas) is a lighthearted and comical Brazilian spin on a time-honored classic, A Christmas Carol.

The main character, Jorge (Leandro Hassum), is a self-proclaimed hater of Christmas, born on Christmas day. He grew up detesting the holiday because of how it detracted from him being able to fully celebrate his birthday; he remarks that there was no contest between a celebration of Baby Jesus’s life or his. His disdain for Christmas holds even when he marries and has a family of his own.

Through a mystical intervention involving the otherwise stoic grandfather of the family (Levi Ferreira), Jorge develops a 364-day amnesia that prevents him from remembering anything, except for one day of the year. You guessed it: That day is Christmas.

Through the course of what seems like more than a decade, he is only present and aware of his experiences on Christmas. That becomes the one day he is the most like himself, while on the other 364 days of the year he is quite literally on autopilot.

Through these experiences, Jorge realizes how much of “life” he was missing out on and how much he took for granted, including love, family, and presence. It’s a lesson we all can benefit from, hopefully without the need of a 364-day amnesia. —Shanna B. Tiayon

Spirited (2022)

And the award for most Greater Good Christmas movie of 2022 goes to…a postmodern musical bromance starring Will Ferrell as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Ryan Reynolds as the “perfect combination of Mussolini and Seacrest” that, weirdly, ends up being a sequel to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Spirited starts with a question: “Do people really change?” The rest of the movie explores the answer, in some very entertaining ways. It imagines the afterlife as a kind of singing-and-dancing nonprofit agency that selects self-centered, mean people for visits from the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, with the aim of helping them evolve in a more positive direction.

The plot goes into motion when a public-relations monster named Clint (played by Reynolds) is picked for haunting. Clint is a very 21st-century, very American villain—an amoral right-wing social-media manipulator whose motto is “People never change” and whose company “specializes in creating controversy, conflict, and disinformation for his clients worldwide.”

“Oh, my God,” says the Ghost of Christmas Present, more than a little smitten. “He’s perfect.”

“Why do we do it?” asks “Present” (as he’s called, though his name when he was alive in the 19th century was Ebenezer). “We do it for the ripples. See, it’s a documented fact that one person’s kindness can have a ripple effect.” Unfortunately, however, in this case the ghosts don’t know what they’re getting into, for Clint proves himself to be a very clever and tenacious adversary.

There’s a lot of truth in Spirited, it seems to me, and despite the movie’s zippy, feel-good vibe, some of its truths are actually quite hard. The message is that people do, in fact, change, but that change is really, really difficult to accomplish, and none of our self-improvement makes suffering and death go away. Maybe that’s not what everyone would want to hear—but, by my (Christmas) lights, it’s what we all need to hear. —Jeremy Adam Smith

The Holdovers (2024)

At first glance, The Holdovers may not seem like a feel-good holiday movie with an uplifting story-line. The main character, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), is a curmudgeonly classics teacher at a Northeastern private boarding school for boys, whose haughtiness and better-than-thou attitude are off-putting to students and staff alike.

Yet, in many ways Paul resembles a classic Christmas tale anti-hero: Ebenezer Scrooge, the protagonist of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which makes a very frequent appearance on this list. Maybe Paul’s not rich like Scrooge; in fact, he’s a poorly paid teacher who’s resentful toward his wealthy, privileged students. But, much like Scrooge, he’s about to learn some hard lessons over the Christmas holiday that just might change his life.

Paul is being punished by the school’s headmaster for failing an important school donor’s son in his class by being assigned to watch the “holdovers”—kids who have nowhere else to go over the Christmas holidays and must remain at school. This puts him in charge of students who resent being there and can’t escape his harsh treatment, which he obviously relishes meting out.

But soon Paul finds a kindred spirit in Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a cafeteria worker also stuck at school for the break. Mary has recently lost her son in Vietnam and is bitterly grieving. Yet, unlike Paul, Mary can look beyond her own pain to feel sympathy for the abandoned students. Her example helps Paul to soften, at least a little.

To the movie’s credit, this change in Paul doesn’t happen in an overnight epiphany like Scrooge’s. Instead, it’s subtler, messier, and more authentic-seeming. As Paul navigates a new way of relating to the students, he begins to see them less as caricatures, and more as real people who, like himself, are suffering and who deserve more compassion than cruelty. Paul discovers, not unlike Scrooge, that it’s better to be generous than heartless. — Jill Suttie

In her new book, How to Fall in Love with Questions , behavioral psychologist Elizabeth Weingarten reveals her personal and intellectual struggle to live with uncertainty, and perhaps even embrace it. I spoke with Elizabeth about the solutions she discovered at an event at Berkeley’s Book Society. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Where did this book begin?

Elizabeth Weingarten: Like many people, at one time I was dealing with a lot of uncertainty in my life. For me, this came in two distinct flavors.

I had recently gotten married, and I was questioning my marriage, to say the least. So, I was grappling with this question of, Should I get a divorce?

The other big question involved my work. I had recently left a job and I was pursuing a creative project, and it was becoming very clear that this creative project was completely failing to launch. All of a sudden I was asking: What am I doing with my life?

I put all my eggs in this basket, and it was not panning out. To face this uncertainty, I was listening to lots of podcasts, I was reading lots of self-help books. I was trying to find answers to these big questions that felt really scary and really heavy—and, frankly, it felt very lonely to be dealing with them at the same time.

Across all of these books and podcasts that I was reading, I kept coming upon the same advice, and that advice was just “embrace uncertainty.” And to me, this felt just very tone-deaf, because I think it’s one thing to embrace uncertainty in like fun, exciting moments in your life, like maybe you don’t know what your family’s planning for your birthday. But try telling somebody who’s waiting on the results of a biopsy to embrace uncertainty. Try telling somebody who you know is dealing with the death of a loved one to just embrace uncertainty. That felt to me like a kind of toxic positivity.

There are these moments in life that, to me, call for a very different way of relating to uncertainty. It was around that time that I found a book called Letters to a Young Poet. That’s a book of correspondence between the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and this aspiring poet named Franz Kappus that was published in the early 20th century. Kappus was 19 when he was writing to Rilke, and he was asking Rilke all kinds of questions about how to live his life, as many of us do when we’re 19. And Rilke, very famously, responded to him not with answers, but with this advice that has become timeless and enduring. He tells him to “love the questions themselves,” as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign tongue, and Rilke encouraged Kappus not only to love the questions, but to live the questions.

So, I’m reading this book, and on the one hand, I was really struck by this passage. By the way, this is a book that has a very interesting following. Dustin Hoffman has called it his Bible. Lady Gaga has a line from it tattooed on her. I loved this idea of loving the questions, and yet I had never felt further away from loving the questions of my life. I hated the questions.

My book really came out of this question that I had, which was: What does it actually mean to love the questions of our lives, particularly the questions that are really painful and challenging to love? How do we start to do that? How do we do that in a time in which so many of us have become addicted to fast, easy answers?

JAS: What is uncertainty, psychologically speaking, and why do we resist it?

EW: My favorite definition of uncertainty is a sense of doubt that stops or delays progress. That came from a couple of psychologists who were writing a paper about how decision-makers cope with uncertainty.

I like this definition because I think it gets at the lived experience of uncertainty. For many of us, when we don’t know the answer to a question, we feel stuck. We feel stopped and stagnant in our lives until we find the answer and feel like we can move forward. I also found that we as humans are really wired to avoid uncertainty and seek certainty. And a big part of the reason for that is because it’s more metabolically costly for us to deal with uncertainty.

We evolved during a time of food scarcity. Since it takes more energy to navigate uncertainty, we learned to prefer certainty in our environment. That’s what’s known as selfish brain theory. That’s one part of why we want to get the answer to our questions and feel really uncomfortable when we don’t have those answers.

JAS: Do you feel like we as a culture are becoming less tolerant of uncertainty?

EW: There’s some research from Nicholas Carleton, at the University of Regina in Canada, which shows that as smartphone and Internet penetration has increased, so too has our intolerance of uncertainty. We’re talking here about correlation, not causation, so we can’t say definitively that phones are the cause. But Carleton’s research does suggest that there’s a connection, and the reason why he and other researchers think that there’s a connection is because with our smartphones, all of the sudden, we’ve lost all of these moments during our day and our lives to practice dealing with uncertainty.

Think about how when you go to a restaurant, you Google the menu. I do this all the time, right? You’re like, I gotta know what I’m gonna order before I go. Or if you’re going to a new city, you spend a lot of time on your phone mapping out all the places that you’re gonna visit. Or maybe you’re just in a moment where you’re kind of feeling uncomfortable or anxious, and you turn to your phone to try to numb that feeling.

If you think about uncertainty tolerance as a muscle, there are all these moments when we could be strengthening it in little ways, but we’re actually atrophying it, because all of a sudden we have in our pockets these little false certainty devices that are giving us the answers to all of these questions over time.

JAS: You start the book talking a lot about cults and cultish behavior and cultish ways of thinking, which I thought was pretty interesting. Why did you start there?

EW: One of the things that I talk about at the beginning of the book is this idea that it is increasingly difficult to love the questions and live with the questions. And what I mean by that goes back to Rilke’s idea of trying to sit with and exist in and have a different relationship to uncertainty.

Before I talk about cults, I want to explain this framework at the beginning of the book where I liken different questions to different parts of a fruit tree. If you think about questions as ripening into answers, you can think about one type of question as being like a peach type of question, one that ripens pretty quickly into an answer.

The second type of question might be a pawpaw question, as in pawpaw fruit. That is a type of fruit that actually can take five to seven years to ripen, so a pawpaw question might be something like, Is this fertility treatment going to help me have a kid? Or maybe, Will I really like this career change that I’m making?

The third type of question is a heartwood-style question. Heartwood is the core of the tree that stays with the tree over the course of its entire life. You have different layers that grow around the tree, but the heartwood is what gives the tree its stability and security over time. So, these are the questions that really stay with you. These are the questions like, Who am I? Who am I becoming? How do I live a life of meaning and purpose? A lot of the book deals with the heartwood-style questions, about love, loss, purpose, relationships.

The final type of question is the dead-leaf question. These are the types of questions that are no longer serving us, that we may be better off letting go. These are the types of questions that are keeping us locked into patterns of regret and rumination. Sometimes these are questions keeping us locked in the past, when ultimately we want questions that are helping us to move forward.

What does that have to do with cults? Heartwood and dead-leaf questions can be really heavy, challenging questions to carry and hold alone. That creates fertile ground for what I call the charlatans of certainty. Those are the gurus, or influencers, or experts, who want you to believe that they have all of the answers to the biggest and most important questions in your life. Cult-like groups are an extreme example of that. They’re often successful because they lead their followers to believe that they have all the answers, and that you have all this uncertainty and all this fear and all this pain in your life—but if you just join us, all of that will go away. All of your doubts will evaporate.

And of course, nobody can do this, right? No group, no person can do this. I start out talking about the research on cults and certain cult-like groups and the charlatans of certainty because all those phenomena can be really, really challenging for people who are trying to love the questions of their lives.

JAS: How do you know if a question is a good one? How do you build a good question?

EW: The answer boils down to this: Is your question opening you up to lots of different possibilities in your life, or is it limiting you, or closing you off?

Take one of the questions I started with: Should I get a divorce? That was not a good question, because it was a binary. It’s either yes or no. I’ve learned that a really good question breaks you out of binaries, and it helps you see a whole landscape of possibilities for what an answer could look like for you. And so for me, a better question might have been something like, What would have to change in order for us to stay together? Or, How might we make this relationship work? Ultimately, shifting that frame gave me and my husband the space we needed to actually have the right conversations to be able to move forward.

The other really key component to what makes up a great question is this: Is your question serving as an internal GPS? What I learned from many people that I interviewed for this book—activists, scientists, some Zen Buddhist practitioners, all kinds of people across the gamut of different expertise—is that for your question to be a great question, it needs to lead you back to yourself and what you want from your life. It is not someone else’s question, and it does not tie you to someone else’s expectations for what they want of you.

So, I think to find a good question, you need to ask yourself: Is this even my question—or is it someone else’s about me? Do I even want to be asking this question?

I’ll give you an example of a question that I’ve been living with and working on recently: Am I having a second kid? A lot of people in my life are asking me this question! But is it the right one for me? And note that’s a very yes-or-no binary question, one that closes off possibilities rather than opens them up. I’ve started reframing this question for myself as: How will I know if I want to have a second kid or what will it look like? What are some of the things that I can look for if I do want that?

Then I think you have to ask if your question is a dead-leaf one that keeps you stuck in the past. Those are the questions that leave us spinning: Why didn’t I do that? Why did I break up with this person? What if I had just done this or been that way? Instead you need to ask yourself: Do I feel like this is moving me forward toward an answer in my life, or does it feel like it’s keeping me stuck and locked in a past that I can no longer control? If your questions keep you stuck in rumination patterns, if they’re no longer moving you forward and no longer making you feel excited about future possibilities, you probably want to let them go.

JAS: It occurs to me that we live in a culture that poses questions that people in previous periods in history could never ask, because of social pressures or even laws, like: Should I stay with my husband? That’s not really a question a lot of women could ask themselves, in many times and places. Once you answered that kind of question—assuming you were even allowed to ask it—you were done, because divorce wasn’t an option. Should I take that job and move to another city?—that’s not something farmers asked themselves in feudal economies.

Today, we don’t live that way; we’re in a much more mobile, fluid society, facing uncertainties that our ancestors never did. Today, there are some questions you just have to never stop asking—the heartwood questions, I guess. Should we ever stop asking if we should stay with our spouses, even if the answer is always yes? It strikes me as actually being somewhat functional to always hold that question, and yet, also, it’s kind of crazy-making.

EW: Yeah, it gets to the question of: Can we ever ask too many questions? Is there a time when it becomes overkill? Especially in a relationship, it can become neurotic and nit-picky to continuously question whether you’re meant to be together. And, as you say, crazy-making.

But take this question of whether you should be with your spouse. It’s not necessarily about whether you should continue to ask it or not, but also: Is that the only question you’re asking in your relationship? Are there other questions that aren’t binaries, that can help you come to know each other better or differently, that can help you grow? 

To me, it’s right to think about relationship questions as being heartwood questions, because these are the questions that are maybe never permanently answerable across your life, right? And so maybe they’re questions that you have and answered for a certain time, but with any really significant relationship, I think it would be very odd to say, Well, we got married, and now this it for the rest of our lives. I think commitment is worth interrogating throughout your life, as long as you are also asking other generative questions alongside it. 

JAS: If only to renew that commitment, so we don’t end up sleepwalking.

EW: Right. The sleepwalking to me is a symptom of curiosity being dead in a relationship. Not only are you not asking the question of whether you should be together, but you’re also not asking an assortment of other questions: Who are you to each other after a big life change? How do you continue to learn about each other even when it feels like the other person is entirely known (when, generally speaking, they aren’t)? 

The key is to keep curiosity kicking—something we can do with a shared commitment to asking better questions.

These are common questions for the dying, according to end-of-life doula Diane Button. She and her colleagues at the End of Life Doula Alliance sit with people who are dying and their loved ones to help them through the practical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of dying. By listening to people’s stories and shepherding them through the process, she’s witnessed firsthand what people care about most and what brings them peace at the end of life.

In her new book, What Matters Most: Lessons That the Dying Teach Us About Living, Button shares poignant stories of individuals who have faced impending death and what she’s learned from their experiences. Her book not only serves as a primer for dying well, but also as a source of important lessons for anyone wanting to live life with more intentionality. 

I spoke with her about her book and what we should take away from it.

Jill Suttie: How does facing imminent death change the way people think about their lives?

Diane Button: When people are facing the end of life, everything that is superficial just gets stripped away. The idea of taxes and politics and other things that we worry about are just gone, and you’re really focusing on love, relationship, healing, and, oftentimes, spirituality, because that’s something a lot of people believe they’re going to take with them when they die. The world becomes smaller in certain ways, but also just so profound and raw and beautiful. There’s often so much joy at the end of life. It’s amazing.

JS: Why is there joy?

DB: It’s surprising, but people at the end of life are some of the most joyful people I’ve ever known. At first I asked myself, why is there so much joy in the room when working with the dying? But then I figured it out, and it’s really simple. I think that they’re consciously looking for joy. They’re not stuck in the past and they’re not fixated on the future. They’re here, they’re present.

There’s a freedom that comes when time is short and all your expectations fade, your to-do list goes away, and you’re focused on what’s right in front of you. It might be holding someone’s hand or the simple things of an ordinary day, like the sun shining on your face. Pausing to acknowledge the joy that’s right in front of us is a huge benefit to everyday life.

JS: What are some of the common themes that come up when people are dying?

DB: People want to know that they’re going to be remembered. They want to know that their life mattered and that they made a difference. And so we’re often talking about what people have contributed to the world during their lives.

People also want to be sure that everyone they love knows that they’re loved. Oftentimes they’re making calls in the last week of life, calling their friends from the past, sometimes people they haven’t talked to in decades. Expressing love and saying goodbye and thank you is such an important part of end of life.

Another thing is unfinished business. People really want to take a look at any parts of their life where they might need to ask for forgiveness. Sometimes people have been holding on to something for decades, and it becomes urgent at the end of life to let it go.

JS: I found many of the stories in your book to be very moving. But one in particular stood out for me—the mother who’d abandoned her children and wanted to ask for forgiveness. How does listening to stories like hers affect you?

DB: Witnessing people’s stories has really changed my life. Sometimes they’re beautiful stories and I think, Oh, I want to have an ending like that. But sometimes they’re really hard stories, and it’s a lesson in a different way for me.

This woman named Carrie had left her family—her teenage daughters, her work, everything—and moved to California to be with a man that she fell in love with. When she was diagnosed with cancer, which later became terminal, the fact that she had abandoned her family was, at first, not really percolating. She was worrying about her medicine, her treatments, and such.

But once I got to know her and she told me the honest story, I realized that there was real big unfinished business that she was holding on to. So, we talked about it. These are the hard conversations, but they’re also the most profound. It took me a few visits of just sitting and processing it before I really understood the depth of what she was going through. I didn’t recommend anything. I just listened and I asked a few questions that gave her the opportunity to pause and reflect on what would matter most to her in her last few days and weeks of life. In the end, she actually got on a plane and went back to be with her family.

JS: Are there any lessons from the dying that you particularly took to heart—maybe something you hadn’t considered before?

DB: One of the most important lessons I learned came from a few different stories in the book—the idea of living in the moment in a different way, pausing to really take in something beautiful.

That’s the biggest change I’ve made in how I live my life. Hour by hour, and sometimes moment by moment, I’ll really pause if I see a beautiful flower, rock, or heart-shaped leaf, or when looking into my friend’s eyes or even at a loaf of bread, sometimes. I’m realizing that there’s beauty everywhere and that I was just spinning through life so fast that I wasn’t pausing to take it in.

So, I’ve actually created a practice for myself where at least once a day I pause for a minute and stare at something beautiful, whatever I see. Really being there in that minute takes me away from the stress and the fast pace. And when I say thank you to somebody, I try to be specific now with my gratitude. I say “Thank you for bagging my groceries, thank you for spending this time with me.” It’s helped me to pause, to be in the moment, and really think about it rather than just saying thank you and passing through.

JS: That’s beautiful.

DB: Do you want me to share a story from the book?

JS: Yes, please.

DB: One of my favorite stories in the book was told to me by my doula friend, Gabby Jimenez, who had a client named Jacob with a glioblastoma (a fast-moving brain tumor). He’d been a very active man, always outdoors and just a nature lover, and now he was confined to his bed. When Gabby went to visit him, he had a grab bar above his bed with a bunch of colorful bracelets hanging down and a tally counter in the middle—like the kind you would see at a baseball game.

Gabby asked him about it, and he said, “That’s my joy counter.” Over time, he’d realized that although his life had changed dramatically, and he had gone through depression and sadness, he was still experiencing joy. So, he had this joy counter, and he would click it every time that he had an experience of joy—like a friend coming to visit, click, a bite of his favorite ice cream, click, a hug from his wife, click, click.

That became his way of remembering the joy in his everyday life. And I thought that was really, really beautiful. It’s surprising, when you’re paying attention, how many beautiful moments there are in an ordinary day. That was a great lesson.

JS: Many people want to focus on leaving a legacy behind. How does that help someone when they’re dying?

DB: Leaving a legacy will be both tangible and intangible and offers benefits both to the dying person and those they are leaving behind. Our legacy is a way for us to feel that our lives were valued, that we will be remembered, and that we made a difference.

This can be accomplished through a legacy project by creating something tangible such as a letter, recording, or photo album to leave behind. Or it can be the intangible legacy work, which involves the client thinking through how people are going to remember them and what the most fulfilling parts of their life were. It helps them feel good about the entirety of their life and how they’ve lived. And it also helps reveal any unfinished business that might need to be addressed.
 
Heartfelt, personalized legacy projects can become beautiful memories for the people they leave behind—partners, children, friends, people they’ve spent their lives with. It’s a way of ensuring their memory and their stories will live on and that they were a significant and meaningful link in the generational chain.

JS: So many lessons you write about seem important. But the one I practice most, perhaps, is expressing love directly to people I love. Yet it seems many people are reluctant to do that.

DB: I think there are certain people who just don’t say the words. They spend their life showing their love and not verbalizing it. But at the end of life, it becomes urgent. Those unspoken words can really build up.

Oftentimes we’re spending sessions with clients making calls, writing letters, texting, finding people on Facebook. That’s part of the inventory that people do at the end of life. They’re processing what their life has been all about and remembering people, and those people often pop up and want to reach out.

That’s why I think it’s really helpful to do this work all along the way, to say the words “I’m sorry” or “I love you” and make the phone calls and ask for forgiveness, or give forgiveness when it’s appropriate. When you do those things during the course of your life, then you avoid the buildup of unfinished business at the end.

JS: Many of the practices for living well have solid science behind them—like forgiveness, gratitude, kindness, meaning, self-compassion. Do you think hearing about them from people who are dying gives them more poignancy somehow?

DB: I think looking at forgiveness, gratitude, meaning, love, joy through the lens of the dying gives them a new perspective, because none of us has died before. To be able to hear the stories of what’s likely going to be most important to you at the end of life gives you the opportunity to live life through that lens right now.

The biggest takeaway from the book is to not be afraid to lean into conversations around end of life and to think about your own end of life. Because, really, talking about death is talking about life. If you start to understand what, for you, is most important and what might be most meaningful for you at the end of life, then you can live differently now. I feel like that’s a gift.

For institutions like the University of Oxford, the responsibility was impossible to ignore. After all, we take pride in educating students who go on to hold positions of influence around the world. As one faculty member put it, “there is no doubt that Oxford produces thinkers and leaders, but are we producing wise thinkers and good leaders?” 

This conversation and the generous support of the Templeton World Charity Foundation gave rise to the Oxford Character Project. Our mission was also a research question: How can we educate a generation of wise thinkers and good leaders who will further the flourishing of individuals, organizations, and societies around the world? 

How character promotes flourishing

The idea that underlies the Oxford Character Project, that virtuous leadership is a key driver of human flourishing and the common good, is far from original. It was a premise of classical thinkers such as Aristotle and Confucius, a driving force of the European Renaissance, and an organizing principle of higher education through to the beginning of the 20th century.

However, such an emphasis on character did not fare well through the last century. Modernization was based on technological progress and the design of systems and structures to optimize economic outcomes. Values and virtues—once foundational to education and public life—were increasingly limited to the private realm. In the modern world, public life was to be ruled by facts, not by values.   

Fast forward to the present, and a strong distinction between measurable facts and intangible values is no longer as plausible, not least because of huge strides in the science of human flourishing. Just this year, a paper in Nature announced the first results of the Global Flourishing Study, a longitudinal study of over 200,000 people in more than 20 countries to explore aspects and drivers of flourishing. Led by researchers at Baylor University and Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, the study defines flourishing as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the contexts in which that person lives.”

Alongside other dimensions of flourishing—mental and physical health, financial and material stability, meaning, and close social relationships—are character and virtue. Virtues (positive character qualities) such as gratitude, justice, wisdom, courage, temperance, kindness, and hope are at the heart of flourishing lives and societies. Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska and her colleagues conducted studies in the U.S. and Mexico to examine the impact of character on flourishing. They found that people with good character (orientation to promote good) tend to be more satisfied with life and happier, report better mental and physical health, and feel more socially connected and purposeful.

Character is a component of human flourishing. But flourishing is not simply an individual phenomenon. It is supported by all kinds of institutions: families, schools, health care, transportation, hospitality, media, culture, business, construction, community organizations, sports clubs, local and national governments, technology providers, banks, and religious communities. This is where leadership comes in. All these institutions, and more, are central to the flourishing of individuals and societies. But they need ethical and effective leadership—character-based leadership—to contribute to the greater good.


In 2023, we investigated character-based leadership around the world, identifying 720 papers that report on the impact of character-based leadership. They find benefits for individuals (e.g., well-being, sense of meaning, job satisfaction, creativity and innovation), organizations (e.g., ethical climate, organizational performance, team cohesion, interpersonal trust), and society (e.g., corruption prevention, social justice, sustainability). 

Purpose, courage, love, and hope

Since 2014, we have been conducting research, developing programs, and building partnerships to advance character-based leadership. Just this year, we released Leading with Character, a free online course developed together with the Legatum Foundation and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. The course was designed by a global group of academics and practitioners to support people around the world to be better leaders and build a better world. It has so far been taken up by 2,000 learners in 122 countries.

The course focuses on four central virtues: purpose, courage, love, and hope. If leaders were to cultivate these virtues, if we could even strengthen them by a few percent, we believe there would be a marked impact on leadership performance and societal flourishing.
  

Purpose is defined by researcher Bill Damon and his colleagues as “a forward-looking intention to pursue goals meaningful to the self and beneficial to others.” Purpose supports vision and direction, enabling leaders to inspire followers, unite strategy with mission, and pursue goals that advance the common good. There is a close relationship between values and purpose. We have found that helping students to reflect on their values, strengths, and goals has enabled them to clarify their sense of purpose.

Courage in leadership involves acting in accordance with one’s values in the face of difficulty, risk, or discomfort. Leadership is tough, and fear of failure or loss can cause leaders to shrink back from the actions and decisions needed to build a better world. Courage enables leaders to step forward. In the Leading with Character course, we focus on the need for courage in everyday leadership contexts. As one student put it, “I’ve realized that courage doesn’t have to be something that is loud or bold; anything you do in life that takes effort towards goodness is courage.” 

Love is a word rarely used in relation to leadership. It should be. Understood as a commitment to the good of others, leading with love fosters security, trust, and collaboration. It is expressed as leaders put others’ interests before their own, looking for the best in others and acting with kindness even when making hard decisions. As one student put it, “I have learned that love in leadership is not about sentimentality but about creating meaningful connections, valuing people, and fostering an environment where others feel seen, heard, and empowered.” 

Hope is not simply a positive expectation; that’s optimism. Hope is like a muscle that is developed by repeated practice. It is a focused attention on the possibility of a good future, especially in the face of difficulty, challenges, and uncertainties. Hope empowers leaders to continually work toward that future. As Napoleon is famously said to have put it, leaders are also “dealers in hope”; they can cultivate hope in communities and organizations by the stories they tell and examples they set.

Good leadership for a better world

Leaders certainly need expertise in strategy, technology, risk management, and communication. Virtuous leadership—leading with purpose, courage, love, and hope—elevates these competencies as a force for good.

Our work at the Oxford Character Project is built on the premise that the leaders we need to face the many challenges and uncertainties of our time require the highest levels of excellence in both competence and character. As we head into our second decade, we are building partnerships for the future, planning new research on character-based leadership in politics, business, and sport, and developing programs that will support a new generation of leaders at Oxford and around the world.

But does it matter where your sense of purpose comes from? Do different sources of purpose affect our well-being in different ways?

Answers to these questions are hard to come by, because most research on purpose doesn’t look that granularly at the concept. Instead, it’s often measured by asking people how much they agree with general statements, like “I have aims and objectives for living” or “My life is meaningful”—not specifically what those meaningful aims are.

But, in a new study, researchers Michael Mask and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia and their colleagues aimed to get more detail about people’s purposeful pursuits across cultures and to see their effect on “the good life.” Ultimately, they found that our purposes around the world have a lot in common.

Cultural similarities around purpose

In the first part of their study, Mask and his colleagues asked 200 American participants to write about seven things that gave them a sense of purpose in life. Then, they analyzed over 2,000 responses to come up with 16 general categories of purpose that encompassed everyone’s answers:

• Self-improvement: Becoming the best you can be
• Family: Supporting and providing for your family and caretaking
• Relationships: Searching for, finding, or maintaining close relationships
• Religion/spirituality: Living in accordance with and meeting the standards of your religious or spiritual beliefs
• Recognition: Being respected and having high status
• Happiness: Being happy, enjoying life, and feeling good
• Self-sufficiency: Being able to take care of yourself physically and financially, and having the freedom to do as you wish
• Material wealth: Getting rich, owning nice things, and buying whatever you want
• Internal standards: Knowing who you are and what you stand for and living your life according to these principles
• Positive impact: Making the world a better place
• Mattering: Inspiring others and leaving a legacy; making an impact
• Occupational fulfillment: Finding your calling through work; doing your job well and working hard
• Persevering: Handling what life throws at you—not giving up and dealing with the struggles inherent in life
• Physical health: Taking care of your body and being healthy
• Inner peace: Being grateful for what you have and accepting what you can’t change
• Service: Serving your country or community

After testing out these categories with a different group of 100 American participants, their team surveyed over 1,000 people from Japan, India, Poland, and the United States to find out how much these categories reflected their own purpose in life. Specifically, participants reported how much each source of purpose influenced the decisions they made and guided their behavior, as well as how happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich their lives were—all aspects of “the good life.” (Psychological richness involves experiencing diverse, challenging, and interesting activities that evoke complex emotions and change your perspective.) 

Analyzing the results, the researchers found that people in each of these unique cultures had very similar sources of purpose and prioritized each category similarly, too. “Happiness,” “self-sufficiency,” and “family” were in the top five for each country, while “religion” and “recognition” were in the bottom five for each country.

Also, there was a lot of agreement on what sources of purpose went along with more meaning, happiness, or psychological richness in life. This finding surprised Heine, who, as a cultural psychologist, is used to seeing more variability among people of different cultures.

“What stands out from our finding is just how much agreement there was within these four quite different countries about what kinds of purposes are associated with a good life,” he says. “They’re not identical, but there is a striking amount of similarity.”

Different purposes for different ends

So how did different types of purposes relate to different ways of living well? The researchers found that people whose purpose came from “mattering” were the most likely to have a more meaningful life, overall, with “perseverance” and “service” also tied to meaning. This fits in with past research explaining how meaning in life involves a sense of purpose, coherence, and mattering, says Heine.

“It makes sense that ‘mattering’ is especially linked with meaning, as it [suggests people] want to make a difference in the world,” he says. “And ‘service’ means you are guided by contributing to others—another source of meaning.” 

People felt happier depending on how much they pursued “inner peace,” with the pursuit of “positive impact,” “physical health,” and “happiness” also tied to happiness more than other sources of purpose.

While it may seem obvious that aligning your decisions with inner peace, happiness, and good health would make you personally happier, it’s less obvious that making a positive impact would lead to happiness. However, Heine points to research that suggests that those who benefit others are happier—for example, his colleague Elizabeth Dunn’s work finding that spending money on others makes you happier than spending it on yourself.

“What you are doing is making the world a better place, and that should be especially rewarding,” he says.

For the psychologically rich life, pursuing “service” was the top contender for people across cultures. This seems counterintuitive, because service isn’t necessarily associated with novelty, complexity, or challenge.

But it’s possible, says Mask, that serving others opens us to new perspectives and a range of emotions—for example, happiness at connecting with people in less fortunate circumstances, but also sadness about their misfortune—that could be relevant to a psychologically rich life.

“These aspects of service (emotional complexity, perspective-changing experiences) may be what link it to psychological richness,” says Mask.

Interestingly, pursuing material wealth was the lowest predictor of every form of the good life in this study. Heine suggest that the reason may be that pursuing wealth takes you away from more reliable sources of purpose associated with the good life—like relationships, a sense of community, work, or connection to a cause or spiritual practice.

“Chasing material wealth is not associated with the kinds of connections that underlie a good life,” he says.

Variations in purpose and well-being

While the overall results suggest an almost universal experience of purpose, there were some cultural variations in the findings, too.

For example, for Japanese people, finding purpose through their occupation mattered a lot more to their quality of life (in every sense) than it did in the other cultures studied. Heine, who’s familiar with Japanese culture through his research, says that finding rings true, as he has witnessed how central work life is to people’s well-being and personal identity in Japan.

On the other hand, he and Mask couldn’t explain why seeking purpose through family did not predict meaning in life much, except in Poland, where it ranked second. Given research on how close relationships bring us a sense of meaning, they’d expected it to pop up at the top of the list for all countries.

According to Heine, it’s possible that in countries where people feel strong obligations and expectations around their family (like in Japan and India), other areas of fulfillment may have felt more novel and relevant to them.

Mask wonders if it could be due to how different cultures think about family as a source of purpose, which their general survey couldn’t detect.

“It could be the case that how people conceive of family in these different societies might look very different,” he says. But, he adds, they can’t say more without getting more granular detail in future studies.

Aiming for the good life yourself

Knowing that certain elements of a good life may be supported by sources of purpose like mattering, inner peace, or service could be useful to know, especially if we’re aiming for a happier, more meaningful, or psychologically rich life. But Heine is not sure that there can be a “purpose prescription” based on their findings alone.

“Purpose and meaning in life have an important subjective element. It wouldn’t be good for an individual to share the same purpose just because others endorse it,” he says.

On the other hand, he and Mask both hope their research will encourage more people to consider focusing on what brings purpose to their lives, to help achieve greater overall well-being.

“Though the goal of our paper was to highlight many sources of purpose, our take-home message is that having any kind of purpose is key to having a good life,” says Heine.

Beacon Press published Are We Born Racist? New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology in 2010. Drawn from the pages of Greater Good magazine, many of its essays were written by scientists about their own investigations into how we form racial categories and hierarchies in our brains; other pieces took that work a step further into domains like workplaces, community, and family, highlighting best practices for living in a multiracial world.

What other books were removed alongside ours?

The first one to jump out at me is Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the classic memoir about growing up in racially segregated Arkansas in the 1930s and ’40s. Another is a more obscure and recent science fiction novella by Becky Chambers called A Psalm for the Wild Built, which happens to be a favorite of mine. It tells the gentle story of a monk who travels around an alien world setting up a tea station and inviting local people to share their stories. Why in the world was this book censored? The only thing that comes to me is that the main character is non-binary (pronouns they/them) and polyamorous.

Many of the deleted books are academic histories of racial minorities in America, like Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting in World War II at Home and Abroad and The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority. A rather substantial number are books of nerdy cultural history and criticism: Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850-1877; Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics; and Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films. The list goes on and on.

What books were preserved? Well, our country’s future Navy officers can still check out The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which argues that European Americans are naturally smarter than non-white people—even as a scientific critique of that book was censored: Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined.

Hitler’s Mein Kampf remains in the library, but gone are books like Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide, and Collective Memory. The library also kept copies of at least two openly white supremacist novels that I found in its database: Farnham’s Freehold, by Robert Heinlein, and The Camp of the Saints, by a fellow named Jean Raspail.

The Nimitz Library purge is not an isolated incident; though it touches our work directly, it’s not even remotely the most important. Since President Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has attacked free speech and educational institutions on multiple fronts. The list of these acts is so long that it becomes numbing to read, which is most likely the administration’s intent.

The president of the United States has tried to use state power to persecute news organizations, weaken the 83-year-old Voice of America, and strip public radio of funds for coverage he does not like. He has sought to punish Republican government officials for even minor criticism of his administration. He’s gone after foreign-born students who have peacefully protested against Israel’s war in Gaza, literally snatching some off the streets in acts reminiscent of the authoritarian countries from which many immigrants have fled.

And then there are the actions aimed at scientific research, schools, universities, libraries, and museums. For example, school libraries on military bases have been told to pull books the Department of Defense describes as “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics.” Meanwhile, the administration is gutting federal funding for public libraries—and has altered or removed thousands of federal web pages to prevent “public access to information on a range of topics related to science, health, equity, and foreign assistance programs, among others,” according to the American Library Association.

The administration is slashing funds to museums, including refusing to disburse already-approved grants, in order to restrict their exhibits, facilities, and activities. For example, the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services withdrew a 2024 grant awarded to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis that was intended to help the museum “reduce barriers for visitors with disabilities by planning and implementing interpretive tools and programs for learners with disabilities.” At the same time, cuts to funding for the Science Museum in St. Paul hobbled a data and community engagement project on climate action and a professional development collaboration on diversity and inclusion with 20 smaller museums in the Midwest, among other projects.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is exerting legal and financial pressure on school districts to remove curricula and books that tackle race, gender, and sexuality. It has threatened to pull billions of dollars in funding from universities for not toeing the administration’s ideological lines, especially around diversity programs. The president is trying to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard and other universities for not complying with his demands, despite lacking the legal authority to do so.

But it’s cuts to federal funding of science that stand to have the worst intellectual and economic impact. The administration has fired thousands of government scientists and indiscriminately frozen or cut billions of dollars in research funding in almost every area of science, from medicine to computing to astronomy, including cuts to research into cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

The cuts of course affect our beat, “the science of a meaningful life,” as my colleague Jill Suttie reports today in Greater Good. When we surveyed our network of almost 400 researchers, we discovered that many of them are seeing years of work destroyed by the cuts. Some were intentionally targeted for studying non-white populations, women, and gay, lesbian, or transgender people.

Across all domains, these measures add up to a coordinated effort to limit the expansion of scientific knowledge; squash free speech and debate; control cultural and scientific institutions for political purposes; and erase the experiences of women, people of color, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. These are not and should not be partisan issues. They’re attacks on what actually has made America great—fundamental ideals and principles that have bound this country together since its inception.

In the face of these attacks, scientists and institutions have started to band together. We’re seeing examples like the 200 scientists who were working on the National Nature Assessment, which studies the role of the natural world in America’s health, economy, and well-being. When the Trump administration came for their funding, they created United by Nature, “an initiative to provide evidence-based, nonpartisan insights into the changing state of nature across the country,” as one of the scientists, Phillip Levine, writes in The New York Times.

“When knowledge is threatened, don’t just mourn it,” writes Levine. “Build around it. Not with rage but with the kind of resolve that moves through spreadsheets and shared documents, late nights and collective purpose. Because science is only as resilient as the people who refuse to let it die.”

Libraries are resisting these assaults with their own efforts. The Data Rescue Project is tracking “who is rescuing which data and where it can be found now,” says the American Library Association. “The project’s website also highlights libraries across the country providing patrons with information on how to access federal data and help preserve it.”

After having initially acceded to the administration’s demands, universities have started coming together for self-protection. In April, more than 400 campus leaders signed a statement opposing attacks on academic freedom. As the statement says, “We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” These words and actions resonate with us here at Greater Good magazine: Our work relies on researchers’ unfettered exploration into what gives life meaning; we simply cannot fulfill our mission if this science is obstructed.

For what it’s worth, I applaud and support the work of leaders across sectors to stand up for science and academic freedom–and I believe it will become crucial for each of them to band together across their respective domains. When libraries are threatened, universities should speak out for them; if museums are being told to exclude particular cultures or ideas, every educational and media organization should mobilize on their behalf. An injury to one must become an injury to all. Without that institutional solidarity, science and learning don’t stand a chance.

This is not a movement confined to institutional elites. It’s something that all of us can embrace wherever we are, at every level—and many of us can serve as bridges between our employers and grassroots activity. At some point in the past three months, America crossed a line into a civil emergency. No one wants this to be true, but it’s a truth that must be faced. We urge our readers—Republicans and Democrats alike—to act in whatever ways you can to counter the attacks coming from Washington, D.C., to limit academic freedom and scientific inquiry.

We can look abroad for inspiration. When a xenophobic, authoritarian political party called the Law and Justice Party came to power in Poland in 2015, the country’s lawyers and judges took an unusual step. They traveled around Poland explaining how principles like due process and judicial independence affect ordinary people, and why they were critical to a functioning democracy. Not necessarily at universities or elite forums, but in churches and union halls, and through popular media.

Many of the judges and lawyers were politically quite conservative, and could make the case for the rule of law from that perspective, using Poland’s recent experience with Communism to inform their arguments. They didn’t tell anyone how to vote, but focused strictly on public education. This effort did not produce overnight results; the Law and Justice Party was not voted out until 2023.

That’s a model—combining popular education, non-partisanship, and patience—we need to emulate in the United States. As independent judges are arrested in America and lawyers are punished for representing the wrong clients, the legal profession is starting to mobilize in its own defense. But in this country, I believe scientists and scholars must make a similar effort, going to the places where Americans meet to make the case for science and academic freedom in terms everyone can understand. Making the case for science is inherent to our mission here at Greater Good, and it’s a task we are undertaking now with great urgency.

It’s important for those opposed to what is happening to remember that a little over half the electorate voted for the administration propelling these measures, and the president made small but significant inroads with populations that had previously spurned him, like Latinos and youth. There should be a place for soul-searching and humbly asking ourselves why research and education appear to have lost so much support in this country. That’s something else we can do at Greater Good magazine.

At the same time, however, we need to bear in mind that this is not even close to being the first time in history that political leaders have turned on teachers, scientists, librarians, curators, journalists, and other finders, organizers, and disseminators of knowledge. We don’t need to guess what will happen when politicians and political parties attack knowledge workers because we’ve seen it before. From Nazi Germany to McCarthyism in America to the Great Purge in the Soviet Union to the Cultural Revolution in China to Pol Pot’s Cambodia to ISIS in the contemporary Middle East, the results have never been good. Anti-intellectualism transcends left and right political categories; it cuts across social classes and cultures and religions. It’s a tool of control that history looks back on with horror and shame, never nostalgia.

It’s important to be fair. It’s important to listen and empathize. Facts and accuracy matter; the fight within ourselves against various kinds of bias is never over. Those are core values for us here at the Greater Good Science Center. In my view, however,  in the situation Americans are facing, doubt, humility, and empathy should be pathways to clarity and purpose, not paralysis and moral confusion. In these much-too-interesting times, we’re going to need to be courageous and at least a little fierce in defense of the principles and institutions that try to cultivate the best in us.

How can educators navigate this crisis? That’s the topic I explored in February of this year with beloved teacher, writer, and activist Parker J. Palmer. Drawing on decades of experience as a teacher and organizer, Palmer has published 10 books and over a hundred essays pondering the intersections of education, community, spirituality, and democracy.

As Palmer noted in our conversation, “A liberal education was meant to illuminate the dynamics of our inner lives, to liberate us from oppression, to prepare us to participate in the civic life of a democratic society, and to learn about social responsibility and social change. So the fight to preserve education in the arts and letters and sciences is a critical part of the fight to preserve democracy.”

What follows is an edited version of my conversation with Palmer.

Margarent Golden: You’ve written a lot about how we can hold our heartbreak in life-giving ways. Can you help us understand as educators how we might better navigate these heartbreaking times so we can continue to serve our students, staff, and communities?

Parker J. Palmer: The good news is that the world you just described—the shattered and violent world “out there”—is not the only world in which we live. We also live “in here,” in the heart, in a world of inwardness, of human identity and integrity, of self-exploration around questions of meaning and purpose.

So when the external world breaks both our hearts and our will to act, we can turn to the world “in here”—not as a place to escape, but as solid ground on which to stand in the middle of shifting sands. In solitude and in community, we can do inner work aimed at holding hard experiences in ways that yield life, not death—ways that allow us to get leverage on the external world.

What I’m saying about the interplay of our inner and outer worlds doesn’t come from studying the world’s great wisdom traditions. It comes from studying the great liberation movements of the past few centuries. Every democratic movement I’ve studied began with oppressed people—people who’ve been robbed of every form of external power—going inward, getting re-grounded in their identity and integrity, and standing firm in the one source of power that no one can take away from them: the worthiness, the sacredness of their own selfhood. They make a transformative decision to live “divided no more,” to refuse to behave outwardly in ways that contradict the truths they hold inwardly.

And when people like that come together in organized communities of support—multiplying the power of identity and integrity many times over and insisting that the world honor it—we tap into a wellspring of resistance and transformation, a countervailing power that comes from what’s within us and what’s between us.

MG: Many of us today, including myself, have been trying for a very long time to change public educational systems to become more inclusive spaces, and yet we seem as a culture to be heading backward in many respects. I’m wondering if you have any wisdom to share that might help us keep our hearts open in the face of what has become such a long and difficult struggle?

PJP: Well, put me on the list of people who struggle with all of this. Today, at age 86, looking back on a life of commitment to education and democracy, it’s tempting to get cynical about all of the backsliding these days and throw in the towel. But I learned something back in the day that’s helped keep me in the struggle. During the 1960s in Berkeley—where I got my first lessons in social change—a lot of us felt certain that this was the generation and this was the decade that would set America on a new course.

I left Berkeley (and academic life) in 1969 to become a community organizer in Washington, D.C., focused on issues of racial justice. Five years into that work, it became very clear that the problems I was working on, like white supremacy, were perennial, not seasonal. It also became clear that if I wanted to maintain my commitment to social change, I needed a new frame in which to understand it, a frame with a lot less hubris and a lot more humility than the one that characterized the 1960s in Berkeley. I needed a frame rooted in an understanding that the pursuit of values like love, truth, and justice is endless work, intergenerational work.

That’s when I began to understand that human beings always find themselves standing and acting in the Tragic Gap, the gap between the harsh realities around us and what we know to be possible because we’ve seen it happen from time to time. It’s tragic not just because it’s sad, but because it is the result of our flawed nature, a flaw in reality itself. This gap is not a bug in the nature of things, it’s a feature that’s been known from the Greeks through the biblical era through Shakespeare.

Our job is to learn how to stand and act in the tragic gap, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, knowing that the gap will never close once and for all. We are asked to hold the tension of the gap, refusing to flip out into the cynicism that comes from giving in to life’s harsh realities—or into the ungrounded idealism that comes from floating above the fray in the world of possibilities. If I were to design a curriculum to prepare social activists, the Tragic Gap would be lesson #1, and the punch line would be, “If you’re not willing to spend a lifetime in that gap, and keep going despite all the ways you will fall short, you should find a different line of work.”

It helps to understand that short-term “effectiveness” cannot be the primary standard by which you live if you want to work for love, truth, and justice. If you insist on being effective, you’ll take on smaller and smaller tasks, because they are the only ones with which you can get quick results.

If you want to do deep work for social change, “faithfulness” is the only standard that will help you hold the course day after day. I mean faithfulness to your own gifts, faithfulness to opportunities where your gifts might help, and faithfulness to investing yourself where those two converge. That’s the only way you can live into the old rabbinical saying, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

MG: In your now-classic book, The Courage to Teach, you explored the question, “Who is the self that teaches?” In my role as a teacher educator, I’ve introduced countless students to that text, with many being completely blown away by your words. What about that book, do you think, really resonated with these teachers? And why did you give it that title?

PJP: I’m sure readers could answer that question better than I can! But I can say that when I wrote the book, I was not thinking about how to reach teachers. I simply wanted to write something that was faithful to my own experience as a teacher. When the publisher’s marketing people ask me, “Who are you writing to?,” I’ve always said, “I can’t answer that. All I can tell you is where I’m writing from, and that’s from a place of authenticity.” So I wrote about teaching as I experienced it within myself, an experience that has always been laced with a strong sense of calling, and a big dose of fear! When you write from your own depths, you have a chance to connect with the same depths in your readers.

I think the title resonated almost immediately with teachers. Unless you are phoning it in, you teach from a place of caring about your students, caring about your subject, caring about how to bring all of this into creative interaction. So good teaching makes you vulnerable, and vulnerability takes courage, especially in a culture of fear such as the one that permeates education.

So, I think good teachers felt recognized by the title, and by opening words like these: “Good teaching can never be reduced to technique—good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher, and from [their] capacity for connectedness.” I think the subtitle resonated as well: “Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life.”

The book is a humanistic approach to teaching, in contrast to the mechanistic approach so often taken by the focus on “tips, tricks, and techniques.” The good teacher is an organic node that holds together a complex weave of teacher, students, and subject. The finest compliment I ever got about the book came when I started doing retreats based on the book for K–12 teachers, retreats that grew into the Center for Courage and Renewal. At the end, one teacher said, “This is the first time in 20 years of teaching that I’ve been regarded organically, as a plant to be nurtured and grown, rather than as a broken machine to be fixed.”

One thing is clear to me: At the heart of education reform, we must have proper regard—respect, really—for teachers, and we must find ways to support their inner development as it impacts the practice of teaching. If we can’t do that, we will never have a system in which both teachers and students can thrive. And if the system refuses to provide us with that support, we must find ways outside of the system to support each other.

MG: I think it’s so important what you’re saying about vulnerability being at the heart of authenticity because that requires us to understand our gifts and our limitations. You’ve written a lot about the importance of embracing this wholeness. Can you talk a bit about what that means for educators? 

PJP: For me, wholeness has nothing to do with perfection. Instead, it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. We live in broken times, and that leaves us feeling broken, as well.

In my work with teachers over the years, I’ve found that many of us are plagued by a sense of “not being enough.” The demands of teaching are endless and bottomless, more so today than ever before. I could spend my life beating myself up about the students I failed to reach, or the systems I failed to reform. But if I refuse to do the inner work required to integrate all of that shadow-side stuff into my sense of self, I disempower myself—and sooner or later it will take me down.

For me, this has been an existential issue related to my three deep dives into clinical depression. For me, liberation from all that darkness came when I was able to say, “I am ALL of the above—my gifts and my achievements AND the part of me that sometimes stands on the edge of a precipice and starts slipping into it.” Showing up in the world as we truly are is a source of strength and courage, since we are no longer spending energy trying to hide out. And it turns out that when we are willing to be vulnerable with more of our truth, we connect more deeply with others in the community that we all need to sustain us.

What keeps us from showing up with our whole truth—from speaking truth to power—is the knowledge that we are likely to be punished in some way if we do. In the social movements I’ve studied, I’ve found that the courage to live “divided no more” comes from people who have transformed their own understanding of the logic of punishment. They understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment—by living a divided life, by acting and speaking on the outside in ways that are not congruent with what we know to be true on the inside.

These days, at age 86, there’s one more motivator to live “divided no more”: I feel quite certain that there can be no sadder way to die than knowing that you never showed up in the world as your whole self, standing for all that you valued and loved, and against all that threatens it.

MG: I’d like to shift the conversation a bit and get your perspective on how educators can support our immigrant and LGBTQ students, that for many showing up “whole” is literally life-threatening.

PJP: I appreciate you naming that fact because my thoughts about the current administration hinge very directly on people being damaged, sometimes mortally damaged, by their actions. And, of course, there are forms of courage that very few young people are able to adopt or embody at this tender developmental stage of their lives. So I think it’s a lot about companioning those young people, advocating for those young people, accompanying and befriending them on what has to be an enormously crushing journey that so many folks are taking right now.

As adults who understand that no punishment anybody might lay on us could possibly be greater than the punishment that comes from conspiring in our own diminishment, we must tell the truth about the injuries being done to trans kids, to other members of the LGBTQ+ community, to immigrants who are seeking a better life, and to asylum seekers, to any and all who will listen.

MG: A few years back, you gave the keynote address for a conference on spirituality in education at Naropa University. It was subsequently published as an essay entitled “The Grace of Great Things: Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning.” To this day, it is one of my favorites and such an important teaching for us now. Toward the end, you wrote, “The sacred is something we carry in our hearts into the world, in solitude and in community.” Can you explain what you mean by “the sacred” and how educators can carry it into their schools, classrooms, and communities?

PJP: Let me give this a little context. In the book, I define the inner life as having three dimensions: intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. And I define “spirituality” as ANY way a person answers the eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than one’s own ego—something that can save us from the loneliness of self-absorption, something that can give us a sense of meaning and purpose.

I like this definition of “the spiritual” because it is value-neutral: It embraces all of the world’s wisdom traditions (including secular humanism) at their best as well as collective movements like the Third Reich that cause people to lose their identity and integrity and commit egregious evil. All of this falls under the heading of “spirituality.” As one of my teachers used to say, “When the Nazis talked about blood, soil, and race, they did not mean hemoglobin, dirt, and genes. They meant some sort of transcendent blessing on the superiority of the so-called Aryan race, a superiority that gave believers license to do anything they could get away with to advance their murderous cause.”

In that context, sacred means that which we find worthy of respect, which leads directly to the question, “What are we teaching our students about what’s worthy of their respect? Or about what will answer their yearning to be connected with something that will give them a sense of meaning and purpose?” As I look around the U.S. today and see what is pretty clearly the continuing decline of our democracy and the rise of something that looks a lot like early-stage fascism, I have a lot of questions.

What we owe our students are some basic tools of discernment to come up with life-giving answers to their spiritual yearnings. I’m irrevocably opposed to any form of indoctrination in the classroom. But I’m also opposed to any form of education that ignores the quest for meaning and purpose, and the tools of discernment that can help people make considered choices.

In education, that translates into deep respect for the students in front of me, seeing through the false fronts they often hide behind into the struggles of heart, soul, and mind that so many bring to the classroom. It also means deep respect for the discipline that I’m trying to bring my students into, a discipline that has developed over long years, sometimes centuries, of hard work by a lot of dedicated people, a discipline that should be the plumb line of everything we do.

But according to a new book, Start Making Sense by psychologist Steven Heine, this is the wrong attitude. By reflecting on existential questions like these and considering our own answers to these questions, we can live a more authentic, meaningful existence.

“When people feel they are leading a meaningful life, their lives make more sense to them,” writes Heine. “They have a sense of purpose that guides their behaviors. They feel that their lives matter and that they’re capable of making a difference in the world.”

Why focus on meaning

As Heine writes, the search for meaning is an inherent part of being human. Yet many of us don’t take the time to think about our place in the universe or what we value most. Instead of focusing on what might bring us more meaning, we distract ourselves with superficial sources of gratification—like overconsumption, alcohol and drugs, TV bingeing, or mindless social media scrolling—which are easier to access and, therefore, tempting. The ease with which we can get sucked into these interferes with making meaningful changes to our lives, argues Heine.

How to focus more on the larger context of our lives? We can look to philosophers who tried to explain the different approaches to the search for meaning, argues Heine. For example, Kierkegaard, a theologian, believed in God but also believed that people have free will and meaning in life is a personal construction. Camus, on the other hand, believed there was no God or inherent meaning in life; so, we must revolt against the absurdity of it all and live life with passion. Contemplating conflicting views like these, Heine suggests, help us clarify our own beliefs about life’s bigger questions. And, he adds, psychological science can help explain why we have this urge to see our lives as coherent and meaningful. If they aren’t, we’ll experience unpleasant cognitive dissonance and try to resolve that, somehow.

“Our brains have evolved what I term a sense-making system, which ensures that we feel what we are doing is meaningful and makes good sense . . . and directs us to make efforts to correct matters whenever it senses anything that no longer makes sense,” he writes.

Though we have tools at our disposal, the path to more meaning is not necessarily straight or narrow, Heine writes, but one involving personal choice and many possible detours. Our personal sense of meaning will be affected by our culture and the events in our lives—how we managed them and what they taught us. The trick is to recognize this and use it to our advantage.

“Everything we encounter is wrapped up in layers of meanings, many of which are subjective and personal, and those meanings determine the ways that we make sense of our situation and the ways we act,” writes Heine. In other words, we have some power over the meaning we attribute to events and how these come together to shape the meaning of our lives overall.

How to infuse life with more meaning

The keys to a meaningful life generally stem from three things: our close personal relationships and communities, our work, and being connected to something greater than ourselves. Each of these can have a huge effect on our well-being through the meaning they impart. While there isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach, here are some tips Heine suggests for finding meaning:

Ground yourself in your personal values. When people encounter problems in their lives, they can react in different ways depending on how grounded they feel, says Heine.

“When people are grounded, they feel that the key connections in their lives that provide the foundation of a sense of meaning are solidly intact,” he writes. “They know who they are, who their important relationships are, and what they stand for, and they are in a better position to confront any new threats they might encounter.”

A simple exercise of writing about what you value and why it’s important has been found to benefit people in many situations, writes Heine. He points to studies suggesting that doing so can help people change their lifestyle in healthy ways, do better in school when disadvantaged, and accept their choices in life and their mortality more easily.

Use nostalgia to reflect on your life. Engaging in nostalgia can help us see parts of ourselves that have remained steadfast, despite the passage of time. By reflecting on past experiences and how we dealt with them, we can boost our sense of continuity and authenticity.

To stimulate nostalgia, you can look through old photos, listen to favorite songs from the past, or go through old keepsakes and recall what was happening at that time of your life, says Heine. Or you can contact an old friend and reminisce about the past. It can be especially powerful to recall times when you were socially connected with others, he adds, since relationships are so meaningful.

“By making your past memories more accessible, you will be better able to connect the path of your current life with the events that occurred along the way, writes Heine. “You will be reminded about how the events of your path have shaped who you are today.”

Research has found that reflecting on our lives through nostalgia can help us increase our sense of meaning, feel more socially connected, have a greater sense of authenticity, and be motivated to pursue important goals, among other benefits.

Pursue self-transcendent experiences. There is a reason many people find meaning in religion—it can give us a sense of self-transcendence or being connected to something bigger than ourselves. But for nonbelievers, there are other ways to seek transcendent experiences that inspire awe and wonder—and these, too, bring meaning to our lives.

For example, watching a beautiful sunset or a starlit sky, witnessing people doing supremely moral acts, encountering deep states of meditation, or seeing incredible architecture or art can all inspire awe. When we have these kinds of mind-expanding experiences, they challenge our view of everyday existence in a way that forces us to think about what life means and what matters.

“During . . . awe experiences, people’s lives often feel more significant and meaningful, as they have the sense that they are connected to something much vaster than themselves and that their existence extends beyond the material world,” writes Heine.

Enhance your relationships. “One of the most reliable sources of meaning in our lives is the interpersonal connections that we have—in particular, those of our closest relationships,” writes Heine.

For that reason, it’s good to spend time with those we love—whether that means our families, friends, or romantic partners. Nurturing these relationships brings a sense of meaning in life; even when they are challenging, our sense of meaning can help us maintain them in the long run. For example, a parent who finds taking care of their kids to be tedious or difficult may be able to persevere and find joy because of the meaning it provides in their lives.

Another way that relationships can imbue meaning is when we are part of a group or community with shared interests and values. If you lack this sense of belonging in your life, it could help to volunteer for a cause you believe in—perhaps providing help to others in need or working toward preserving a green space in your community—which can help connect you with others.

Find meaning and purpose in your work. The work we do in the world is a primary way we fulfill existential needs, writes Heine. “When people think about who they are, a big part of their answer comes from what they do for a living or whatever organizations they belong to.”

Work provides a sense of identity and self-worth, and it allows us to contribute to something greater than ourselves, which feels purposeful. Work can also bring us meaning if the money we earn is used to provide for others (e.g., our families). Simply recognizing this can help us see the meaning behind what we do for a living, making our lives richer.

Some careers lend themselves easily to finding meaning—such as those serving the needs of others, like teachers, health care workers, or the clergy, writes Heine. However, it can be challenging to find meaning in work for many people. Part of that comes from changing trends in the work world itself—like more remote work and less stable employment. But some of it comes from not keeping in mind the greater purpose of our work—how it contributes to something bigger than ourselves and to our sense of self-efficacy.

If you find it hard to find meaning in work—or if you’ve retired and have lost the everyday meaning work supplied—it’s still possible to find meaning in volunteering, participating in groups that interest you, or taking classes, writes Heine.

Seek psychologically rich experiences. While there are many roads to happiness and meaning, one that is less commonly recognized is what psychologists call a “psychologically rich life.” This means seeking experiences that are novel and different—ones that challenge our way of thinking, offer us new perspectives, or stimulate deep feelings in us.

While these can be large in scope (like living abroad for a year), they can also be simple and easy to do, writes Heine. For example, he suggests things like trying out a new ethnic cuisine, visiting an art gallery, or trying out an escape room with friends.

“Psychologically rich experiences present people with complex challenges, and they provide opportunities for learning and discovery, all of which tend to be associated with enhanced feelings of meaning,” he writes.

Recognize your own heroic journey. All of us have had to face obstacles at some point in our lives. If we can reflect on how we overcame those obstacles—whether by pulling on our personal resources, learning new ways of thinking or behaving, creating allies to help us in our quest, or something else—we can tap into our own heroic narrative and find a sense of meaning in our existence.

Of course, writing about the heroic thread in your life story may not grab you. Nor might some of the other ways to find meaning that Heine suggests. But it doesn’t hurt to assess where you’re at in each of these areas of life and see what you may be missing, he says.

“If you can shore up any of the underpinnings of meaning that you find are lacking, you’ll likely start to feel that your life is more meaningful.”

This scene comes from our study on adolescents’ development of transcendent thinking and purpose in an intergenerational storytelling program. We partnered with Sages & Seekers, an organization whose mission is to bring together adolescents with elders from their communities in insight-generating friendship. Adolescents, the “seekers,” share dreams about the lives they want to live, and older adults, the “sages,” share stories and lessons from the lives they have lived. This is not a mentoring program, where one group holds more knowledge than the other. Instead, the groups learn from and benefit each other. For the seekers, the program is an opportunity to build perspective on values and beliefs that will guide their future lives. For the sages, it offers an opportunity to view the world again through the eyes of a young person—to look back on their life from a more current perspective, and to distill learnings.

It’s clear from their excitement and commitment that the teens find value and enjoyment in this opportunity. At USC’s Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education, we wondered: How do they grow through this experience? How might they come to conceptualize their adult potential, trying on new identities and building narratives about the adult they would like to become? For us, this eight-week program offered a window into how teens develop capacities for meaning-making, and a way to understand how they build purpose even beyond such a program. We believe that the lessons we learned can help educators, parents, and teens themselves to appreciate and unlock the benefits of relationships, reflections, and what we are calling “transcendent thinking” for wellness, purpose, and psychological growth. 

Transformative conversations

After each weekly session, we asked the teens to reflect on how they felt and on what they had learned that day, in a short video message to us.

Analyzing their thoughts, we gained insights that are at once simple and profound. As seekers reflected on the raw and deep complexities of the sages’ lived experiences, they began to extract broader lessons from their own lived experiences—grappling emotionally and cognitively with what they had witnessed and felt, and then moving beyond to generate the underlying convictions, aspirations, and identities that form the stuff of a promising transition to adulthood.

We call this process of moving beyond “transcendent thinking” because it builds from the specifics of situations and happenings, and their associated emotions, to broader considerations and curiosities that guide teens’ enduring dreams, intentions, identities, and values. It’s thinking that builds meaning beyond the concrete here and now.

Consider Michael, a 17-year-old from Los Angeles. After the first session with his elder partner, Sal, he sought to identify specific, factual circumstances that could serve as a concrete basis on which they could relate:

I found out that we have a lot of things in common. Like, we both like to sing music, a lot of the same music that’s similar tastes, and that in our lives we have had crazy females. . . . For me, it was my mom and for him it was his sister.

The commonalities Michael found created an unguarded starting point—a launchpad from which to build a friendship with Sal. And his thinking progressed from there. By the next session, Michael’s and Sal’s shared interest in the history of basketball provided just the right outlet for Michael to begin to explore how things can change over time, an early move toward transcendence:

Today we were talking about our thoughts on basketball and how it’s changed throughout the years.

As the weeks unfolded, Michael’s thinking continued to shift in subtle yet important ways. By week five, he was reflecting on broad values:

The thing I took away from my conversation with my sage was that, you know, we both think that the family is very important, and it influences our lives throughout. . . . Like what his mom says [to him when he was young], what his dad says to him and how he is as a person today. And with me, like how my mom and dad influence me to become a better person every day [and to] try and not be taken down easily.

Quite remarkably, we see that as Michael built a friendship and shared stories with Sal, he moved from basketball hoops and music tastes to exploring the intergenerational roots of his character.

Transcendent thinking develops adolescents’ sense of purpose

As Michael’s reflections demonstrate, over the weeks, participants’ transcendent thoughts moved them beyond the specifics of situations and happenings, as their reflections became more forward-looking, integrative, and aspirational. Michael decided he wanted to “become a better person every day”—a values-based, growth-oriented goal that extends indefinitely into the rest of his life. This feature of intergenerational conversations—an orientation toward values and the future— turned out to be key: The teens who showed such boundless but considered thinking tended to experience a burgeoning sense of purpose, defined as an energized sense of commitment to life goals that are personally meaningful.


And this pattern turned up across many of the seekers’ evolving narratives once we began to look. For example, another seeker, Laura, reflected in a late session of the program that her sage “has tried a lot of new things, and then she kind of just encouraged me more to try new things because you don’t want to go through life without trying things and regretting things in the future.” Or Joline, who reflected to her sage, “You mentioned going back to school when you were 41 years of age. To me, that shows persistence. It gives me the message to never give up regardless of the circumstances. It really helps me build my motivation especially when it comes to school. . . . [it] motivates me to keep pushing and working hard.”

Relationships are key

Adolescents can derive meaning from all sorts of mundane experiences on their own, but doing so requires active and patient reflection that can feel safer and be more productive in the context of a supportive intergenerational friendship.

In our program, the older adults brought hard-earned wisdom and life experience, and thoughtfully and vulnerably unpacking these with their teenage partners may have modeled for the adolescents how to engage with, relive, and reflect on their own experiences—both those already had and those yet to come. The new friends’ shared stories that challenged the teens’ assumptions and validated their personal experiences, striking a harmonic chord that resonated for the teens, and helped the teens develop a deeper understanding of themselves and their aspirations.

Judging from the tenor of the room, the eagerness of the participants, and the seriousness with which the teens explained their thoughts, this kind of reflection is deeply engaging and compelling for teens. It is also potentially critical for their development, as we explore next.

Transcendent thinking supports adolescents’ brain growth

Our current work extends these findings to show something quite extraordinary. Not only does adolescents’ transcendent thinking grow the mind—we found that it grows the brain. In an additional set of studies, another group of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse adolescents reflected on complex social stories and personal experiences first in an interview, and then while undergoing brain scans.

The stories they engaged with were powerful and true, such as the story of Malala Yousafzai and stories of the violence and crimes youth had themselves witnessed. Participants reported experiencing complex feelings, and as they talked in interviews and later reflected in the scanner, they grappled not only with the concrete facts of the stories, but with their broader meaning—for themselves and for the world.  While they weren’t engaging in intergenerational conversations, the kinds of thinking and reflections they did were similar.

The brain scanning data revealed that when teens reflected in this way, they showed dynamic, coordinated patterns of activity and deactivity in key networks of the brain involved in emotion, executive functioning, self-processing, and reflection (in effect, a sort of neural “conversation” between brain networks for action and reflection, all the while with strong activations in regions involved in emotional feelings, self-awareness, and agency).

This was interesting, but the most striking findings revealed themselves years later. As we followed our participants over five years into young adulthood, scanning their brains a second time in the interim, we discovered that mid-adolescents with greater dispositions for transcendent thinking tended to show more brain development across the two years following the initial interview. That is, comparing teens’ brains from the first to the second scan—comparing them to themselves two years prior, not to each other—we found that youths who engaged in more transcendent thinking in the interview later grew their brains more over the next two years. This brain growth, in turn, predicted their identity development, which then predicted their life satisfaction as young adults. In the end, what this study showed is that it is not simply what teens think, but how they think, that grows their purpose and their brains over time.

In addition to these benefits, other studies of ours suggest that transcendent thinking can promote the development of adolescents’ spiritual and civic ideas, and even help protect brain development against the effects of witnessing community violence.

Implications for practice

Taken together, these studies reveal the powerful role of adolescents’ own dispositions of mind, and patterns of thought, in their healthy growth. Adolescents are naturally inclined toward, and deeply motivated by, reflecting on the values, beliefs, and identities that will support them in becoming fulfilled young adults.

When the situation is conducive, youth often engage spontaneously in the kinds of transcendent thinking that grow them both neurologically and personally. But other people can provide important supports and modeling for these meaningful reflections. For that, adolescents need safe spaces in which to build trusted and appropriate friendships with adults and elders. Through these friendships, adults can model emotionally meaningful reflections on lived experiences, and teens can be supported in constructing a values-based sense of self and a life purpose oriented toward a productive and happy future.

One of the seekers in our study said it well, in the tribute she read to her sage on the last day of the program. “Nancy gave me a goal…,” she shared, “never to limit myself to one option . . . never to stop at what is required, but to go beyond.”

But, as psychologist Jamil Zaki argues in his book, Hope for Cynics, that’s exactly the wrong approach to facing future challenges. Based on research out of his Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, he argues that hope is a more activating, muscular emotion than cynicism or despair, and that hope is necessary for focusing our efforts and creating positive change.

Though hope may seem hard to find, it can be deliberately cultivated, he argues, by fighting our biases and getting a more realistic, evidence-based picture of other people—and our shared situation.

Greater Good spoke to Zaki about the importance of hope—and why practicing hope should be part of everyone’s New Year’s resolution.

Jill Suttie: Why should we allow ourselves to be hopeful or optimistic about the future right now?

Jamil Zaki: It’s important to distinguish hope from optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will turn out well, and that can make us rosy and happy, but it can also make us feel complacent. It’s also often a mismatch with what’s going on around us. If things are really feeling broken in our lives or in the world, optimism can seem ridiculous.

But, hope is different. It’s not the belief that things will go well, it’s the belief that they could improve and that we don’t know what the future holds. Because of that, our actions matter.

So, hope is not a way of ignoring problems or pretending like everything is great when it’s not. In fact, it’s a way of tackling and taking problems head on and saying, “Well, things are not great now, but I can envision a better future. I can find the other people who want it and we can work together to try to achieve it.” It’s actually a great frame of mind for facing adversity—to retain a vision that things could improve.

JS: What does research say about the benefits of staying hopeful—say, versus having a more cynical outlook?

JZ: Oh, that’s massive. It’s very clear that people who are hopeful versus cynical thrive in all sorts of ways. Their mental health is better, their relationships tend to be stronger, and they tend to achieve more. They’re more focused on the most important goals that they have. So, for instance, hopeful people are more likely to vote or engage in civic action and social movements.

Both hope and optimism tend to be beneficial for people’s mental health. But hope is also tied to people’s actions. People are more likely to actually go out and strive if they are hopeful.

JS: In your book, you write about the importance of having “hopeful skepticism.” What is that exactly, and how is it beneficial?

JZ: A lot of people think that the opposite of being cynical is being gullible—a naive rube or chump who believes that everybody is great until they get taken advantage of. But that’s not the opposite of cynicism. In fact, cynics and gullible people have more in common than cynics would probably like to admit. They both start with a conclusion—in the case of cynics, people are terrible; in the case of gullible people, they’re great—and then try to support that conclusion by only paying attention to whatever evidence confirms their bias.

Skeptics think more like scientists. They don’t assume that people are great or terrible. They withhold judgment and try to learn when, with whom, and in what situations they can trust and feel hopeful. It’s a much better way to learn about the world, to adapt and build relationships.

Hopeful skepticism is simply saying, “I’m going to think like a scientist. I’m going to wait for evidence [before making broad generalizations].” But, most of us tend to be too cynical without evidence. When we pay attention to the data, when we look at what people are really like, we’re probably going to be pleasantly surprised.

JS: That reminds me of a study in your book, where you had Democrats and Republicans talk about hot-button issues (like abortion and gun control) and predict how positive the discussions would be. They were pretty sure the conversations wouldn’t go well, but they did. People rated them as 100% positive. Were you surprised by that?

JZ: We were super surprised, which is ironic given that our hypothesis was that this would go better than people expected. We thought people might underestimate the value of these conversations, but we didn’t realize that we were also underestimating the value of these conversations.

In research, one of the most important things is to protect the well-being of the participants who are taking part in your experiments. So, well, we were really worried. What if people tried to dox one another or threaten one another? What if they swore at or insulted one another? We predicted that our moderators would have to stop 25% of the conversations because they would go too poorly. We were wrong.

The people having the conversations were also wrong. When we asked them, they predicted that the conversations would be somewhere between neutral and awful, and that they’d probably dislike the person more after the conversation. Everyone, the scientists and the participants, were shocked at how positive the conversations were.

That’s great in a way. But it’s terrible too, because it just goes to show you how much our media system has fed us information about “the other” that is wrong and purposefully frightening. It makes us imagine that people we disagree with are more extreme, more hateful, more anti-democratic, and more violent than they really are. It’s sad that we’ve been given these cynical perceptions.

The good news is that when we actually get off our screens and meet one another, we’re often surprised at how much we have in common.

JS: I know a lot of people, personally, who are changing how they take in news—some avoiding it altogether. Where should people look to stay informed, but not fall into despair and increase hateful feelings towards each other?

JZ: Besides the GGSC [Greater Good Science Center], of course [laughs], there’s something called the Solutions Journalism Network. In particular, the Solutions Story Tracker is a website with positive news, but it’s not fluffy, positive news, like a cat being saved from a tree. It’s about real, important social problems, but also about people in communities striving to address those problems in creative ways.

What I do is I bounce back and forth. If I read the New York Times and I feel devastated by anti-democratic practices or something else, I’ll go on Solution Story Tracker and look up that same topic. That helps me balance my media diet.

I completely sympathize with people who are just shutting out the news altogether. But, that’s not what I want to do; I want to stay informed. But I also want to feel as though I’m not only looking at the most sensationalistic, negative depictions of what’s happening in the world—not just because that feels bad, but because it’s only half the story. I want to know what people are doing to make things better, to be inspired and be challenged as well.

JS: Besides changing your news diet, are there other ways people can infuse more hope into their lives—especially for those who find it hard to be hopeful?

JZ: I have a whole appendix in my book that walks you through exactly what you might do to cultivate hopeful skepticism.

Here are a few things for now. One is to fact-check your cynical feelings. A lot of us have things that we think or feel that are really broad and general—like you can’t trust anybody these days, or this group of people are all pretty immoral. The next time you think that, ask yourself, What data do I have for that claim? Is that really something that I can defend?

If not, the second step would be to collect more social data. Often what this means is contacting, talking with, and interacting with real people. Cynicism is so easy on our screens, but hope is much more natural close up. To the extent that we can get close to people and even take leaps of faith with them—trust them in ways that let them show us who they are—that can also build hope.

The third practice is what I call “positive gossip”—sharing stories about human goodness. For me, that’s helpful, not just in combating other people’s cynicism, but in fighting my own.

JS: Yes, you’ve written that you’re a self-proclaimed cynic. What gives you hope for the year ahead?

JZ: That’s a great question. I would say the young people that I interact with are a perennial source of hope. That includes my children, but also my students. I hear so much stereotyping of young people as self-centered or narcissistic, and my experience is the exact opposite. I see Gen Z and Gen Alpha as being the most globally informed and concerned generation I’ve ever known. I think this causes them a lot of anxiety, but also infuses them with such potential. So, I love to see my students growing in their thinking, developing their ideas and their sense of what contribution they want to make to the world.

JS: Do you see these younger generations as hopeful themselves?

JZ: They are certainly more mistrusting of people than earlier generations, which might be in part because we teach them to be mistrustful. The style of parenting that we’ve adopted since the 1980s is much more oriented towards fear than it was before. But, I also see young people as wanting to do a lot, and though I think that’s beautiful, it can also make it harder for them to feel hopeful.

One critical finding from the science of hope is that you need both a will or desire for a better future, but also a path for achieving it. I worry sometimes about the young people in my life, because they seem to want to make a difference in huge global issues that are very hard to put a dent in and can make us feel helpless.

So, I often tell my students to think globally, but hope locally. Focus on parts of their lives and parts of the world where they have agency and where they can see the power of their actions making a difference. I think that’s the best way to maintain hope.

JS: So, do you think staying hopeful makes for a good New Year’s resolution?

JZ: [Laughs] Yes! One could argue that hope is part of all New Year’s resolutions, because they all entail wanting a better future for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, and for the world. Really, the essence of any New Year’s resolution is to experience hope for something better.