Why is there so much mental and emotional trauma inside our traditional public school system these days? Why have so many kids lost their purpose, and spend their days roaming schools like zombies in a post-apocalyptic world? Are we working on the right things with our kids, or is our curriculum so outdated that even the best of our students are becoming more and more disengaged with what is going on in these places called schools?
I thought about these questions as I listened to a TED Talk by Emily Esfahani Smith titled “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy.” Smith says this,
“I used to think the whole purpose of life was pursuing happiness. Everyone said the path to happiness was success, so I searched for that ideal job, that perfect boyfriend, that beautiful apartment. But instead of every feeling fulfilled, I felt anxious and adrift. And I wasn’t alone; my friends – they struggled with this, too.”
“Eventually I decided to go to graduate school for positive psychology to learn what truly makes people happy. But what I discovered there changed my life. The data showed that chasing happiness can make people unhappy. And what really struck me was this: the suicide rate has been rising around the world, and it recently reached a 30-year high in America. Even though life is getting objectively better by nearly every conceivable standard, more people feel hopeless, depressed and alone. There’s an emptiness gnawing away at people, and you don’t have to be clinically depressed to feel it. Sooner or later, I think we all wonder: Is this all there is? And according to the research, what predicts this despair is not a lack of happiness. It’s a lack of something else, a lack of having meaning in life.”
“But that raised some questions for me. Is there more to life than being happy? And what’s the difference between being happy and having meaning in life? Many psychologists define happiness as a state of comfort and ease, feeling good in the moment. Meaning, though, is deeper. The renowned psychologist Martin Seligman says meaning comes from belonging to and serving something beyond yourself and from developing the best within you. Our culture is obsessed with happiness, but I came to see that seeking meaning is the more fulfilling path. And the studies show that people who have meaning in life, they’re more resilient, they do better in school and at work, and they even live longer.”
“So this all made me wonder: How can we each live more meaningfully? To find out, I spent five years interviewing hundreds of people and reading through thousands of pages of psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Bringing it all together, I found that there are what I call four pillars of a meaningful life. And we can each create lives of meaning by building some of all of these pillars in our lives.”
“The first pillar is belonging. Belonging comes from being in relationships where you’re valued for who you are intrinsically and where you value others as well. But some groups and relationships deliver a cheap form of belonging; you’re valued for what you believe, for who you hate, not for who you are. True belonging springs from love. It lives in moments among individuals, and it’s a choice – you can choose to cultivate belonging with others.”
“For many people, belonging is the most essential source of meaning, those bonds to family and friends. For others, the key to meaning is the second pillar: purpose. Now, finding your purpose is not the same thing as finding that job that makes you happy. Purpose is less about what you want than about what you give. A hospital custodian told me her purpose is healing sick people. Many parents tell me, ‘My purpose is raising my children.’ The key to purpose is using your strengths to serve others. Of course, for many of us, that happens through work. That’s how we contribute and feel needed. But that also means that issues like disengagement at work, unemployment, low labor force participation – these aren’t just economic problems, they’re existential ones, too. Without something worthwhile to do, people founder. Of course, you don’t have to find purpose at work, but purpose gives you something to live for, some ‘why’ that drives you forward.”
“The third pillar of meaning is also about stepping beyond yourself, but in a completely different way: transcendence. Transcendent states are those rare moments when you’re lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life, your sense of self fades away, and you feel connected to a higher reality. For one person I talked to, transcendence came from seeing art. For another person, it was at church. For me, I’m a writer, and it happens through writing. Sometimes I get so in the zone that I lose all sense of time and place. These transcendent experiences can change you. One study had students look up at 200-feet-tall eucalyptus trees for one minute. But afterwards they felt less self-centered, and they even behaved more generously when given the change to help someone.”
“Belonging, purpose, transcendence. Now, the fourth pillar of meaning, I’ve found, tends to surprise people. The fourth pillar is storytelling, the story you tell yourself about yourself. Creating a narrative from the events of your life brings clarity. It helps you understand how you became you. But we don’t always realize that we’re the authors of our stories and can change the way we’re telling them. Your life isn’t just a list of events. You can edit, interpret, and retell your story, even as you’re constrained by the facts.”
Finding a meaningful life is all about belonging, purpose, transcendence, and storytelling.
Now let me ask you a question – how much time do we work on building belonging, purpose, transcendence, and storytelling in our traditional school system?
I think we all know the answer. Very little.
Maybe, if we would restructure the learning day so that kids spent time working on skills like belonging, purpose, transcendence, and storytelling, then we would start to see young learners with the meaningfulness to take on skills like reading, writing, problem-solving, character development, and those interests that make each one of them who they are as learners.
But that would mean a serious restructuring of how a learning day looked and how a learning day went. Sadly, I don’t think most schools and districts have any interest in weaving these meaningfulness skills into their daily routine. They are more interested in taking federal bucks to pay for additional counselors and mental health staff instead of thinking about what a new learning day might look like for their young learners.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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