(2013-08-02) Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness

People who are happy but have little-to-no sense of meaning in their lives (Meaningful Life) have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity... It’s important to understand that for many people, a sense of meaning and happiness in life overlap; many people score jointly high (or jointly low) on the happiness and meaning measures in the study. But for many others, there is a dissonance — they feel that they are low on happiness and high on meaning or that their lives are very high in happiness, but low in meaning. This last group, which has the gene expression pattern associated with adversity, formed a whopping 75 percent of study participants.