Flourishing amid suffering
Hope College. August 23, 2022.
A pair of interlocking questions have fascinated thinkers across millennia. First, philosophers, sages, and religious teachers have tried to address the question: “what makes for a good life?” Trying to understand what gives life meaning has been a central human concern. Second, people are often troubled by, and try to understand, the question: “how do we make sense of evil in the world?” In some domains, the study of the existence of evil is called theodicy, or how evil came to be—especially if there exists some sort of omnipotent and omniscient benevolent supernatural agent (e.g., God).
These are perplexing questions with significant psychological consequences. After all, many of us long to spend our lives meaningfully contributing to something larger than ourselves, and we tend to orient ourselves around some set of values that guides our behaviors. But many of us have also experienced pain, tragedy, loss, and grief; or we’ve struggled to come to terms with the stinging cold of indifference in the world; or we’ve suffered traumatic events that may lead us to question the goodness of the world. Even if we’re not consciously thinking about these topics, how we answer them directs a fair share of our daily behavior.
Existential Positive Psychology
These seemingly intractable questions lie squarely at the center of existential positive psychology, a subfield in psychology where the primary focus of empirical scientists is to better understand the nature of and conditions for human flourishing in a world that is uncertain, unstable, and seemingly uncaring. This field of study draws inspiration from two intersecting approaches to understanding the human condition: existential psychology and positive psychology.
Existential psychology is concerned with how humans come to terms with several “givens” of being human…
Freedom or groundlessness: We all have to navigate a world that lacks inherent order and is outside our control, but we’re forced to make choices and live with the consequences
Isolation: Each of us has unique subjective experiences and are fundamentally isolated from another, as no one will know what it is like to be us.
Identity: We all must navigate changing identities across our lifespan.
Death: The only certainty in the world is our own mortality, and the foreknowledge of our eventual death.
Meaninglessness: The world lacks a readily apparent and consensually validated meaning.
Scientists who investigate how humans come to terms with these fundamental features of being human often find that the awareness of these realities gives rise to considerable angst, which can lead us to engage in a rather sophisticated suite of psychological defensives aimed at regaining psychological equanimity and mitigating existential terror. As a result, existential psychology can sometimes focus on the “dark side” of the human condition.
Positive psychology, on the other hand, is focused on the “light side” of human nature. Designed as a counterbalance to the increasing preoccupation in psychology to identify pathologies and mental illness, positive psychology seeks to understand what contributes to the good life by understanding positive character strengths, communities, and institutions. The goal of many researchers operating from this approach is to better clarify how people craft lives of meaning and purpose through the development of virtues and positive relationships that can improve well-being for individuals and larger communities.
How do people find meaning and flourish amid existential suffering?
In my view, existential and positive psychology are perfectly complementary. No account for human nature could be complete without the refreshing candor and honesty afforded by an existential approach, in which we acknowledge our finitude and human frailty. We need to understand our limitations and the core fears that motivate a host of social and cognitive inclinations. Yet we also need positive psychology to help us identify ways to experience flourishing, seek opportunities for growth, and live autonomous lives that are aligned with our values that extend beyond reflective defensiveness or strategic protection. A mature reckoning of the human condition humbly admits our frailty while courageously hoping for ways that our lives may be richly filled with meaning that improves the lives of those around us.
As an existential positive psychologist doing work in experimental social psychology, my research has been oriented around an issue of fundamental import to both fields: “How do people find meaning and flourish amid existential suffering?” To be sure, plenty of greater minds and deeper thinkers have tackled this issue, ranging from Viktor Frankl to Thich Nhat Hanh. Let’s take a look at several different ways that scholars have sought to offer clues to this question.
The Social Motivation for Meaning in Life
If I were to ask if you thought your life was meaningful, my guess is that you’d probably say: “yes.” You’re not alone. Most people report that their life is pretty meaningful (Heintzelman & King, 2014).
But why do people perceive their lives as meaningful? One possibility is people are simply passively appraising an intrinsically meaningful life; another is that people are motivated or compelled to perceive life as meaningful, to avoid perceiving it as meaningless.
Meaning is motivated
Data from Van Tongeren & Green (2010) found that subliminal primes of meaninglessness (vs. neutral words) motivated people to report greater meaning in life (lower sense of meaninglessness) and stronger affirmation of other sources of meaning, such as religious faith.
Rather than simply ask people whether life was meaningful, one investigation explored what happened when people encountered disruptions to their meaning (Van Tongeren & Green, 2010). We brought participants into the lab and sat them in front of computers, ostensibly for a simple word-sorting task, and told participants to categorize target words as colors or numbers. Although this seemed simple enough, while they were working through 20 iterations of this procedure, unbeknownst to participants, words flashed in the corners of the computer screen for a brief instant—50 milliseconds, which is quick enough for our minds to perceive, but too fast to be consciously recognized. For half of the participants, these words were related to meaninglessness (e.g., chaos, empty, futile); for the other half of participants, these words were neutral (e.g., chair, echoes, furnace). After this, all participants filled out questionnaires assessing their meaning in life across various domains, including self-esteem, certainty, belongingness, and religion, as well as completed questions directly assessing how meaningful they perceived their life to be.
The participants whose meaning was threatened by the meaningless words reported greater meaning in life across those various domains as a strategic reaffirmation process, in which they defended against implicit threats to meaning by restoring their meaning automatically. The take-away message suggests that we’re so motivated to perceive our life as meaningful that we automatically protect that sense of meaning, even when we’re not aware of the threat of meaninglessness. Our psychological machinery is designed to combat meaninglessness rather effortlessly.
Meaning attenuates death-related concerns
But what good does this existential self-defense system serve? What motivates such a reaction? A number of studies suggests that perceiving life as meaningful helps manage our concerns about death. Research testing terror management theory (Pyszczynski et al., 2010, 2015) has found, for example, that because thinking about death can be unsettling and anxiety-provoking, people have developed some rather sophisticated ways of ridding the mind of death-related cognitions (Arndt et al., 2004).
Data from Van Tongeren & Green (2018) found that, compared to when they were asked to think about a death with no or low meaning, participants showed less cognitive activation of death-related concepts when they were asked to think about a meaningful death.
In one set of studies, we explored the role of meaning in managing death-related concerns. Participants who were instructed to imagine dying a meaningful death reported fewer death-related thoughts than those who imagined a meaningful life at the time of death (Van Tongeren & Green, 2018). When life is full of meaning, death can rob our lives of meaning, which can be threatening; however, when death itself is meaningful, it can remove the sting, such that we’re not as concerned about it. And follow-up studies (Van Tongeren et al., in press) found that people who thought about both a meaningful life and a meaningful death reported lower accessibility of death-related cognitions.
This research on meaning might also offer clues as to why religion is a such a powerful force in managing fears related to death. Religions address the problem of death with the promise of literal immortality (i.e., afterlife). But one research study of ours found that part of what explained this existential comfort was that life felt meaningful (Van Tongeren et al., 2017)—that is, feeling that one is living up to religion’s values, and is thus qualifying for the religious concept of eternal life, not only makes one’s death a meaningful transition but also makes this life meaningful as well.
Taken together, this research suggests that meaning is a powerful anecdote to the fear of death. For many, suffering reminds us of our human frailty. We’re reminded that we are vulnerable, experience tragedy and trauma, and one day will perish. This disconcerting thought should be overwhelmingly anxiety-producing, and for some, it causes significant psychological turmoil and mental dis-ease. And grief is a normal part of loss—as some say, it is “unspent love” toward someone about whom we cared deeply. There’s no reason to rush through the healthy process of grieving, feeling the profound loss of a person, dream, or ability.
But what often helps people metabolize their suffering, both in the midst of it and after it happens, is building a sense of meaning. The more meaningful our life is, the less anxious we are about death. After all, there’s an increasing variety of good things in this world toward which we can direct our attention and immerse our experiences: the beauty of sunset over the water, the comfort of a loving hug, the savoring of a delicious meal, or the simple ability to relish our place in nature or among the cosmos. Building meaning helps make this life worth living. And when we’re focused on the meaningfulness of life, death can be a pretty distant concern.
The Existential Function of Religion
Given the desire to view ourselves and our lives as meaningful, we regularly turn to cultural worldviews to help make sense of our existence and imbue our lives with significance and purpose (Solomon et al., 2004). Cultural worldviews are sets of beliefs that address the nature of the world and our place in it.
Some have argued religion is particularly well-suited to address existential concerns—such as freedom, death, isolation, identity, and meaning—issues concerning what to do, who to be, why, and how.
For many people, religion offers a cultural worldview that answers questions about the good life and the existence of evil: it offers clear guidance on the type of life people should live as well as a path through suffering. Religious texts and teachers admonish adherents to follow particular moral mandates, many of which are implied to have eternal consequences. And most religions have something to say about suffering. Buddhism claims suffering is an inherent part of life, whereas Christianity promises that God will abide with those who suffer.
In fact, religion is perfectly suited to address the various existential concerns that suffering often raises. Supernatural agents convey the idea of guidance and control in an otherwise chaotic and uncertain world, suggesting freedom and agency can be exercised, thereby conquering groundlessness. Divine spirits, such as God, can know the deep parts of one’s identity and provide them with a transcendent connection to something larger than themselves. Religion promises to solve the otherwise intractable problem of death by claiming to vanquish it altogether through the provision of literal immortality. And religion offers people a framework of meaning through which they can find significance and purpose. Indeed, some have suggested religion might be more effective at addressing existential concerns than nonreligious worldviews (cf. Newton & McIntosh, 2013).
An existential trade-off
However, not all religious views are equally effective at mitigating existential anxiety. Both the content (what people believe) and style (how people hold such believes) matter greatly, and religious beliefs often involve an existential tradeoff (Van Tongeren et al., 2016). Consider that religious beliefs fall along a spectrum ranging from security to growth.
Security-focused beliefs are often more effective at providing meaning in life and reduced death anxiety but come at the cost of intergroup intolerance. People hold strong convictions which provide their life with certainty, order, and meaning, but their steadfast commitment and ideological rigidity render them intolerant of others who hold dissimilar views. Being defensive about one’s religion can make life feel more meaningful (Van Tongeren et al., 2013).
On the other hand, growth-focused beliefs promote tolerance and engender openness, but often leave such believers anxious and searching for meaning. After all, those who can admit they might be wrong, and therefore hold their beliefs tentatively, may be kinder and more accepting of those with whom they may not agree. But that tolerance comes at the cost of intrapsychic security. Such tentative believers may wonder if they are correct or if their beliefs may be wrong.
In my own research, I’ve consistently found that one of the best predictors of existential security is intrinsic religiousness. Intrinsic religiosity is when people participate in religion because they believe their religion is inherently true, whereas extrinsic religiosity is where people participate in religion not because they believe but because doing so brings social rewards and abstaining is socially costly. For intrinsically religious believers, their faith is a central and organizing feature of their identity, and their religious beliefs color how they interact with other people and the world around them. They’ve deeply integrated their religious beliefs into how they view themselves, and they spend time and resources trying to deepen and mature their faith.
People with intrinsic religious belief enjoy a greater sense of existential security, but are still defensive about their faith (Van Tongeren et al., 2020) and resist religious cognitive dissonance even when presented with videos of horrific suffering in the world (Van Tongeren et al., 2021).
So, what does the research say? In one study, people were randomly assigned to read a passage about religion or a passage from piece of literature. When experimentally reminded of religion, the more intrinsically religious people reported less anxiety about the afterlife (Van Tongeren et al., 2013). However, such reminders were unsettling rather than soothing for those who were not intrinsically religious. Further, all religious believers get a bit defensive about their faith. People across religious orientations defend against worldview conflict (Van Tongeren et al., 2020) and are prejudiced against dissimilar others who impugn their cherished beliefs (Brandt & Van Tongeren, 2017).
In another study, my colleagues and I looked at how people with intrinsic religious orientation think about evil and suffering in the world (Van Tongeren et al., 2021). We randomly assigned participants to view video footage of either a neutral scene (e.g., nature) or a disaster scene (e.g., a forest fire; the 9/11 terrorist attacks). Then we asked people to reflect on their beliefs about God. For example, it’s possible that people could believe God was a tough and punishing God, in general, but also believe God was loving and protective in their own lives, which is a sort of religious cognitive dissonance. Indeed, when extrinsically religious people viewed the disaster videos (vs. the neutral videos), they recognized the great suffering in the world and experienced greater religious cognitive dissonance. But intrinsically religious people were unmoved by the disaster videos; they believed God’s love or punishment in their own lives was similar to God’s love or punishment, in general, and exposure to videos of horrific suffering visited upon others did not change those appraisals.
Religions are simply too existentially powerful for believers to discard or abandon so easily. In fact, given the powerful nature of religion, my colleagues and I have found evidence for the religious residue hypothesis: following deidentification from religion, remnants of one’s previous religiousness still linger (Van Tongeren et al., 2021) and affect moral attitudes (Van Tongeren et al., 2021), values (Schwadel et al., 2021), and consumer behavior (DeWall & Van Tongeren, in press). The existential appeal of religion continues, even after people change their faith or try to leave it behind.
The Existential Nature of Suffering
The drive for meaning and the value of our worldviews—whether religious or not—are central features of what makes suffering so existential threatening. Each of us has a strong desire to perceive ourselves and our lives as meaningful, and many times we accomplish this by making sense of the world around us according to culturally validated worldviews. These systems of meaning provide useful frameworks for understanding the world and our place in it, and they often have implicit rules about the way things are supposed to be. The problem is that suffering often shatters these assumptions and reveals these expectations as inaccurate approximations which do not account for the cold indifference of the world.
Data from Edwards & Van Tongeren (2020) found that, compared to thinking about a neutral experience, thinking about current experiences of suffering led participants to report lower meaning and satisfaction with life.
One experimental study of ours found that asking people to recall a time of suffering reduces their perceived meaning in life, which can impair well-being (Edwards & Van Tongeren, 2020). However, because suffering often threatens our sense of meaning, building meaning is the key to flourishing amid suffering (Van Tongeren & Showalter Van Tongeren 2020, 2021). This doesn’t simply mean making sense of our tragedy; some suffering is simply incomprehensible. The best the way to make sense of suffering is, when appropriate, to acknowledge its senselessness. Rather, meaning can be built and restored through investing in loving and reciprocal relationships, as well as engaging in work that transcends yourself.
Experimental work has found that people often turn to close others as a source of meaning and comfort in the wake of mortality salience: following death reminders, people are more likely to seek to repair meaningful relationships by offering forgiveness (Van Tongeren et al., 2013). And prosociality, such as altruism or volunteering, can enhance meaning in life (Van Tongeren et al., 2016), as can practicing self-transcendent virtues such as forgiveness (Van Tongeren et al., 2015) and humility (Van Tongeren et al., 2016). Meaning is often found in connection with others or with something greater than ourselves, so activities that can help us move beyond ourselves often helps.
For those reasons, suffering is a deeply existential experience that often reveals our core fears (Van Tongeren & Showalter Van Tongeren 2020, 2021). When these fears are laid bare, many of us find ourselves mired in grief, fully confronting the existential realities of isolation, groundlessness, death, loss of identity, and meaninglessness. For those who are suffering—whether by the grief of an expected loss or traumatic tragedy—death becomes increasingly real. Illusions are often shattered, and we’re forced to make sense of our world in ways that feel unfamiliar and unsettling.
Thus, perhaps the most poignant thing we can do in the face of suffering is to honestly and authentically acknowledge and embrace our finitude as humans. Perhaps our frailty is not a curse nor our mortality something to be feared, but perhaps it’s a reminder that each moment is precious—that our life is meaningful precisely because it will one day be over. We don’t have a limitless supply of time, so how we spend each day matters.
In fact, I’d argue that one pathway toward a good life, even one amid suffering, is existential humility—an awareness of our human limitations and our common plight of mortality. Through this understanding, we are motivated to shrink our ego, turn our attention away from ourselves and toward others, and use our time to make this world a more loving, just, and compassionate place. When we realize our place in the cosmos is excruciatingly small, it frees us from the cultural pursuits of vanity, revealing them as Sisyphean tasks unlikely to extend life or offer immortality.
When we can embrace our common condition as mortal, meaning-seeking creatures, it frees us to live authentically and with purpose. Suffering comes as less of a surprise; it doesn’t hurt any less, but it might make more sense.
Daryl Van Tongeren, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research at Hope College. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP), Midwestern Psychological Association, and the International Society for Science and Religion. His research examines the social motivation for meaning in life, the social cognitive and existential function of religion, and the nature and functions of virtues. He is particularly interested in the psychological ramifications of people leaving religion (i.e., religious dones) and the lingering effects of this religious change. He has more than 200 academic publications and four books in these areas, and his work has been supported by numerous external grants, including several from The John Templeton Foundation. Daryl has won national and international awards for his research, and he is an Associate Editor for The Journal of Positive Psychology, and a Consulting Editor for Psychology of Religion and Spirituality and the Journal of Social Psychology.