ABSTRACT
Meaning and happiness overlap but are far from the same. This chapter focuses on how these two competing versions of the good life differ. Happiness appears to be the simpler and in evolutionary sense older of the two, and it remains closely tied to natural inclinations. Health was linked to happiness but completely irrelevant to meaning. Having enough money to buy the things one wants and needs correlated substantially with happiness but again seemed completely irrelevant to meaning. Happiness, in contrast, seemed much more present-focused, as the preceding section already indicated: People are happy in the present when an urge finds satisfaction. Thus, some of the overlap between meaningfulness and happiness may reflect genuine kinship between those two dimensions of the good life, and some of it may boil down to simple tendencies for some people to furnish more globally optimistic and positive self-reports than others.
