Breann Harwood

The meaning of life is something that almost anyone, but especially college students, tend to struggle with. Between making major life choices, deciding on a major, and where they will go after graduation, college students are faced with many pressing questions about what to do with their lives.
On Tuesday, Oct. 20, around 100 students, faculty, and community members joined Hood College as they welcomed social psychologist Laura King. King’s lecture was about “what science can tell us about the meaning of life.” This lecture was in conjunction with the inauguration festivities of Hood’s new president, President Andrea Chapdelaine.
Respectfully so, King started out her lecture by paying honor to President Chapdelaine, who coincidentally majored in social psychology, and told the audience that they were lucky to have a social psychologist as a President; she can change the campus and the world. She then explored how happiness is equivalent to the experience of meaning; however, she emphasized how she was not a positive psychologist, and in fact, found many things skewed with that philosophy.
King explained that there are many people who have “pretty good lives” and it’s these “pretty good lives” that are full of meaning.
“We see the good life all the time,” King said. “We just need to notice it.”
Scientifically, King asserts, that maybe noticing is even more important than inventing. Certainly, she explains that there is value to both, but someone wouldn’t need an invention if they noticed something new, already existing.
The meaning of life, to King, is a paradox. It is ineffable but adaptive and anything that we require in life, to help bring about this meaning must be easy or else no one would say their life is meaningful.
“The meaningful of life happens even if we don’t want it to. There are signs everywhere and we can’t just turn the meaning on or off,” King said.
She then shared with the audience one of her studies about parents who have children with down syndrome. She asked a variety of these people about their experiences and their rate of how meaningful their life is. Almost all of them rated around 5 out of 7, which is significantly higher than the average “meaningful life” at 3.8.
Other populations that hold a higher meaning of life include those who live in poorer nations. King said that this is overwhelmingly due to the fact they have a stronger religious foundation.
King assured the audience that every one of them already had a meaningful life because they all had the integral parts to what is “meaningful.” Every single person already lives in a world that makes sense and that thrives off of habit and routine; the cornerstone to homeostasis.
“The biggest thing that I took away from Dr. King’s lecture is that everyone has meaning in their life, even though it’s sometimes hard to see, and that the biggest problem isn’t that we think our lives have too much meaning, but that our lives have no meaning,” Senior Aleyna Fitz said.
King said that one of the strongest correlations in rating a positive meaning in life is helping others. Helping people and volunteering creates a direct connection to a higher rate of meaning, so much so that King suggests there may not truly be such a thing as altruism.
She then concludes her lecture by asking the audience, “What are you going to do with your one extraordinarily meaningful life?”
“I like how she said that everyone’s life has meaning and that if one of us wasn’t here, right now, we would notice,” Junior Naila Stocks said. “We all matter; we all are the meaning of life.”