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Steven Heine is a professor of social and cultural psychology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Cultural Psychology, the top-selling book in the field. His research has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Newsweek, and New Scientist, among other publications. Whats the big idea? A lot of people right now feel lost, anxious, and despaired. During these dark times, preserving a sense of meaning in our lives is vital. Fortunately, meaning can be cultivated and ground us when life feels turbulent. The emerging field of existential psychology is refining practices for tuning in to the worth, purpose, and importance of your life. Below, Steven shares five key insights from his new book, Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times. Listen to the audio versionread by Steven himselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Meaning in life helps protect against anxiety. Everyone seems on edge these days. The world is going through somewhat of a mental health crisis as rates of anxiety, depression, and deaths of despair have jumped sharply in many countries. How can we cope with these dark times? The sense of leading a meaningful life protects us from anxiety and uncertainty. When people feel that their lives are meaningful, a sense of purpose guides them, and their life makes sense. They feel that what they do matters and can make a difference in the world. People who feel their lives are meaningful can stand strong in the face of the slings and arrows thrown at them by these uncertain times. They enjoy greater well-being and fare better in coping with their anxieties. The emerging field of existential psychology has provided evidence-based answers to what makes a life meaningful. Ultimately, meaning is about connections, and a meaningful life is richly connected. For example, interpersonal connections play a key role because people feel that their lives are more meaningful when they spend time with their closest relationships, especially when taking on a caretaker role. People also feel more meaningful when they are part of a community because it gives them a sense of belongingness and identity. Peoples connections to their work can also provide a sense of purpose and mastery. And people feel meaningful when their lives are connected to the transcendent realm, feeling that they are part of something much larger than the material world. When peoples lives are sufficiently connected in these domains, they are existentially grounded. Their lives make sense, they feel a sense of purpose in what they do, and they feel that their lives matter in the grand scheme of things. This mindset helps people thrive during trying times. 2. We tell stories to make sense of life. Our lives only feel meaningful when they seem to make sense. But the key challenge is that life often doesnt seem coherent. For example, we may seem like quite different people in different situations. We might act silly with friends, but on our daily commute, we may be short-tempered, and then at work, we become ambitious and responsible. Which persona is the real self? Or we might struggle to identify a common thread connecting the different chapters of our lives. We might realize that the person we were in high school shares little in common with how we now think of ourselves. How can we weave all the different threads of our self together? We accomplish this by telling stories. We create stories with our self as the central character, going on a journey where we confront all the experiences and challenges in our lives. These stories help us organize our understanding of who we are, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. It lays the foundation of self. Stories integrate those inconsistent facets of ourselves because they allow us to focus on particular episodes and edit out parts that dont quite fit. Importantly, the stories we tell are not typically literal accounts of what happened but improvised tellings that make our lives feel sensible. Stories integrate those inconsistent facets of ourselves because they allow us to focus on particular episodes and edit out parts that dont quite fit. When we tell our stories well, we feel that our lives make sense. While each story we tell about ourselves is unique in certain respects, it often shares features in common with stories told by others. Many of our stories share common themes, such as redemption, when our story highlights how we conquered a challenge, or a theme of contamination, when our story explains how our life suddenly went off a cliff. Also, our stories rest upon simple but extremely important premises that guide how we experience the events in our lives. Our stories might be built around key premises such as I am good or People get what they deserve. These premises serve as a lens through which we see how our life unfolds. Part of leading a meaningful life is learning how to narrate the events in our lives through a compelling and sensible story. 3. When meaning is threatened, we seek to rebuild it. A key challenge with leading a meaningful life is that things often dont feel meaningful. Feelings of meaning ebb and flow like the tide. But we have a psychological need to feel that things are meaningful. When things feel meaningless, we become especially motivated to make things seem meaningful again. Its akin to feeling hungry when we havent had enough food. Likewise, our brains signal to us when our lives arent sufficiently meaningful. Research points to our brains having a sense-making system that strives to keep things feeling meaningful. When things feel meaningless, our brains detect a signal indicating a lack of sufficient meaning, and we are prepared to try to regain a sense of meaning. Its a homeostatic system, much like your thermostat at home, that only becomes triggered when meaning is insufficient. This is all occurring beneath our awareness. There are different ways to rebuild a sense of meaning. Much research finds that people feel more meaningful after engaging in nostalgic reflections. Remembering how we were in past chapters of our life stories provides us with a better appreciation for how we became the person we are now, boosting our sense of meaning. We are most likely to drift off in a nostalgic reverie precisely when we feel that life is unsatisfyingly low in meaning. For example, our lives feel more meaningless when we are lonely or bored. When a sense of meaning is hard to come by, we make unconscious efforts to boost meaning. So, we often turn to memories in an effort to regain an existential footing. We may play songs from the soundtrack of our youth or flip through a photo album. Our sense-making system was tripped, and nostalgic reflections are one way to regain a sense of meaning. I dont think its a coincidence that since the 2010s, the world has undergone a nostalgia boom. Movie theatres are playing remakes of films that were created decades earlier. New television series set in previous decdes are discussed as much for their plots as they are for how they nailed the décor, fashion, and music of those times. During this anxious period, weve felt a collective need for meaning, and the world has been turning to the past to gain the meaning-boosting effects of nostalgia. 4. Life struggles can provide greater meaning. Feeling meaningful and feeling happy share much in common. However, there is more to meaning in life than positive feelings. We can learn a lot by focusing on how meaning is distinct from happiness. Jean-Paul Sartre perceptively observed that human life begins on the far side of despair, and much research supports this contention. One study explored the characteristics of people with more meaningful lives and found that they reported more negative life experiences, even though these experiences came with a cost to happiness. Our struggles can often feel meaningful. Likewise, we can see this relation when considering where meaningful lives are commonly found. Curiously, you are more likely to find them where life is harder. On average, the poorer a country, the more meaningful its citizens report their lives to be. The comfort and ease that people living in wealthier countries can enjoy appear to come at an existential cost: it often doesnt provide the struggles that people rely on to build resilience and meaning. Peoples spiritual lives often become deeper after a trauma. Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed, That which does not kill me makes me stronger. Research finds that people often do rise to the challenges that life throws at them. The most common reaction to trauma is post-traumatic growth. People make more meaning in the aftermath of trauma because their relationships often become closer, as they usually receive a great deal of social support. It is also common for people to develop a new sense of purpose as they re-evaluate their lives, and they often become more altruistic toward others who have experienced tragedies. People also tend to grow because they discover that they had inner strengths that they hadnt realized. In addition, peoples spiritual lives often become deeper after a trauma. And last, the realization that so much can be lost in an instant makes survivors of trauma more appreciative of what they still have. They no longer take their lives for granted. We can never lead a life without suffering, and our struggles certainly come with a cost to happiness. But it is reassuring that difficult times can help make our lives more meaningful. 5. Meaning in life can be cultivated. Meaning in our lives can be nurtured. We are not born with a certain amount of meaning; meaning can be cultivated, just like any other ability. First, there are existential exercises that provide temporary boosts to feelings of meaning, which can be invaluable for helping us get out of a rut. I think of these as the existential equivalent of a shot of espresso. One simple exercise helps people feel existentially groundeda clear understanding of who they are and what they stand for. People will feel more grounded after reflecting upon their most important values. Simply writing a brief paragraph about your most important values puts you in a better position to respond with greater resilience to challenges. A second way to cultivate a more meaningful life is to examine your lifes foundations for meaning: our connections, especially with closest relationships, with communities, with work, and with a transcendent realm. I encourage you to conduct an existential audit of yourself to evaluate how deeply connected you are in these domains and identify where you have the most room for growth. Hardly anyone is richly connected in all these domains, but meaning is fungible. That is, the meaning you derive from one domain of connections can make up for a shortfall of meaning in another domain. Its as though we can pay for the meaning in our lives from different accounts. Remember that our life stories tie together the threads of our lives and provide a sense of coherence, purpose, and importance. We cannot change the past, but this doesnt mean that our life stories are carved in stone. As the author Gabriel García Márquez put it, What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. Some ways of telling a life story provide more meaning than other ways, and you would likely benefit from reflecting on your own life story in a different way. One of the most successful templates for stories, which the mythologist Joseph Campbell calls the Heros Journey, focuses on an individual conquering difficult challenges with a band of allies. When people are instructed to think of their own lives in terms of the individual elements from the Heros Journey template, they come to feel that their lives are more meaningful. If you try to identify your transformations, allies youve relied on, or seemingly insurmountable quests, you too can likely learn how to reflect on your life in a more constructive, meaningful way. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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As a subject for delightful conversation, personal insurance ranks somewhere between polyp removal and credit default swaps. Which means most of us don’t know what we don’t know. No one likes to dwell on what might go wrong in the futurewhich is part of the reason why we all tend to regard insurance professionals with a healthy level of skepticism. But protecting yourself and your money from the unexpected has to be part of getting your financial house in order. Otherwise, a single bad event could erase all your hard work. To figure out what kinds of insurance you might need, start with the following basic rules of the insurance industry. Social benefit and private profit The goal of insurance is to share risk among a large pool of people. If everyone pays a small amountknown as the premiumto their insurance company, the insurer assumes the risk of any one individual suffering a large loss. At that point, the insurance company will pay out to make that individual whole after the loss. But insurance companies are not there just as a social benefit. These companies are in business to make a profit. This means insurers make it their business to understand what kinds of losses are most likely to happen. And if something is more likely to occur, the insurance company will charge higher premiums for it. This is why life insurance for a nonsmoking 20-something costs pennies compared to the giant chunk of change the same insurance costs for a pack-a-day 58-year-old with diabetes. Its possible the young adult might die in a freak stamp-collecting accident and perhaps the smoker might live to 109but the odds are that the 20-something has decades of life ahead and the 58-year-old does not. Since it is more likely that the insurance company will have to pay out for the smokers life insurance policy relatively soon, the premiums for that policy are higher. This is how the insurance company protects its profits while still offering the payout benefits. Mo money, mo likely The insurance industrys understanding of probable outcomes can help consumers identify which policies they need. Specifically, if a personal insurance policy is expensive, that usually means the insurer thinks its likely it will have to make a payoutand that can indicate that you might need that kind of coverage. This is not a one-to-one correlation, of course. Just because a policy is expensive doesnt mean you need it. And some types of insuranceidentity theft insurance and renters insurance, for exampleare extremely helpful to have and generally low-cost. But understanding why insurers charge high premium prices can help consumers figure out which types of policies they might need. The most expensive types of insurance include the following. Disability This kind of personal insurance helps pay a portion of your salary until youre able to go back to work, which can help keep you financially stable. While you might assume that youre unlikely to suffer a disability, since the most strenuous thing you do is staple Mr. Lumbergs TPS reports, remember that about 1 out of every 4 current 20-year-olds will become disabled before reaching retirement age. Thats why its expensive to purchase disability insurancebut also why its important. Auto insurance Car crashes are the leading cause of death in the United States, with a total about 120 people killed per day in car accidents. Getting behind the wheel is the riskiest activity most Americans engage in on a daily basis, which means the insurance to protect you from that risk is also expensive. (The good news is that you can lower your risk and your auto insurance costs by driving like your dad: hands on 10 and 2, brake gently, check your mirrors, and assume everyone on the road is trying to kill you.) Life insurance Even though you wont notice if you die without life insurance, any dependents who rely on your income will struggle if you pass away. And that likelihood is 100%, since none of us are getting out of this thing alive. Life insurance is cheapest for young and healthy individualswho are the least likely to need it or buy itand the price goes up with age and health problems. Homeowners insurance This kind of insurance not only covers damage to your home and possessions because of a covered disaster, but also liability for injuries or property damage experienced by a visitor to your home. (This is why dog owners, even apart from the growing trend to take out healthcare policies on our furry friends, may pay a higher premium than pet-free homeowners, and certain dog breeds are not covered at allsince they are more likely to bite a stranger.) And even though homeowners insurance covers damage caused by certain disasters, not all types of hazards are covered. In particular, flooding is a common hazard that isnt covered. Flood insurance Nearly no insurers include flood damage in homeowners or renters insurance policies. Instead, you may have to purchase a policy through the National Flood Insurance Program, which is a partnership between the federal government, insurance companies, and local communities to provide affordable flood protection. This is because floods are so likely to happen in so many areas that the federal government had to help subsidize the cost of flood insurance. While these are not the only hazards you should protect yourself against, these are the ones the insurance industry (and its army of statistics nerds) think are most likely to occur. That means its a good idea to start with the types of losses you are most likely to face. Protect your moneymaker In addition to looking at which hazards are most likely, its also helpful to think about what valuables you have that would be most difficult to replace. For most people, these valuables fall into the same categories as the most expensive types of insurance: your earning potential, your life, and your home represent your most valuable assets. But its important to insure whtever assets you have that would be financially devastating to lose. For example, opera singers have been known to insure their voices, since they cant earn their living if they cant sing. More commonly, small business owners and freelancers often purchase professional liability insurance, also known as errors and omissions insurance, to protect themselves from lawsuits. Thinking about insurance as protection against financial loss can help you pinpoint what kinds of personal insurance you need most. Dont fear the reaper (or the insurance rep) Theres a reason no one invites Ned Ryerson to dinner: talking about the kinds of doom-and-gloom that insurance professionals know intimately is a major bummer. But personal insurance is an important part of a healthy budget. You need insurance to protect you from the risk of a devastating financial loss, which it does by spreading the risk among a pool of individuals and asking the insurance company to assume the financial risk. Understanding how insurers price their policies can help you figure out which types of personal insurance are most important, since the industry charges higher premiums to protect against the most likely losses. Thats why disability insurance, auto insurance, life insurance, home insurance, and flood insurance are among the most expensive types of policies available. Insurers know they are likely to have to make payouts on these policies, so they price the premiums accordingly. Consumers can also figure out the right coverage by thinking about what assets it would be financially devastating to lose. For most people, that includes their income potential, life, and home, but depending on your circumstances, you may also want to protect other important assets that you rely on or would be unable to replace.
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E-Commerce
The American economy runs on what are known as heuristics, a diverse array of mental short-cuts that help consumers make a dizzying number of choices to navigate the wild complexity of everyday life. These shortcuts help us select the restaurants we may choose to patronize, the cars we drive, the food we purchase, and the schools we attend and to which we send our children. We rely on scoring systems, certifications, and ranking methodologies to consider what movies to see, what music to listen to, and whether to purchase fair-trade products. These shortcuts come in many forms, from the complex (like the tools used to rate bonds and other financial products) to the straightforward (like the letter grades that many municipalities generate to inform consumers whether a particular restaurant follows safe food-handling practices). Sometimes these systems are managed and operated by the government, like the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administrations system for grading automobiles and trucks for their performance in crash tests, but often by private entities, like Consumer Reports. Sometimes the ratings are purely peer-to-peer and aggregated, like the ubiquitous five-star rating systems for ride-hailing companies or delivery services. In the end, consumers rely on these systems every day to make decisions great and small, to help make sense of a complex world where we are too easily prone to information overload. One area that cries out for a methodology that would provide consumers with critical details about the products and services they are using is one that is largely devoid of these types of shortcuts: our online life. We search, scroll, bank, shop, talk, text, stream, post, like, stan, and even hook up in the digital world. And we enter sites, download apps, communicate over platforms, access our financial information, and provide intimate details about our health and welfare without the slightest clue about what the entities with which we share such information do with it. The truth is, most will use it for their own profit and often sell it to data brokers: the third-party entities that, in turn, pass it along to other companies that might then use and abuse it, selling us products, pushing content to us we may not want, and perhaps even getting us to engage in behavior we might otherwise avoid if we were truly educated consumers about the uses and abuses of our digital data. AI only amplifies that influence. But what if there was a way to use the power of heuristics to protect our digital privacy through simple shortcuts that could give consumers basic information about how different sites, apps, and platforms were exploiting the digital activities they harvest from us? At present, some American states and the European Union have created rules of the road for the sunny information superhighway, as it was once called so quaintly in the 1990s. Instead of an information superhighway where consumers can travel at will, free of harm or surveillance, when we enter the digital world today, a better metaphor is the Upside Down: the shadowy, parallel world from the hit TV series Stranger Things, where entities with access to our digital lives create replicants of us that follow us around, always just below the surface, waiting to do us harm. We are already living in a world where we get asked to accept a particular companys cookies policy or its terms of service. These relatively light touch disclosure regimes are the product of laws and regulations passed around the world. The Europeans General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has largely set the global standard because tech companies do not want to have to ascertain when a particular consumer is subject to those regulations or not. And it is the GDPR, and the European Union, that we have to thank for those ubiquitous pop-ups that ask us to accept the companys cookies policy. But those rules actually mask what is going on under the hood. Companies can comply with the disclosure requirements by giving consumers the option of accepting their practices or not, and burying those disclosures in user agreements that are unintelligible to the average user. As a result, current practices in the digital world require a far more robust regulatory response than that which the relatively weak disclosure regimes that presently exist currently offer. Consumers are also routinely presented with complex terms of service, which few will read to the end, and even a smaller number will completely understand. Indeed, rare is the consumer who ever actually reviews these policies prior to entering a site or download an app. If they did, they would likely find few privacy-protective policies, if any. Instead, more likely than not, a review of those policies would reveal that the company engages in cross-site tracking, sells consumers information, and forces such consumers to go to arbitration even for violations of those very terms of service policies, among other things. What legal protections do exist on the internet actually largely protect companies, and not consumers. Laws like Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act insulate many companies that engage in activities online from being sued for the content on their sites. Courts, too, following federal law, largely enforce the terms of service that require that disputes about a companys actions must be resolved, not through the courts, but through arbitration. All of this is a result of a powerful tech lobby that not only fights any meaningful regulation of their activities but also complains that any government intervention will stifle innovation and the economic benefits and convenience these companies generate. Enter the Zone But there is another way, one that does not require the heavy hand of government, that can still foster innovation and put the power in the hands of consumers to drive business behavior and not the other way around. A more robust regulatory regime for the digital world could draw on the power of grading systems to send a clear message to consumers about the risks that particular apps or sites may pose to our digital privacy. It would provide this information to consumers in an easy-to-understand format that does not require a deep dive into the bowels of a companys end-user agreement, or a certificate in legalese. Instead, whenever a consumer accessed a site, app, or platform, that service would communicate whether it is protective of the consumers privacy or not. While there are many ways that a company can protect, or violate, a consumers privacy, and engage in activity that makes it unaccountable to that consumer should it breach their privacy, a simple, easy-to-understand system would grade companies on how well they do in terms of protecting their customers privacy or routinely violate it. That information would be communicated through one letter, a grade, that the company would have to reveal prominently as any consumer accessed the service. The consumer would then know, immediately, whether this is an entity that looks out for consumer privacy and which tends to exploit it. But where would such grades come from? Some grading systems are opaque, with the ultimate grade issued by a government agency, like the restaurant letter grades in New York City. One can assume that an A grade means that the restaurant meets basic quality standards. And its hard to find a restaurant worth their salt that does not have that A grade. In fact, anything less is usually enough to ward off many customers. In regime for the digital world, one could adopt a type of digital zoning modelled after land-use restrictions in IRL. In land-use zoning, certain uses are permitted and others are excluded in particular areas or zones. You generally dont have a power plant or waste treatment facility abutting single-family homes. Thats because of zoning. If an area is zoned for particular uses, individuals and businesses that wish to engage in those uses are free to do so within it. Developers, government regulators, commercial establishments and residents can easily find out what is permitted and what is not from a predetermined description of particular zones. Anyone can comply with those restrictions, or find themselves facing litigation, fines, an order to stop what they are doing, and perhaps even dismantle any illegal development that has occurred. Zoning in the digital world could work much the same way. Privacy-protective uses will be clustered in the best zone; lets call it Zone A. In that zone, companies would not track a consumers activities on their site, not even keep personally identifying information unless it was necessary for their own purposes, and certainly would not sell such information to third parties. They would agree to stiff punishments for violations of their consumers privacy and allow those disputes to be resolved in a court of law, instead of forcing individuals to go through business-friendly arbitration settings of those businesses choosing, as many companies choose to do today. Ultimately, a company agreeing to provide this suite of privacy-protective practices by operating within Zone A would be able to market to its customers that they are doing so by displaying an A prominently on their home page, their apps site on an app store, or whenever a consumer starts to enter that site from their smartphone. If a company failed to provide these sorts of privacy protections, it would not receive that grade. Instead, it could choose from a number of different zones that would offer a different suite of protections along a spectrum, from best to worst. When a company provides some privacy protective measures, that would justify it displaying a higher grade, even if not an A. The system would cluster an array of practicescovering search, sale of data, monitoring user behavior, etc.and grade companies on the extent to which they meet the more privacy-protective practices or are more likely to take advantage of their customers. Those companies that are least protective of their customers data would earn an F. All companies would have to display their grade prominently whenever a consumer engages with that companys site, service, app, or platform. Consumers would have an immediate read on whether the company is looking out for the customer or abusing their data for its own benefit. While disclosure-based regimes are sometimes themselves abused, by, for example, companies making it difficult to understand what their policies are, or burying the important disclosure in legalese, a disclosure regime that is clear and easy to understand will put the power back in the hands of the consumer. Such a regime could create a race to the top, with companies vying to be more protective of their consumers data because they have to be completely transparent about their data privacy practices. Instead of stifling innovation and competition, digital zoning could actually encourage both, prompting companies to find ways to deliver their products and services in ways that are more protective of their customers interests and not less. Moreover, companies have a clear choice within this regime: no particular grade would be mandated. Companies would be free to do as they please with their customers dataprovided they are open and honest about their practices. What are the exact contours of this system and who would get to begin to cluster the different practices that determine the grade companies would receive? All of us. Legislators, technology companies, online safety and security experts, and consumers could engage in a dialogue around these issues to start to chart a course forward when it comes to our digital life that will encourage innovation that is protective of our privacy and does not simply see privacy as, at best, something to get around, or, worse, something to exploit. This type of robust and meaningful disclosure can occur without heavy-handed government intervention. Government will certainly have a hand in helping to write the rules of the road and setting the contours of the zones, with extensive input from a wide range of stakeholders, but it will not need to engage in extensive regulation of private companies. Of course, there will be a need to police company practices to make sure they are complying with the requirements of the letter grade they say they deserve, but that can be accomplished by stiff penalties, fines, and damages actions when companies misrepresent the types of protections they afford their customers. Such policing can come from state attorneys general and consumers themselves. It will also require strong whistleblower protections so that employees are free to come forward if the companies for which they work are not following the law, as well as stiff penalties for companies that engage in this sort of fraudulent behavior. Digital zoning would establish a clear and easy-to-understand approach to online privacy, empowering consumers while promoting corporate transparency and accountability. It could create a market-driven system that makes clear to consumers which companies protect their privacy and which might violate it. And it can enlist the government to police the boundaries of the zones, and not necessarily impose command-and-control policies from on high. Such a market-driven approach would place the consumers in the drivers seat and give them a clear sense of the rules of the roadand who is following them around. As technology becomes more and more present in our lives, it’s important we have a clearer way to know if the companies we do business with are harvesting our data or selling it to those who will use it for purposes we don’t know, and would never accept if we knew it was happening. The time is right for us to better understand how technology serves us, rather than having such technology serve us up to anyone eager to exploit our data. Adapted from The Private Is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Ray Brescia. Published by NYU Press. Copyright 2025 by Ray Brescia. All rights reserved.
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