In the autumn of 1826, John Stuart Mill, then twenty, asked himself a question. Suppose all the reforms he had worked for were achieved at once: would that make him happy? An irrepressible self-consciousness, he later wrote, answered no. In his Autobiography (1873) he drew a lesson: "Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so." In plainer words, asking yourself whether you are happy tends to end it. Those only are happy, he decided, who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.

The paradox of hedonism

Mill's discovery has a name. Henry Sidgwick, in The Methods of Ethics (1874), discussed what came to be called the paradox of hedonism: aiming directly at pleasure tends to defeat it. The pleasures of a game, a friendship or a craft come to those absorbed in the activity itself; someone constantly checking whether they are enjoying themselves usually enjoys less. That suggests happiness is often a by-product of caring about other things. Some research supports this: studies by Iris Mauss and colleagues found that people who place great value on being happy can end up less happy, perhaps because they keep measuring and are disappointed.

What is meaning?

Many people say they want not just a happy life but a meaningful one. The two often go together, but not always. A parent caring for a sick child through sleepless nights, an activist in prison, a scientist pursuing a hard problem for decades: such lives may not feel happy, yet they seem rich in meaning.

Philosophers divide on what meaning is. Subjectivists say a life is meaningful when the person living it finds it fulfilling, whatever the activity. Objectivists say meaning requires involvement with something truly valuable beyond oneself. The American philosopher Susan Wolf has defended a widely discussed middle view, which in paraphrase holds that meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness: when a person loves something that is worth loving and engages with it actively. On her view, the grass counter from an earlier level may be content, but his life lacks meaning, because grass counting does not merit that devotion. A person grimly doing worthy work they feel nothing for also misses something.

Crises of meaning

Leo Tolstoy, at about fifty, was famous, wealthy, healthy and surrounded by family. In A Confession (1882) he described how the question of what it was all for stopped him cold, and how he hid a rope and gave up hunting with a gun to avoid the temptation to end his life. His crisis shows that comfort and success do not guarantee a sense of meaning. Tolstoy eventually found an answer in a simple faith modeled on the lives of ordinary working people. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi camps, argued after the war that people can endure almost anything if they have a reason to live, and that meaning can be found even in suffering faced with dignity.

What studies show

Psychologists have tried to pull the two apart. A 2013 study by Roy Baumeister and colleagues surveyed several hundred Americans and found that happiness was linked to getting what one wants and needs, while meaning was linked to giving to other people, to thinking about past and future and to more stress and worry. Takers, the authors suggested, tend to be happier, and givers to find more meaning. Cross-national data point the same way. A 2014 analysis by Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener found that people in poorer countries reported less life satisfaction but more meaning, a pattern the authors linked to religious belief.

These are correlations from surveys, not proof of how life must be. But they support a point philosophers have made for centuries: happiness and meaning are distinct goods that can come apart, and a life can be strong in one and weak in the other.

Why both matter

If well-being includes meaning, then a society concerned only with pleasant feelings would miss something important. A job can pay well and still corrode the worker's sense that it matters; a cause can make life harder and still make it worth living. This bears on dignity too. Treating people only as containers of pleasant feeling, to be soothed or entertained, neglects their capacity to care about things and to give their lives a direction of their own.

Worked example: the hospice volunteer

Mira, a software engineer, spends two evenings a week as a hospice volunteer. The evenings are often sad and draining, and on a mood scale they would score low. Asked whether she would give them up, she says no; they are among the most important hours of her week.

A hedonist might say the later satisfaction outweighs the sadness. Wolf's view explains her answer more directly: she is drawn to something truly worth caring about, the comfort of the dying, and engages with it actively. Baumeister's findings fit too, since her volunteering is giving, not getting. Mill's lesson completes the picture. Mira does not volunteer in order to become happier, and that may be exactly why the work enriches her life.