experientially with the therapist. The life trajectory of the therapist may often be different from that of the client in many respects, and each may experience subjective differences in the definition of meaning and what is meaningful.
In this chapter we have very broadly discussed various perspectives of meaningfulness. Our concern remains to explore how daily occupational life may be used to enhance meaning in peoples’ lives. One of the things that we want to emphasize though, because there often is a misunderstanding, is that meaning should not be confused with happiness. As Belliotti (2001, p. 129) stated: ‘Meaningful lives…are not necessarily happy lives’. Frankl (1992) certainly understood this because he experienced persecution and many losses but came to recognize that painful events may be meaningful. Many people who choose to relate their experiences in writing describe periods of pain and struggle. African National Congress leaders Alfred Luthuli (1963) and Nelson Mandela (1994) and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (2000) are examples. Like many of the worker writers whose lives are explored in the next chapter, the meaningfulness they appear to have experienced did not preclude moments of unbearable pain and unhappiness.
Thus, it is difficult to know for sure how happy individuals who have lived meaningful lives were. Readers can only project their experiences empathically onto them in the form of thinking ‘I would be happy, or unhappy, if I was in their circumstances’. Despite the difficulties they endured, including imprisonment, physical violence, loss of loved ones and friends, and threats to their lives, none of the people listed in the above examples lived their entire lives in distress. King (2000) certainly understood himself to have a destiny to fulfill and seemed to have faced the possibility of assassination with equanimity. What we want to underscore, as stated earlier, is that a meaningful life is not necessarily a happy one, since meaning and happiness are not inextricably linked, although, ‘…happy lives, at least those that are not artificially induced, are invariably meaningful’ (Belliotti, 2001, p. 129). In other words, meaningfulness does not equate with happiness, but happiness always subsumes meaningfulness.
Note
1 There are those who argue that bad as the working conditions were in factories, such conditions were still better for factory workers than for those in rural areas. Drucker (1993) for example argued that even though it was true that the conditions in factories during the industrial revolution period were indeed abysmal, factory workers often enjoyed a higher standard of living and experienced a higher life expectancy than their rural counterparts.
Applying the ideas discussed in Chapter 1
Think of a client with whom you are working right now. Bearing the issues of concern for this client in mind, think about the following:
• Based on the discussion in chapter 1, what is your understanding of the construct ‘meaning in life’?
• Based on that personal understanding of what meaning in life entails, and your understanding of the issues of priority for your client, what do you think is the status of your client’s meaning in life (or lack there-of)?
A quick appraisal of your client’s sense of meaning in life
Ask your client to rate himself on how meaningful he perceives his life to be at the moment using the rating scale in the following assessment.
Caution: The indicators of meaning in life in the self-assessment below are based on propositions in the reviewed literature. Please explain to the client that the purpose of the self-assessment is to enable the client to identify areas of her internal experience of life in which she could increase satisfaction. This has nothing to do with whether or not her life is meaningful in any objective sense, as an internal experience is not something that can be measured externally by observers. The client may even be able to think of other indicators of meaning in her life that are not listed here. If she does so encourage her to list them in the ‘Other Indicators of Meaning in your Life’ category and rate herself on them accordingly.
Ensure that the client understands that a low score in this self-assessment does not mean that his life is meaningless or worthless, but it merely means that perhaps in the client’s mind, he could optimize meaning for increased satisfaction with his life. Irrespective of what we feel about how our lives are going, it would be wise to remember that if we ask those close to us, they will probably tell us that our lives are immeasurably important to them irrespective of our accomplishments and failures. Ultimately, an individual is the best judge of personal circumstances and in the end it is the individual’s opinions and feelings about life that matter.
Fig 1.1: Assessment of perceived meaning in life
Chapter 2 Meaningfulness as an experienced phenomenon: Lessons from worker-writer autobiographies
Learning objectives
After reading this chapter which is based on the findings in the study by Ikiugu et al. (2012), the reader will understand how:
1. The English Worker-Writers whose autobiographies were analysed experienced themselves as meaning-makers in their lives
2. The experiences of the English Worker-Writers can be used to help people understand how their daily occupations contribute to meaning-making in their lives
Contents of this chapter
• What makes occupations meaningful?
• People use occupations to construct/discover meaning in their lives by using them to:
