The question to ponder more often than not.

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well hello, this is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me. Where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:16] People look for happiness. What's the thing that will bring me the most happiness? Now and in the long term. And so often the world around us promotes that way of thinking as well. To value happiness above all. But happiness is like the tide. Even on the best days it ebbs and flows. It's a feeling, one that is impossible to sustain continuously. I'm not even sure you want to sustain it continuously.

[00:00:47] No. The thing to look for, the thing to optimize for, is meaning. A life that honors your values. A life that helps you make sense of your existence. I'm willing to bet you'll have more days of happiness when you optimize for meaning than when you optimize for happiness itself.

[00:01:09] Happiness is fleeting. It comes and it goes. It rises and it dips. Meaning is like the foundation of a house, steady, allowing you to build something solid on top of it, something that empowers you.

[00:01:26] So how do you optimize for meaning? Well, it comes from what you value. We spent a number of episodes in the first quarter of this season talking about values, how to figure them out, how to live by them, how to define them.

[00:01:41] From values, we build habits and goals. We talked a lot about that in the second quarter. Things do get hard. Not all is rosy, there are rough patches. We worked through it anyway. We talked about that in the third quarter. And now, nowadays we talk about so much else that defines meaning and value in our life, the little things that promote it.

[00:02:09] You know, this season has been a wild mix of strategy and tactics, all devoted to living a better life, and perhaps implicitly saying all along that living a better life means living a life of meaning, a meaning that only you can define.

[00:02:25] What brings meaning to you may not bring meaning to me. And yet, if we both live a life that feels meaningful to us, we've both lived a good life that will bring us happiness more often than not.

[00:02:40] Meaning may come from work, or it may come from outside of work. Meaning may inform how you both do work and non work. There are different compartments of life, but you still have to take stock of it all holistically, because each section, each compartment in one way or another informs or affects another no matter how well you build those walls. And some of us build those walls pretty well and pretty high. But here's the thing though. We're all just carbon and other things and there's plenty of space between the atoms of anything we might build, real or mental. So things are gonna slip through anyway.

[00:03:22] So I guess today's question, because we've had a lot of those and we will continue to, Today's question is, what brings your life meaning?

[00:03:36] What makes life meaningful for you? If there's a question that should hound you, a question that you should ruminate over and ponder on a regular basis, I think that might be it, you know?

[00:03:58] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?