How to Find Meaning in Life Using Awe as a Guide

A life of awe sounds like a fairy tale, but finding the things that fill us with it can help us find meaning in our lives.

It’s hard to find meaning in life, but awe can guide us to it. Photo by Colton Sturgeon on Unsplash

Finding meaning in life can take its entirety. The search for meaning is personal and can’t be provided from one source for every person.

Dacher Keltner’s book Awe lists eight sources of awe, plus an “other” category that encompasses sources like exceptional sex or food. He defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.”

Anyone can pay attention to when they feel awe to identify the parts of their lives that inspire the most meaning. In his introduction to Awe, Keltner lists the ways that awe changes us when we feel it:

“By quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.”

Evolutionarily, “individuals who united with others in awe-like patterns of behavior fared well in encounters with threats and the unknown.” Today, we’re not struggling to survive in the wilderness, but we band together in many settings. Whether it’s a religious service or a concert, an art gallery viewed on a tour, or a great book read alone, we have many ways to connect to the larger webs of people, knowledge, and culture around us.

These sources of awe aren’t equally profound for all people. But what they can do for us is point the way toward the sources of meaning in our lives.