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Meaning in Life

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Encyclopedia of Adolescence

It is an astonishing feat of engineering, learning, or luck for humans to grow into thoughtful, purposeful, aware people leading meaningful lives. People start off as organisms with all the heft of a gallon of milk, unable to exercise sufficient willpower to keep from blowing out their diapers in their car seats while their parents groan and look for the first exit to escape rush hour traffic. Along the way, most become people with an intuitive facility for manipulating the symbolic contents of their aspirations, the future, and the world around them to create massively complex and flexible mental models of everything they have come to regard as important in life. In one sense, people go from a world where the concrete – like going to the bathroom – is an abstraction, to a world almost completely populated by abstractions that feel concrete. Math, language, fables, cartoons, time, aging, relationships, people’ goals, their own death, all of these things attain gravity primarily in...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Colorado State University, Mail Stop, 1876, Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1876, USA

    Michael F. Steger

  2. The Pennsylvania State University, 002A, Ferguson Building, University Park, PA, 16802-4300, USA

    Matthew J. Bundick

  3. Stanford University, 271, Jordan Hall, Palo Alto, CA, 94305, USA

    David Yeager

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  1. Michael F. Steger
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  2. Matthew J. Bundick
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  3. David Yeager
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Correspondence to Michael F. Steger .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, 302 Sycamore Hall, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Roger J. R. Levesque

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Steger, M.F., Bundick, M.J., Yeager, D. (2011). Meaning in Life. In: Levesque, R.J.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1695-2_316

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