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Lumping and Splitting in the Study of Meaning in Life: Thoughts on Surfing, Surgery, Scents, and Sermons

For thousands of years, philosophers have been debating what a meaningful life entails and the best way to create one. In their article, Garland, Farb, Goldin, and Fredrickson (this issue) offer a comprehensive account of one such pathway that originates with the act of mindfulness. Specifically, when people are faced with negative life events, they should deploy mindfulness techniques to receive a chain of benefits, which include a positive reappraisal of said events, that in turn increase the likelihood of positive emotions, which can then be savored and ultimately transformed into a greater sense of meaning and purpose in life (see Figure 1 in Garland et al., this issue). This pathway has been anointed the mindfulness-to-meaning theory. In this commentary, we place this theory in a wider perspective and consider several neglected issues regarding how mindfulness may relate to meaning and purpose in life. First, meaning in life is irreducible to a single pathway. We reintroduce the concept of equifinality where diverse pathways, including chance events, can be substituted to attain the same goal (e.g., Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1996). We illustrate and lay out several different ways that meaning in life can be obtained. Mindfulness to meaning is integrated into a wider review of how people can create meaning in life. Second, we reintroduce the concept of multifinality (e.g., Nolen-Hoeksema & Watkins, 2011) where the same initial conditions, in this case mindfulness and positive reappraisal, may lead to a variety of outcomes—and only one of them is a greater sense of meaning in life. We question whether science requires a new theory about each individual mindfulness outcome. In our view, it would be a greater scientific advancement to delineate the full range of outcomes afforded by a particular behavior (the benefits and the costs) and to specify the contexts that the benefits (or the costs) might be stronger or weaker. Third, we question the widespread assumption about positivity that more is always better. Instead, we offer an alternative view on the importance of situational sensitivity, inspired by a growing body of work suggesting that psychological flexibility trumps allegiance to any single behavior or strategy such as mindfulness (Aldao, 2013; Bonanno & Burton, 2013; Kashdan & Biswas-Diener, 2014; Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010). Taken together, we hope to integrate several isolated strands of study into a nuanced discussion of mindfulness and meaning.