Jonah Li on meaning and purpose in life
Jonah Li is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Tacoma. He was a Ph.D. candidate in Counseling Psychology at Indiana University, and conducted his predoctoral psychology internship at the University of Washington Counseling Center. He earned his MA in Counseling Psychology at University of Denver and his BSS in Counseling and Psychology at Hong Kong Shue Yan University. Jonah is interested in studying meaning and purpose in life, death anxiety, and life schemes, which transcends his teaching, research, and clinical work. He has been the recipient of the Outstanding Student Award of the ISSEP, the Honey Family Foundation Graduate Student Scholarship of the INPM, and the Student Award for Distinguished Contributions to Positive Psychology from the Section on Positive Psychology of the Society of Counseling Psychology (Div. 17) of the APA.
Jonah on the web: LinkedIn | Research Gate | Google Scholar
By Kenneth Vail, Cleveland State University. December 7, 2022.
ISSEP: How did you first become aware of and interested in existentialism and existential psychology?
Counterclockwise from top: Hong Kong; Irvin Yalom and his classic Existential Psychotherapy; Viktor Frankl and his classic Man’s Search For Meaning.
Jonah Li: Before I knew what existential psychology was, I had my own experience with a crisis of meaning. I had grown up in Hong Kong with a life goal to go to university, become a psychologist, and deliver therapy. The universities in Hong Kong are almost all public universities, which use a common entrance exam, and only a few of them offer programs in counseling psychology. So, it was important to do well on the entrance exam so I could pursue my career goals. But when the time came, I failed the exams and didn’t get in. So I really struggled with that, and had to face some deep questions about by life: What do I really want to do? How much did that mean to me? What else might I want to do instead? Could those things be as meaningful? It worked out in the end though; turns out I hadn’t really considered going to private universities, so when I heard about one in town with a counseling program I just went to that one instead.
In my counseling degree, we learned about a variety of counseling theories and approaches—including Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy and Irvin Yalom’s existential psychotherapy. One of the central points of those works is that there is no inherent meaning in the world—everything is essentially meaningless—but we humans fabricate our own sense of meaning and purpose in life through our cultural and personal beliefs. So, we can embrace existing cultural systems of meaning and purpose (e.g., religions) or we can craft new ones for ourselves. But in either case, it’s the sense of meaning and purpose that makes life bearable during the tough times and pleasant during the easy times. I really connected with those ideas, and found that work particularly fascinating. So, I decided to try to follow in their footsteps. I consider that my own meaningful purpose in life is to help others find their meaningful purpose through my counseling work, and to contribute to the improved understanding of meaning and purpose through my research.
ISSEP: You’ve been doing some great work to better understand and measure meaning in life. Can you tell us more about that research?
Jonah Li: I’ve been particularly interested in the tri-partite model of meaning in life, which was developed on the basis of theory and research finding that meaning in life involves coherence, purpose, and significance. A large body of carefully conducted studies found that people feel a sense of meaning in life when they have coherent ways of making sense of the world, have a goal directed sense of purpose, and view themselves as making significant contributions to their broader cultural drama. Much of that research used techniques—such as subtle experimental manipulations of informational incoherence e.g., having participants interact with playing cards that use the wrong colors (e.g., Proulx & Major, 2010), or incongruous strings of words like “turn frogs” and “careful sweaters” (e.g., Randles, Proulx, & Heine, 2011)—which turned out to play an important role in meaning in life but operate outside of people’s conscious processing (Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006).
In that light, I became curious about what laypeople are able to consciously think about when they reflect on what makes their life meaningful. So my colleagues and I did a mixed method study to find out (Li et al., 2021). We generated a structured set of open-ended questions to ask lay people to tell us about what makes their life meaningful, we categorized the responses, and then ran a latent profile analysis to see if we could statistically identify any common themes in their responses. As you might expect, their responses focused on the social relationships, beliefs, and experiences that received the most conscious attention in their day-to-day lives: interpersonal relationships, purpose, self-transcendence (making the world a better place, leaving a legacy), personal growth, spirituality, and meaning making. The latent profile analysis further found these themes typically occurred in one of three clusters, such that people reported their meaning in life was characterized by (1) interpersonal relationships, (2) spiritual-personal growth, and/or (3) self-transcendence (making an impact, leaving a positive legacy). Also as you might expect, they almost never identified things typically processed outside of conscious awareness, like maintaining a coherent basic informational understanding of the world.
In other research (Li et al., 2022), my colleagues and I developed an instrument to measure cognitive concern and emotional anxiety about existential meaninglessness. These two factors were validated in student samples, broader community samples, and samples of people with chronic illness. I think it’s a pretty interesting instrument, because it’s possible for concern and anxiety to be independent from each other. For example, a Buddhist or a secular scientist might each cognitively appreciate that the world is basically meaningless, and come to accept that fact without experiencing anxiety about it. Or a Christian might be intensely worried (anxious) about having a meaningful life, but also cognitively believe in a divine plan full of meaning and purpose.
Still other research studies (Li & Wong, 2020) have examined free-will (vs. determinism) beliefs as a “life scheme” that could impact the sense of meaning in life and mental health outcomes such as depressive symptoms, which reflect, in part, flat affect and low or no motivation. We found that belief in free will was uniquely associated with reduced depressive symptoms, whereas belief in determinism was associated with higher depressive symptoms. That is, people who believed in free will likely felt responsible for their lives and therefore experienced greater motivation and emotional engagement in the world, whereas believing that one’s actions and environments were predetermined (rather than due to one’s choices) perhaps undermined motivation and emotional engagement.
“We can’t have it all—we have to choose certain sources of meaning to prioritize and pursue.”
ISSEP: Can your work help us make sense of important human experiences or better understand pop culture?
Jonah Li: Yes, totally. Think about a couple key ideas in classic existentialist philosophy, such as Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). One idea is that the world doesn’t have any inherent meaning of its own, so we humans create meaning for ourselves. In fact, people have created a wide variety of meanings, which often get passed own from generation to generation. Another idea is that, because we have a limited amount of time to act (there’s only 24 hours in a day, we only live a handful of decades if we’re lucky, etc.), we can’t have it all—we have to choose certain sources of meaning to prioritize and pursue.
Clockwise from top left: Martin Heidegger; his classic book Being and Time (1927); author David Sedaris; and Batman.
That reminds me of an experience I had during my undergraduate studies. In one of my courses, the instructor asked us to write our four most important things (people, places, objects, experiences, etc) out on four pieces of paper. Then, they asked us to choose the least meaningful of those four, and rip it up; then the least meaningful of the remaining three, and rip it up; and the least meaningful of the remaining two. The point was that our time and efforts, like everything else, is limited and so we will inevitably be forced to choose the most meaningful selections available.
A similar example I’ve heard about comes from a story in The New Yorker by David Sedaris (2009) about his Australian friend, Pat. They had been discussing the meaning of success, and Pat invited David and his husband Hugh to imagine a four-burner stove: one burner represents family, one is friends, one is health, one is work. In order to be successful, Pat explained, you have to turn off one of your burners; in order to be really successful, you have to turn off two. Both Pat and David felt they had achieved meaningful work-related successes; to get there, Pat turned off family and health, David turned off friends and health. My own research has found that these sorts of experiences are common; our latent profile analyses found that people tend to prioritize one or another “burner” on the meaning stove—interpersonal relationships, spiritual-personal growth, or self-transcendence (making an impact, leaving a positive legacy)—and turn off the other burners.
Even in fictional pop culture, we see this sort of choosing happen. Bruce Wayne developed an authentic passion for justice after his parents were robbed and murdered. As Batman, he chooses to turn off the “burners” for friends and health, and instead focused on his family (his origin story) and work (his fortune, which fuels his crime-fighting) to successfully pursue a sense of meaning in life through vigilante justice. If Batman had been in my mixed-method study, he might have been categorized in the cluster that found meaning through self-transcendence—making the world a better place by fighting crime—rather than the clusters that prioritized interpersonal relationships, spirituality, or other topics.
ISSEP: What do you see as the most important next steps in studying meaning and purpose in life?
Jonah Li: I’d like to see some more research on the difference between meaning in life and purpose in life. Another area for further research would be for at least some research to take a more idiographic approach to studying meaning in life. Currently, researchers mostly rely on a nomothetic approach—they give all participants the same statements and ask them to rate their agreement/disagreement with those statements. But each person certainly has different sources of meaning and different phenomenological experiences. Those differences, presumably, are captured in the nomothetic approach but it’s more difficult to map the sources that way. So it might be interested to take an idiographic approach to try to map a taxonomy of sources of meaning in life, and study the causes and consequences of different sources of meaning.
ISSEP: You’ve attended, and presented research at, our Existential Psychology Preconferences; how has your experience been with those?
“For someone who passionately cares about the science of existential psychology, it really feels like home”
Jonah Li: I definitely feel at home in this field, and it’s great to know that now we have a segment of mainstream psychological science that embraces, supports, and celebrates research on existential topics. I also totally appreciate all the resources that ISSEP makes available; the grants and annual awards and funding to attend the conference. The Existential Psychology preconference—and ISSEP more broadly—inspire and encourage us researchers to take a close look at the deeper concerns of our human existence, from authenticity to meaning in life. I really appreciate that.
My experience at the preconference has been very positive. I was happy to see some of the top existential scholars receiving the Distinguished Career and Early Career Awards, and enjoyed hearing them speak, and then I was awestruck when they came to my poster session. I had read so much of their work. They had some really great questions, suggestions, and insights, and it was really amazing to be able to interact with them. I was also encouraged by meeting the other students as well. They were creative, smart, and friendly. So I enjoyed and learned from the whole experience. It’s a really neat community and for someone who passionately cares about the science of existential psychology, it really feels like home.
ISSEP: What is one piece of advice you would give to future students who have an interest in following in your footsteps?
Jonah Li: Actually, my advice is to follow… their own footsteps! When I was entering the field, I asked my advisor: What sort of research should I typically pursue? Can I do research on things that align with my own personal interests, or should I do the trendy research on conspiracy beliefs, or diversity and cultural differences, that sort of thing? He encouraged me to follow my own personal interests—to pursue my passion and the things that fill me with purpose in life.
Another bit of advice is to get actively involved in the field. Join ISSEP, attend the Existential Psychology Preconference, and get involved. It’s a great home and great community; you’ll make new friends and collaborators; and you’ll find there are a lot of amazing people who will value your contributions, large or small, and who will support you and help you grow as a researcher and scholar.
ISSEP: Can you tell us a little about yourself outside the research context?
Jonah Li: I got married during the pandemic, two years ago. We had hoped to be able to gather our friends and families for a wedding, but that wasn’t safe during the pandemic so we went to city hall and got the certificate. Since then, we were waiting for the pandemic to ease. My family is in Hong Kong and my wife’s is in China, so maybe sometime in the future we’ll be able to get everyone together for a nice wedding, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
We also adopted a cat during the pandemic. I never thought I would ever get a cat, but here it is. It’s a lot of extra time, money, and effort, for sure. But I’ve come to love her, and find myself feeding, petting, and spending time with her. It’s an impressive responsibility to take care of a life like that.
I’m also a big fan of spending time near water; any lakes, rivers, or oceans are great. I’m not the best swimmer, but I love spending time gazing at the shore and watching sunsets—stuff like that. I recently tried stand-up paddleboarding, but that wasn’t really my jam. I did it for an hour and the entire hour I wasn’t able to stand for more than a few seconds at a time. I’d stand up, fall in the water, get back up, and fall in the water again, over and over for the whole hour. The bright side was that it certainly was a good workout. By contrast, I also recently started kayaking and totally love it!
ISSEP: A lot of us like to listen to music in the lab; what are you listening to lately?
Jonah Li: I actually don’t care for music very much. When I was in high school and college, I of course heard the popular Hong Kong singers, Taiwanese singers, and so on. But it all felt pretty vapid, meaningless, and ultimately dissatisfying. Instrumental music never seems to be about anything identifiable, so lyrics are really the only bits that make music interesting to me. But even then, most popular music seems either incomprehensible, self-serving, or pointless. Most songs seem emotional—about a breakup, or love and happiness, or wanting to rebel and feel cool. I just don’t understand the medium. All of those things seem like they could be better explored in more thoughtful prose, rather then through music. For those reasons, I suppose I like folk music and protest songs, because they’re often less purely emotional and they tell interesting stories about cultural traditions and societal struggles—but even then, songs don’t really seem like the best medium for sharing meaningful narratives. Anyway, when I study or work, I play some background music, such as the K-pop band BTS. And when I have low energy and need some motivation, its music from action movies like the Jason Bourne films.