When asked if they have any regrets in life, people on their death beds rarely say they wished they would have spent more hours at work, made more money, or bought a more expensive house or car. What they often say is that they wish they would have spent more time with family or friends.
And yet, so many of us (especially in the United States) have fashioned our lives in such a way that the pursuit of career success, financial prosperity, and high social status compromise our ability to fully engage in these other family and social activities. Thus, it may be likely that at the end of our lives we will be looking back and wishing we had spent more time cultivating relationships and less time focused on climbing the corporate ladder, making more and more money, and buying expensive toys.
However, how do we know that the regrets of an old or ill person on his or her deathbed are enlightening? In other words, is there any real evidence that prioritizing close relationships makes life meaningful, and does so for young, healthy adults (not just elderly or terminally ill people)?
Loneliness is meaninglessness
First, there are a number of experimental studies that strongly suggest that relationships do provide meaning. For example, in research conducted by Dr. Jean Twenge , a social psychologist at San Diego State University, and her colleagues participants who were socially excluded evidenced lower perceptions of meaning in life compared to participants who were not excluded. Specifically, in this study, college students showed up to a laboratory in groups of four to six people and, at the experimenter's request, spent a few minutes getting to know one another. Subsequently, these participants went into their own cubicles and were asked to indicate who from the people they just met and interacted with they would like to work with on the next experimental task. This is when the experiment got interesting. Half of the participants were told by the experimenter that nobody else in the group picked them to work with. This was the social exclusion or rejection condition. The other half were told that they were picked by others. These conditions were assigned randomly and were not based on actual feedback from the other participants (even though each participant thought they were).
In other words, Twenge and colleagues created in the laboratory the experience of rejection that many of us have faced in life. Almost everyone can come up with a real life example (e.g., not being invited to a party). After this laboratory rejection, Twenge and colleagues measured perceptions of meaning in life and found that the participants in the excluded group were more likely than participants in the non-excluded group to endorse the notion that life has no real meaning or purpose.
In short, having relational needs threatened decreased meaning. A number of other experiments using different rejection situations and measures of meaning have found similar results.
Relatedness and meaning
Just as threats to relationships undermine meaning, a strong sense of connectedness to others facilitates meaning. For example, in a series of studies conducted by Josh Hicks of Texas A&M and Laura King of the University of Missouri, strong feelings of relatedness (feeling close and connected to others) predicted increased feelings of meaning in life. In my previous post, I discussed research indicating that positive emotions lead to perceptions of meaning. Hicks and King found something relevant to this relationship between positive emotion and meaning in their research on the relationship between relatedness and meaning. Specifically, they found that when people had a strong sense of relatedness, they did not need positive mood to see life as meaningful. That is, people in a neutral mood perceived life to be just as meaningful as people in a positive mood, if they felt well connected to others.
As noted in my previous post, you can't be happy all of the time, but this research suggests that relationships can compensate for this fact and facilitate a sense of meaning.
Relationships buffer threats to meaning
The last area of research I want to focus on regarding the connection between relationships and meaning is a number of studies conducted by Israeli researchers. Specifically, Mario Mikulincer and the late Victor Florian found across a number of studies that feelings of close attachment to others and love provide psychological protection from situations that threaten a sense of existential meaning. For more on this research see my previous post Love Conquers Death. In short, when feelings of meaning are under threat, people often turn to close others and doing so likely restores the sense that life is worthwhile.
It is important to note that all of the research just discussed was conducted with young and middle-aged healthy adults. The take home message from the scientific literature is that relationships are an important source of meaning, and not just amongst the elderly or terminally ill. So perhaps there is some wisdom to be found from people's deathbed regrets.
