It's Not Going To Be That Fun

PEOPLE SEEK TO SPEND TIME IN POSITIVE EXPERIENCES, ENJOYING AND SAVORING. YET THERE IS NO ESCAPING NEGATIVE EXPERIENCES, FROM THE MUNDANE TO THE MASSIVE. MIGHT NEGATIVE EXPERIENCES CONFER A HIDDEN BENEFIT TO WELL-BEING?

- Kathleen D. Vohs, Jennifer Aaker, Rhia Catapano

Whether unfolding in the moment, anticipated, imagined, or revisited through memory, experiences are, in a sense, how people live in time. The pleasure principle, that people seek to avoid negative experiences and far prefer positive ones, is an old idea with much empirical backing. Failure at work, relationship dissolution, and health challenges are not the kind of events that people welcome, whereas career success, long and happy relationships, and tip-top health make for an ideal life. Without doubting that negative experiences can bring pain and suffering, the current paper takes the perspective that, at times, difficult and aversive circumstances may have the side benefit of aiding meaning in life.

The rationale for this perspective is that problems, adversity, and loss may promote efforts to comprehend how they make sense and integrate them within existing knowledge. These mental integration efforts can strengthen and support perceptions of meaningfulness. While it is unlikely that people’s immediate reaction to threatening, challenging experiences will be to engage comprehension processes, the motivation to understand the event’s significance for the self and the world may come with some time.

Meaning often is defined in terms of connections among stimuli, information, and concepts. Meaning informs meaning in life, namely through a pillar termed comprehension. Comprehension involves assigning personally-significant interpretations to disparate, yet connected, bits of information. It also refers to the degree to which people perceive a sense of coherence and understanding about their lives. Meaning in life is not only about comprehension, to be sure. Nevertheless, comprehension may be a crucial process by which people can extract meaning from undesirable, aversive experiences.