• As discussed throughout this chapter, there are many perspectives on purpose and meaning in people’s lives. Here is a short, curated list of videos that explore various perspectives of meaning in life:

• The True Meaning of Life [Streaming Video]
• IKIGAI: A Japanese Philosophy for Finding Purpose [Streaming Video]
• Meaning of Life: Jim Carrey Motivational Video [Streaming Video]
• Is Life Meaningless? And Other Absurd Questions [Streaming Video]
• The Meaning of Life [Streaming Video]
• The Psychology of Motivation: Build Purpose, Respect Contributions, Give Credit [Streaming Video]

• For more on what makes life meaningful, review the entire Pew Research Center Study What Makes Life Meaningful? Views From 17 Advanced Economies here. To use the related interactive tool, click here.
• Read the 2010 Best Start Resource Centre document A Child Becomes Strong: Journeying Through Each Stage of the Life Cycle referenced in the “Stages of Life” section.
• To learn more about the forced boarding schools in the United States, read “Thousands of Indigenous Children Perished in ‘Genocide Boarding Schools.’”
• To learn more about the importance of maintaining and revitalizing Indigenous languages, read “Language Is Land, Land Is Language: The Importance of Indigenous Languages.”
• To learn more about the experiences of First Nations people who are healing from residential schools, read and watch “‘They Tried to Extinguish Us’: Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Elder Shares Healing from Residential School.”
• For more information on Ms. Wilcox’s dictionary and the revitalization of the Wukchumni and other languages, read this page with videos from Emergence Magazine.

1. There are several definitions of meaning and purpose in this chapter. Using one or more of those definitions as a foundation, write your own definition of meaning and purpose.
2. You answered the “meaning in life” questionnaire in the first section of the chapter. Reflect on what your response means to you. Why do you think that you scored this response? What experiences in your life have contributed?
3. How does meaning relate to family life?
4. Choose one of the following topics: creativity, religion, or spirituality. Discuss how it relates to purpose and meaning in family life.
5. Reflect on strong purpose. Can you apply this concept to your own experiences or observations?
6. How are loss, trauma, and meaning related?
7. How do social structures affect meaning and purpose?

• Existential psychology: an approach that focuses on the “whole” person and the major concerns of death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.
• Forced assimilation: the process by which a religious or ethnic minority group is forced to give up their own identity by taking on the cultural characteristics of an established and generally larger community.
• Generativity: the concern for the future and one’s own contribution to the next generation.
• Genocide: the deliberate destruction, in whole or in part, by a government or its agents of a racial, sexual, religious, tribal, or political minority. It can involve not only mass murder but also starvation, forced deportation, and political, economic, and biological subjugation.
• Historical trauma: cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations, including the lifespan, which emanates from massive group trauma.
• Generational trauma: trauma that moves from one generation to the next, as experiences of parents affect the biological, social, mental, or emotional development of their children and sometimes also their grandchildren (also “intergenerational trauma” or “multigenerational trauma”).
• Meaning: can include the emotional significance of an action or way of being; the intention or reason for doing something; something that we create and feel; closely linked to motivation.
• Psychosocial model: a framework that emphasizes our relationships and that society’s expectations motivate much of our behavior and the importance of conscious thought.
• Purpose: can include the aim, goal, or intention of an action; a long-term guiding principle; the impact our life has on the world.

[content warning: this activity contains mention of suicide]

Anderson Cooper, a broadcast journalist born in 1967, lost his father to heart disease when he was 10 years old. When he was 21 years old, his only sibling died by suicide. Then in 2019, when Anderson was in his early 50s, his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, died. That was when Anderson started a new journey of recognizing and dealing more deeply with his grief over all of his familial loss.

Take a few minutes to explore Anderson’s podcast, and to review the summaries of these three episodes:

• Mama Shu: Turning Loss into Love (28 minutes)
• Revisiting Stephen Colbert: Grateful for Grief (52 minutes)
• Love, Loss, and Parenting (36 minutes)

Choose one of the three episodes to listen to and then answer the questions.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the play button on the CNN website or by searching for the episode on your preferred podcast application like Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Discussion Questions

1. Consider Anderson Cooper’s perspective along with the podcast guests. How do the familial roles that the podcasters discussed (child, parent, sibling, and others) impact their relationship with grief?
2. Give examples of the ways that Anderson and his guests connected grief and meaning in their lives.
3. In what ways do you connect with what the speakers share on the podcast episode?