This is Josh Korda of Darma Punk's New York.

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It's easy to assume that a happy life and a meaningful life share the same qualities,

and they do share some qualities in common such as close connection to the loved.

But the research of Roy Bowmeister, Kathleen Bowes, Jennifer, Aker, Emily Garbinski,

they've done a bunch of research into the role of a meaningful life and they found some key

distinctions between happiness and meaning and purpose. Attaining health, well-being, and ease in life is related to happiness,

but it's not actually related to finding meaning or purpose in life.

You can have achieved all of your basic wants,

and still not, and you can be quite happy about that,

but you probably won't still find your life is imbued with meaning.

Happiness is connected to the emotional benefits one accrues from relationships and attachments, but meaning is actually related to what we give to others, not what we accrue from them.

So you can get meaning from a relationship where you're not getting a lot of benefits from it,

but you are in some way benefiting the others.

Meaningful life can be stressful and very often unhappy. So for

example a teacher at an inner city school so long as they sense that their work is helping their students,

they can be completely worn down by having 40 kids in a classroom, they can be underpaid. They can be constantly facing an administrative uphill battle.

And yet throughout all that, the drudgery at times of commuting and dealing with bureaucracy,

yet they'll still have a very meaningful life.

Another classic example, if you were a political prisoner and locked up behind bars, you probably wouldn't be very happy,

...