Why Do We Value the Feeling of Meaning in Life? Critiquing Evolutionary Accounts

Evolutionary psychologists often describe the feeling of meaning in life as a fundamental human need and essential to human functioning. Adaptationist accounts typically suggest that the feeling of meaning in life evolved to enable or motivate a specific fitness-enhancing behavior, with most accounts clustering around four broad categories: associative learning, prosocial behavior toward nonclose kin, goal-directed behavior, and coping with death anxiety. Such accounts assume that people would perform these behaviors less effectively without the feeling of meaning in life and the desire to experience that feeling. We argue that these existing adaptationist accounts are underspecified, and it is possible that the behaviors attributed to the feeling of meaning in life may be more straightforwardly explained by other mechanisms. We suggest one alternative explanation, namely that the feeling of meaning in life may be a by-product of humans’ capacities for mental time travel, metacognition, and self-reflection and their attempts to interpret the internal states produced by those capacities. Last, we question the universality of concerns about meaning in life and suggest some potential avenues for future research.