What makes your life meaningful?If you don’t really know, you’re far from alone. “We’re in the middle of a meaning crisis,” says Bill Burnett, executive director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University.Many traditional sources of meaning, such as religious faith and community, have been in decline for decades, creating a vacuum. Then the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a mass shift in priorities: “People were kind of adrift,” says Burnett.Now an economic downturn, threats of AI-driven redundancy and future uncertainty may prompt you to wonder: what’s the point?But finding meaning doesn’t have to be a lofty quest, Burnett says – you can start making your life feel more meaningful today.Burnett and Life Design Lab co-founder Dave Evans, both mechanical engineers and former Apple employees, apply pragmatic “design thinking” to common life problems.Their new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, contains strategies for getting more out of your everyday experience, and finding purpose without upending your life. Composite: The Guardian/Simon & Schuster/Bill Burnett & Dave Evans“The meaning of life is a big, philosophical question, and we’re not philosophers,” says Burnett. “But getting more meaning out of life, or living more fully – that, we can help you with.”Lower the bar – and reframe the questionIf you’re struggling to find meaning, you might be aiming too high.The concepts of finding your purpose (implying there is only one) and self-actualising (or becoming “everything that one is capable of becoming”, identified by pioneering psychologist Abraham Maslow as the peak of human experience) are not just daunting, but broadly unattainable.Instead, cultivate more meaning moment by moment. “Set the bar low, and accumulate small changes over time,” Burnett says.In their book, Burnett and Evans identify four key components to “meaning-making”: wonder, flow, coherence and community. It can be quite straightforward to improve upon these, Burnett says.“These notions that you’ve got to study philosophy, or meditate, or sit on a mountain for a month, or quit your job and do the Eat, Pray, Love thing … you don’t have to do any of that.”Wonder: go beyond yourselfA better aim than self-actualisation is what Maslow and other psychologists call “self-transcendence”: feeling awe, wonder and connection to something bigger.It is much more achievable than a “fully realised, fully optimised self”, Burnett says, and there is mounting evidence that it benefits mental health and wellbeing, as well as reducing stress and releasing oxytocin.The key is to create opportunities for awe day-to-day, rather than wait for a special occasion or a staggering view.“You can have a moment of transcendent love with your grandkids, or of transcendent beauty [looking at] a flower in the middle of nowhere,” says Burnett.He and Evans support a regular practice of wonder and curiosity: “The more you do it, the more your mindset changes.” One way to do this: imagine you’ve donned “wonder glasses”, causing you to see the world around you anew. What catches your attention? What’s something wonderful you might have overlooked?Flow: lose yourself in the momentMost of the time, our energies are focused on what Burnett and Evans call “transactions”: ticking tasks off a to-do list, responding to unexpected snags in our day, and otherwise working to ensure smooth functioning.Graphic with three lines of text that say, in bold, ‘Well Actually’, then ‘Read more on living a good life in a complex world,’ then a pinkish-lavender pill-shaped button with white letters that say ‘More from this section’ “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Burnett says. But if we learn to shut out thoughts of what’s next and exist solely in the present moment, we can feel more fully alive.Burnett likens it to the psychological flow state, “the place where time stands still and you’re really connected to the thing you’re doing”. With practice, it’s possible to achieve that total absorption and presence routinely, and escape the “transactional world”, he says. “You can learn how to ‘flip the switch’”.Try losing yourself in a mundane chore like chopping onions, without a podcast or any other distractions, and imagining that your entire world extends only to the chopping board. Or sit and watch a tree for five minutes until you catch on to the tiny motions of all the leaves. Even going for a walk at half your regular pace can help.If that sounds boring, increasing your tolerance for boredom is part of the point, according to Burnett and Evans, because it fosters a mindset of acceptance and availability.Coherence: find your compassOften, crises of meaning or identity arise when people realise their career and relationships are purely the result of doing what was expected of them, Burnett says.“People just drift into these situations, then find themselves someday going, ‘Wait a minute, how the hell did I get here? This isn’t what I want’”.In How to Live a Meaningful Life, Burnett and Evans write that in a coherent life, your actions reflect your values and beliefs. When those three elements are all aligned, meaning arrives more easily.More from Why am I like this: