People feel that their lives are more meaningful while engaging in behaviors more closely aligned with their routines. Does the behavioral content of these routines and the contextual factors surrounding their enactment matter for this relationship? In two experience sampling studies ( N = 93, 1,512 episodes; N = 97, 1,629 episodes), we test whether the relationship between routines and meaning in life (MIL) depends on the content of the activities. We found that the degree to which one’s current activity is a routine positively related to momentary MIL beyond other meaningful features (e.g., relationships, goals, prosociality) of that activity. We conducted Study 2 in the context of mass routine disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found even stronger relationships between routine enactment and concurrent MIL in this context which held controlling for factors, including perceived chaos, mood, and anxiety. These findings suggest that routines uniquely relate to MIL, beyond the meaningfulness of their content and across contexts.
The science of meaning in life, dominated by retrospective trait assessments, has critically expanded our understanding of this important construct, but has limitations. The trait measurement approach does not allow a nuanced examination of feelings of meaning in life as they are experienced in everyday life, unfiltered by cognitive meaning making processes. In this chapter, we call for a broad integration of experience sampling methods (ESM) into the science of meaning in life to afford a better understanding of the ebbs and flows of this experience within person across situations. Research has identified within person variability in online feelings of meaning in life, highlighting the necessity of this approach. Initial integrations of the ESM into meaning in life research have provided a number of valuable contributions to our understanding of this construct, which we review in this chapter. Finally, we discuss distinctions between state and trait meaningfulness and the generative potential of integrating the ESM into the study of meaning in life.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.