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Meaning & Purpose Why you get up, what makes effort feel worth it, and how to live well against the fact that life is finite. The ideas behind meaning, purpose, and a life that holds together.
39 cards · space to flip · 1–4 to grade · d to go deeper
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Reading list The works this deck draws on, in the order worth reading them. Cards point to a specific chapter or paper where one fits.
01 Book The Power of Meaning · Emily Esfahani Smith The best map of this deck: four pillars (belonging, purpose, storytelling, transcendence), each tied to the research and to people who live by it. Start here. 02 Book Man's Search for Meaning · Viktor Frankl The primary source on meaning under suffering. The camp memoir in part one is what everyone cites; part two, on logotherapy, is where the three routes to meaning are set out. 03 Paper Some Key Differences Between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life · Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky, 2013 The survey study behind the happiness-versus-meaning cards: what the two share, and where they pull apart (giving, stress, time horizon). 04 Book Four Thousand Weeks · Oliver Burkeman Finitude as the starting point for choosing what to do. The chapters on commitment and on settling are the ones this deck leans on. 05 Book The Path to Purpose · William Damon Interview research with young people on how purpose actually forms. The case that purpose is built through engagement rather than found by introspection. 06 Book Nicomachean Ethics · Aristotle The origin of eudaimonia. The translation matters: Terence Irwin's Hackett edition is the scholar's choice, and the Oxford World's Classics edition (Ross, revised by Lesley Brown) reads more easily. Books I and X are the ones on happiness. 07 Book Staring at the Sun · Irvin Yalom A psychotherapist on death anxiety and how facing it changes how people live; far more approachable than his textbook Existential Psychotherapy. His idea of rippling, what of you persists in others, is here. 08 Book Meditations · Marcus Aurelius, translated by Gregory Hays A private notebook on mortality, duty, and attention by someone who had every reason to feel important. The Hays translation (Modern Library) is the plain-English one. 