The Happiness Shortcut

This essay examines a Washington Post interpretation of a Cornell study claiming that small acts of contribution can significantly increase happiness. While the data is compelling, the cultural enthusiasm around it reveals a deeper confusion: we keep mistaking purpose for meaning. Purpose is directional, the movement of action once we decide what matters. Meaning is interpretive, the slow work of understanding why anything should matter at all.
Contemporary life, dominated by technique and optimization, collapses the two. We produce goodness instead of becoming good. The shortcut works for a moment, but it cannot sustain a life, especially in midlife, when the task is not to find a new slogan but to revise the underlying story. Purpose becomes transformative only when grounded in meaning, when action flows from a deeper reckoning rather than from performance. Happiness, then, is not a hack but the consequence of living in alignment with what feels true.

A condensed summary is provided below. The full essay is available as a downloadable PDF.

Doing good helps. Understanding why we do it matters more.

1. The Seduction of Clean Purpose

In an article published yesterday on The Washington Post, Dana Milbank argued that the road to happiness might be surprisingly simple: just help others. Students given four hundred dollars to plant trees, donate books, or support local initiatives reported increased well-being and a renewed sense of belonging. The result is not surprising. When the self turns outward, anxiety softens and perspective widens. But the enthusiasm with which such findings are received reveals something else: a persistent confusion between purpose and meaning. 

Purpose is directional. It describes the vector our actions take once we have decided what matters. Meaning is interpretive. It asks why anything should matter at all. Purpose answers; meaning inquires. In much contemporary commentary, the two collapse into each other. We celebrate the actions because they feel like proof of meaning, when in fact they often stand in for it. A temporary project becomes a temporary “why,” but the underlying narrative - the story into which such purpose fits - remains unexamined. 

2. The World of Techne

This collapse is symptomatic of a broader cultural pattern. We live in a time governed by techne, the logic of making, optimizing, and managing. Technique, which once served understanding, now substitutes for it. Questions of value - What is ethical? What is worth wanting? - are replaced by questions of output: Is this efficient? Does this reduce friction? Is this worth the effort? In this environment, even moral impulses are reorganized into tasks. Purpose becomes a deliverable rather than an orientation. 

Helping others becomes another item in the catalogue of personal upgrades. It steadies the mind briefly, which is useful, but its effect is fragile. Technique can elevate, but only meaning can sustain. Without an interpretive frame to absorb and contextualize the action, the task merely concludes. When the four hundred dollars run out, the activity ends, and techne demands the next procedure. 

3. The Impact of Midlife

This distinction becomes sharper in midlife, where the terrain changes. Younger individuals are still constructing identity; purpose operates as a building tool. A well-chosen direction can shape their sense of self in deep ways. In the second half of life, the challenge is rarely directional. The scaffolding is already in place. The problem is interpretive: how to revise a life already in motion so that its projects still feel alive rather than merely repeated. Here, the cultural narrative of “finding a new why” becomes a trap. It treats exhaustion as a branding issue and assumes that a new purpose will repair what is, in truth, a crisis of meaning. 

Purpose detached from meaning can become performative. It turns into a strategy for managing fatigue rather than a way of orienting oneself toward what is worth doing. Contribution, at midlife, is not measured by scale or novelty but by sincerity, by the ability to act without performance, to be useful without control. Experiences of genuine connection break the feedback loop of mastery, as purpose finds its own full weight only when it is grounded in meaning. 

4. The Act of a Mature Life

This is why shortcuts fail. Purpose feels good, but the feeling is not the story. Happiness is not a technique, and meaning cannot be reverse-engineered through productivity. Interpretation must come first — not to achieve perfect clarity, but to understand what moves us before we act. Only then can purpose take shape as something more than performance. 

The Cornell study is right in one respect: helping others helps us. But the kind of help that transforms is rarely efficient, and the kind of happiness that endures is never simple. Purpose without meaning becomes noise; meaning without purpose becomes paralysis. The challenge, especially in the second half of life, is to let the two inform each other, action guided by understanding, understanding renewed through action. That is not a shortcut to happiness. It is the work of building a life that feels coherent rather than optimized.  

The full essay is available as a downloadable PDF.