Abstract One important recent development in economics is a new interest in happiness research. This research, I believe, is at least partly motivated by two concerns: a questioning of whether people know what is best for them (see Chapter 13 on projection bias) and a questioning of whether, due to self-control problems, people are able to act in their own self-interest even when they do know what’s best for them (see Chapters 18–22). To the extent that people don’t know what’s good for them, or can’t pursue it successfully on their own, it may be useful to attempt to determine what in fact makes people happy and to think about ways to help people achieve happiness.

In this paper we draw attention to an important motive ? the desire for meaning ? that drive considerable human behavior and economic activity, but has been largely ignored by economists. We distinguish four interpretations of meaning that differ in the degree to which they are amenable to modeling using the standard economic tools of utility maximization. These four interpretations are, in decreasing order of their amenability to modeling in conventional terms: (1) meaning as a resolution of preferences; (2), meaning as an extension of oneself either socially or temporally; (3) meaning as an act of making sense of one?s life; and (4) meaning as an assertion of free will. Drawing upon psychology and literature we analyze implications of these four interpretations of meaning for economics.