What is a Good Life? #180
The Art of a Meaningful Life with Karen L. Jacob, PhD
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around how we live and what actually matters.
This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Karen L. Jacob, PhD - clinical psychologist, Program Director of the Gunderson Residence at McLean Hospital, and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School. She shares how a father's dedication shaped her need for meaningful work, how four years of uncertainty after college turned out to be the most formative of her life, and how a chance encounter with a patient led her to specialising in borderline personality disorder.
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Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
Figuring out what you don’t want is part of the process.
This is a lesson that continues to arise from all these interviews, as Karen’s story so clearly demonstrates.
She recalled spending four years before graduate school trying several things that weren’t really a fit. She watched her friends begin climbing the corporate ladder while she pursued different paths and waited tables on weekends to pay the bills. For her, this was a period of considerable personal growth, which was also agonising at times. She felt lost.
We can often feel like we are stuck or lost by not knowing what we want, to the point that we end up discounting the significance of understanding what we don’t want.
We can also over-inflate the importance of thinking we know what we want in theory - you have to try it out. I recall interviewing a partner at a consultancy firm who was also a yoga instructor. He harboured hopes of transitioning into yoga full-time until he went through the process of organising a handful of retreats and realised what the life of someone living that profession entailed beyond the image he had of it.
None of this is wasted effort; it is all part of the process of refining what might be meaningful and realistic. It makes life more of an experiment rather than a matter of winning and failing.
Meaningful work rarely arrives the way you expect it to.
Karen didn’t seek out Borderline Personality Disorder as something to specialise in. In fact, it was considered to be a particularly challenging area to work in when she began her career, and she initially steered herself away from it. It was when working in a department that specialised in diabetes that she crossed paths again with a client with BPD, and it all began from there.
I once interviewed a therapist and best-selling author who tried to be a priest, a college professor, and a musician. This wasn’t a path he could ever have predicted. I recall a senior business executive telling me that she never saw a five-year plan come to fruition. This is not to say we shouldn’t plan, but rather that there is an element of discovery in life that is beyond our control - more like a conversation with life than a determination.
The way you show up matters too.
Even work that feels meaningful can become less so depending on how we engage with it. Conversely, work that isn’t a perfect fit can still teach us something.
Karen mentions how her own realisations about parenting and letting go of control affected her work. How once she was deeply invested in the outcome, and how learning to step back and let other people own the process was hugely impactful on her work and continued to make it meaningful in new ways.
I recently interviewed a meditation teacher who suggested to me that meaning for him was derived from how present he was when engaging with another human being and situation. Just like the conversation he was engaged in with me and the walk he was scheduled to go on afterwards with a friend.
Even situations we no longer wish to be in can reveal something about who we are, what matters to us, and where we might need to go next.
If you are currently in one of those moments you consider yourself to be stuck or lost, perhaps you are really in a moment of understanding more of yourself before the next move becomes clearer.
2. This Week’s Questions
Is there a period in your life when you felt completely lost, only to later realise it was part of your process?
How important is it to you that your work feels meaningful?
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - The Art of a Meaningful Life with Karen L. Jacob, PhD - What is a Good Life? #180
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Karen L. Jacob, PhD below.
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About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.