Ina has some good insight to this question - whether personal or academic. Research consistently demonstrates that the "road to happiness" includes a sense of meaning in life.

Many occupational tasks and daily hassles tend to be momentary and erode a sense of meaning. This is why accomplished individuals tend to commit little time to temporary, even urgent tasks and much more to tasks that have long-term focus. Also, empirical results are largely consistent in demonstrating that activities promoting a sense of connectedness and meaning provide benefit. Having and cultivating positive social connections via friendships, family, or even community service tend to boost this positivity. Likewise, religion/spirituality can provide meaning and social connection.

Paloutzian and Park's (2013) text on the psychology of religion might be insightful as might be Hicks and Routledge's (2013) "The Experience of Meaning in Life: Classical Perspectives, Emerging Themes, and Controversy". Wishing you clarity, insight, and direction!

Dear @Aiemen, looking at my life I very seldom felt lost. I do not even remember such events as examples. Perhaps because any potential reason of frustration (life challenges) I tried to understand (from the roots base) rationally and cognitively.

When the research work gets to over whelming, getting too deeply involved in the research do make me lost touch of the real life life, like akwardness in simple conversation, slow reaction to humor or sadness and avoiding human generally. Most of the time, joining the group prayer (Jemmaah) is good eoungh to bring me back to reality of life and of my goals. If not, I would go a conference or a course to meet new group of people.

Ina has some good insight to this question - whether personal or academic. Research consistently demonstrates that the "road to happiness" includes a sense of meaning in life.

Many occupational tasks and daily hassles tend to be momentary and erode a sense of meaning. This is why accomplished individuals tend to commit little time to temporary, even urgent tasks and much more to tasks that have long-term focus. Also, empirical results are largely consistent in demonstrating that activities promoting a sense of connectedness and meaning provide benefit. Having and cultivating positive social connections via friendships, family, or even community service tend to boost this positivity. Likewise, religion/spirituality can provide meaning and social connection.

Paloutzian and Park's (2013) text on the psychology of religion might be insightful as might be Hicks and Routledge's (2013) "The Experience of Meaning in Life: Classical Perspectives, Emerging Themes, and Controversy". Wishing you clarity, insight, and direction!

We feel lost when we lose contact with our own actual true experience and energy presence, and when we lose contact with the genuine experience and energy presence of other individuals around us. That happens when we fill our minds with presumptive beliefs and interpretations about ourselves, other people, and reality, which can come from our own predetermined biases and demanding judgmental expectations, or from not feeling free to question fixed codes of beliefs and behavior imposed on us by society, family, religion, or other sources deemed to be authoritative and compelling. Focusing on the menu, we are not nourished by the actual meal; focusing on the map, we are afraid to explore the actual territory. That is to say, when we are afraid to question habitual ways of valuing, thinking, feeling, and behaving, we are not free to notice actual genuine experience and potentially liberating insights abiding beyond the scope of those predetermined structures, codes, or models, or systems of thinking. Those rigid systems of thought stifle, block, imprison, and depress our energies, like a straitjacket or iron chain. When we are divorced from our actual experience, energy, and core integrity, then we feel lost, ungrounded, uprooted from our own genuine ground of being, like abiding in dreams or floating castles in the sky, as depicted in Jonathan Swift's novel, "Gulliver's Travels." The tiny dwarfs or Lilliputians who pinned down the Giant Gulliver metaphorically represent our own fears and constricted, restrictive, repetitive, habitual ways of thinking and functioning, which fetter and imprison the natural greatness of our real being, our true heart and soul, our genuine creative genius, the "genie-in-us." As the Bible suggests, "You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free", meaning, directly observe your actual feelings, thoughts, and experience, and be open to empathically tuning into the actual experience and living energy presence of other individuals. That connection to the actual experiential truth of yourself and others will produce liberating insights that will free you from self-imposed and socially-imposed illusions. In truth, the Word of God is not a written book, but the winding trail of our own core integrity, our intuitive direct, unmediated experience of what feels truly right or wrong, real or unreal, wholesome or unwholesome, pure or impure, natural or unnatural, compassionate or cruel, to us, in a given moment. By following that often unpredictable, unstructured, winding trail of our own core integrity, we gradually unfold deeper and deeper, greater and greater, levels of our own real being, like the sprouting and blossoming of a beautiful flower. Burying our emotional pain and inner conflict under a superimposed covering of self-imposed or socially-imposed thought systems freezes and buries the energy in those feelings, in the subconscious, below the threshold of our conscious awareness, whereas compassionately, lovingly, embracing our inner pain frees us from it. That is the "charity that begins at home, where the heart is." If we continue to follow the experiential truth of ourselves, it will eventually lead us from our momentary feelings to our permanent spiritual or Divine Being, our real Home. Metaphorically speaking, that process of following our core integrity or experiential truth from moment to moment is like following the Yellow Brick Road to the Wizard of Oz, or like following the Rainbow to the Pot of Gold, or like Alladin lighting the lamp of his own warm loving heart, thereby becoming like God, as implied by his name.

I and my late father, Dr. Max Hammer, discuss this process of compassionately transforming ourselves (our individual life), personal relationships, and society, in two books which have recently been published. I have posted sample chapters from each of these books on my ResearchGate profile page. Press Releases for each of the books are also available on request. Bibliographical information for the two books follows below:

THE TITLES OF OUR NEW BOOKS ARE:

1) “DEEPENING YOUR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS: DEVELOPING EMOTIONAL INTIMACY AND GOOD COMMUNICATION” (ISBN: 978-1-61897-590-4)

2) “PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALING THROUGH CREATIVE SELF-UNDERSTANDING AND SELF-TRANSFORMATION.” (ISBN: 978-1-62857-075-5)

THESE BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE (IN SOFT COVER PRINT AND VARIOUS ELECTRONIC VERSIONS ) THROUGH AMAZON, BARNES AND NOBLE, AND THE AUTHOR/PUBLISHER WEBSITE, http://sbprabooks.com/MaxHammer