Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is a profound exploration of meaning in human life. The book begins with a harrowing account of the author’s personal experience in Nazi concentration camps. He uses this account to illustrate the distribution of prisoner personas that manifested as a result of the damaging influences of camp. The typical prisoner used apathy to defend themselves. Some used humor. Others were fatally nihilistic. A few were status-seeking people-pleasers trying to win favor with other prisoners and guards.
Despite this wide variance in personas, every prisoner was in the same environment. What was different was how each prisoner related to their environment internally. The book argues that these differences were caused by different meanings that each prisoner held for their life. Those that were able to still find meaning in their life were most likely to endure the daily stress of camp. Others that had no meaning, or lost their meaning, were most likely to give up. They would refuse to eat, refuse to move, and would lie in their own excrement until they died. This suggests that the answer to the age-old question “what is the meaning of life?” is more than just a thought exercise; it is critical to our survival and well-being. Frankl believes that pursuit of meaning is a fundamental human drive (the “will to meaning”), and suggests that meaning, not pleasure (a la Freud), is the primary motivating factor in life.
Frankl eloquently describes how we can answer “what is the meaning of life?” in our own lives. One thing we have to understand is that meaning is personal. It is unique to each individual. Meaning isn’t something that we can outsource to our culture or other people. It comes from deep within us, from our gut and our heart. Frankl suggests that often when we ask “what is the meaning of life?“, we tend to answer in such a way that involves us acquiring or extracting things from life. The answer tends to underscore a cultural metaphor that life is a finite resource, ready to exploited for our own gain and pleasure. To find our meaning, he recommends to flip that perspective around. What matters is not our expectation of life, but what life expects of us.
What does life expect of you?
The meaning of your life comes from authentically answering that question and orienting your life in pursuit of actualizing the answer. The process of confronting one’s meaning and orienting one’s life towards it forms the basis of Frankl’s logotherapy approach. Logotherapy requires listening to and honoring your gut and heart, which may be at odds with your mind. This inner tension is actually a good sign that you’ve identified meaning for your life. Frankl argues that true wholeness and human thriving is dependent upon creating this tension (by confronting one’s meaning) and then working to resolve it via “right action”, i.e., pursuing your meaning through your daily actions.
“What man needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. A call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” — Viktor Frankl
Despite meaning being personal, Frankl suggests there are three general sources of meaning. The first is creation. Humans are especially gifted in that we can create things; solutions to hard problems, art, wealth, or other humans. Heeding the instinctual call to create something of lasting value can bring immense meaning in one’s life. The second is love. Creating a strong relationship with a spouse, friends, and community aligns with our fundamental need to social connection. The meaning in love is about seeing the essential traits of a person and the unrealized potential (their own meaning) which ought to be actualized, and then enabling them to actualize it. The third is suffering. Frankl suggests that life can have meaning despite immense suffering, as he experienced first hand in Nazi concentration camps.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how — Friedrich Nietzsche
Maintaining your positive character and persevering through adversity are two things that provide meaning during times of suffering. Suffering challenges us to change ourselves; there is no growth without suffering and pain.
Frankl believes that many of our collective neuroses, e.g., nihilism, anxiety, depression, can be explained in terms of meaning, or rather lack of meaning in our lives. Whenever we lose meaning orientation in our life, it creates a so-called “existential vacuum” that we tend to fill with pleasure or power1 seeking behavior. On the other hand, having a strong meaning for your life provides a foundation for your behavior and mental health. When we have a foundational “why” for our life, it makes doing things that require discipline (e.g. regular exercise, consistently eating real food, writing) easier to stick to. And since our meaning comes from within us, it will be intrinsically aligned with our core values. This alignment will foster the free expression of our core values through our behavior and thought patterns, a necessary condition for mental health.
Personal Thoughts
If meaning originates from our true self, then we need to have a strong connection to our whole self (including our gut instinct) as a prerequisite for finding meaning in our lives. From a previous post, we know that trauma causes disconnection from our whole self, including our gut instinct. Therefore, finding meaning may require us to first heal trauma to reconnect with our self so that we may hear the full message that our gut tries to send us. Once we’ve identified some potential meaning in our life, we have to act on it. This is the source of tension that Frankl describes. Whenever our potential meaning requires us to switch careers, or end unhealthy relationships (with people or bad information2), this can represent fundamental changes in our life that are difficult to follow through on. Frankl argues that working to resolve this tension through our actions, i.e., pursuing our life’s meaning, is a necessary condition for mental health.
The question “what does life expect of you?” is a great frame to think about meaning in our lives, however I think it deserves caution not to take it too far. No matter how much you think life “expects” of you, you still have to defend your own boundaries and ensure your needs are met. Sacrificing your health or relationships for goals, no matter how ambitious or noble they may be, misses the forest for the trees. You are no good to anyone if you burn yourself out. One thing that can help here is to have a low time preference. Don’t try to solve every problem in a week. Identify opportunities for long-term value creation, and consistently work toward them in a sustainable way.
Thanks for reading,
Connor
- I take Frankl to mean “power” in the sense of title acquisition via finite game play. I will be writing about power and title in the context of finite vs. infinite games in a later post ↩︎
- Here I mean information in the broadest sense: food, media (social and otherwise), lack of exercise, social interactions, subjects of addiction, etc. ↩︎