Our Search for Meaning

Ever wonder why you have that constant urge for something more in your life and career? That elusive job, that something bigger than yourself, or that special relationship that will give your life more meaning? Something that will motivate you to greater heights and make you a happier person? What drives these urges?

Perhaps a real-life story will provide some insight into this intriguing question. One of my heroes, is a man called Viktor Frankl. Given my background in psychology and organisational behaviour, I’m deeply familiar with theories of motivation that try to explain behaviour and motivation through the idea that we are striving to get different needs satisfied. However, Frankl convinced me that we have overlooked one of the most powerful needs that it at the core of all human behaviour – the need for meaning.

We are meaning-seeking and meaning-making creatures. That is why we want to know the reasons behind certain events and why we strive to make sense of things in our environment or events in our lives. If we can attach some sort of meaning to it, we feel more aligned or motivated. If we cannot explain or attach meaning to something, be it an event or an action by ourselves or others, we feel stuck, lost, frustrated, or deflated and demotivated.

One of the most fascinating examples of our desire to create meaning, is a phenomenon called Pareidolia. Pareidolia causes us to interpret random images, or patterns of light and shadow, as faces – i.e. we see faces in random things – very much like when Tom Hanks in Castaway saw a “face” in a bloody handprint on a ball when he was stranded on an island, then gave the ball the name “Wilson” and started having conversations with it.

Now, of course, the example in Castaway was also an illustration of our nature as social creatures and our deep desire for connection – which is a topic for another post – but nonetheless, his mind interpreted the lines of the handprint as a face. It’s as if he wanted – perhaps needed – to see a face.

Now back to Viktor Frankl’s story and what I learnt about our desire to find meaning…

The Importance of Meaning

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, an up-and-coming Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when the camp was liberated, he was the sole survivor. His whole family, including his pregnant wife, had perished. Nine days after being released from the concentration camp, he wrote a memoir about his experiences and upon returning to Vienna he developed what is today called the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy“, i.e. Logotherapy. His memoir was later republished as a book entitled Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl postulated that the most fundamental human need, is the need to find meaning. It transcends all other needs and drives our behaviour at various times in our lives.

Frankl understood something about the deepest psyche of man, that in the end, we are all searching and striving for meaning. Without a sense of meaning, any achievements, accomplishments and even good experiences feel almost senseless, because they are not deemed significant by our deeper selves, and they do not add to our satisfaction of and with life.

Frankl writes: “This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how’“.

Why do so many of us experience a feeling of being stuck in life and career? Why do we often feel disappointed and even sad as the end of the year approaches and why are we filled with excitement at the beginning of a new year? Frankl believed this is because the most fundamental human need, is the need to find meaning. Even if our lives look perfect on the outside, but we derive no meaning from the things we keep ourselves busy with, we will experience a feeling of emptiness or “stuckness”. You will feel stuck or frustrated, or bored, or even downright depressed, because there is simply no meaning. The start of a new year promises the possibility of finding that which is missing – i.e. meaning.

Cultivating your “Why”

According to Frankl, there are three ways in which one can derive meaning in your life or three possible “Why’s” that you can cultivate. Firstly, there is the meaning we derive out of creating something or doing work that matters. For each person that would be different. Most artists and musicians are driven by a desire to create and to give expression to their authentic selves through their art or their music. But across various industries, we find people who love the work they do and who derive immense satisfaction from their work. When our work adds to our sense of authentic purpose, we can endure difficult working conditions, because the actual work matters so much.

Some of us don’t necessarily derive the meaning we are looking for from our work, but we do find it in the connections we have with others. The second way in which you can therefore derive a sense of meaning or purpose in your life, is by loving another more than you love yourself. Our loved ones – our family and friends – can be a tremendous source of meaning, especially if they depend on us and we spend a lot of time building quality relationships with them.

There are also those who do not have loved ones to share their journey with or who have lost their loved ones or even their work and thus now face very difficult and trying circumstances. Having survived the Nazi concentration camps, Frankl could relate strongly to the challenge of finding meaning in such circumstances and he concluded that there is one factor that separates those who survive and live from those who do not. Meaning. Thus, the attitude you take when faced with unavoidable suffering – i.e. having dignity in suffering – is what helps you overcome the difficult circumstances and emerge stronger.

Knowing in your heart that the suffering you are enduring will also end and approaching the challenges you face as opportunities to learn and become a better person, provide a sense of meaning and purpose when there is none. We have heard the zero-to-hero stories of people overcoming the most difficult obstacles and becoming successful beyond even their own imaginations. What it took, was commitment, perseverance, hard work, and the belief that they could change their destinies.

So, to derive authentic meaning from your life, you must either find work that gives you the sense that you are working towards something bigger than yourself or you must find purpose and inspiration from your relationships with others. Some of us are faced with difficult circumstances that cause us tremendous suffering. The only way to overcome the suffering, is by finding the meaning within the suffering or the purpose to be achieved once the suffering has ended. This could be in the form of work we want to do, something we want to create or give to the world, i.e. our calling, or because someone loves us and depends on us and they give meaning to our lives.

Meaning versus Happiness

So, is meaningful life a happy life? Not necessarily. Researchers have been researching the difference between meaning and happiness for a while now and they have found clear differences. How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, researchers found, is about feeling good. People who are happy also tend to think that life is easy and they tend to live more for themselves than for others. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.

However, what sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, but the pursuit of meaning. According to Roy Baumeister, the pursuit of meaning is unique to humans. People will often seek out meaning at the expense of happiness, because sometimes the two are mutually exclusive. People who report elevated levels of meaning in their lives, also often report higher levels of stress and anxiety.

So why on earth would someone opt for meaning over happiness? Simple. Happiness is often fleeting and short-lived. It is a feeling that is dependent on a particular moment or event, whereas meaning is enduring and it transcends the present moment. It is woven throughout different life events both pleasant and unpleasant. It connects the past to the present and to the future. Those who report higher levels of happiness, do not spend much time contemplating the past or the future. They spend their time focusing on the present. On the other hand, those who report higher levels of meaning, also indicate that they spend more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings.

In his 2016 book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari speculates about the different projects that humanity will be pursuing in the future, which will inevitably lead to the creation or evolution of the next genus homo, which he calls Homo Deus. Harari paints an accurate picture of future trends to come of which we are already seeing signs everywhere. Future projects of humanity include: overcoming death, creating artificial life and finding the answer to happiness. Thus, the pursuit of happiness is on most people’s agendas. Given that the newest research findings by Martin Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy Baumeister and Chandra Sripada indicate that human beings are hard-wired to anticipate and plan for the future, we can understand why it is so difficult for people to focus only on the present and why millions of people buy books on meditation and mindfulness in attempts to learn how to stay present and find that ever-elusive thing called happiness.

But perhaps we are going about this in the wrong way. Perhaps happiness remains elusive because it cannot be pursued as a purpose in itself. Perhaps we should be trying to find meaning in our existence and happiness is the by-product of living a life that is characterised by depth and fulfilment instead of the mere pursuit of pleasure. Baumeister and his colleagues postulate that happiness without meaning characterises a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life. Things might go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied and difficult challenges are avoided, but self-actualisation never becomes possible. They found that negative or challenging experiences decrease your happiness but increase the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose.

Frankl advises that both success and happiness, cannot be pursued; they must ensue. Success and happiness become the unintended side effects of your personal dedication to a cause greater than yourself. He states: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible”.

So, if you currently feel unfulfilled, not fully present, almost as if you are a mere bystander to your own life, perhaps it is time to take responsibility and reclaim your humanity. Give yourself the gift of conscious living and discover what your authentic self is calling you to do with this life.

Finding your calling isn’t like taking a pill or doing those five things you read in a “How to” article. There’s no simple recipe. Of course, in a fast-paced, go- to-have-it-now society, many of us demand templates and action plans. But discovering what you are meant to do in your life and career is not only about doing but also about undoing all the beliefs that stand in your way. It’ about a willingness to slow down and deeply reflect on what matters most to you; what makes you come alive. Or to quote Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

References:

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