How Do You Find Meaning in Life?
The importance of Emotional Investment and Worthy Goals
This post turned out a bit longer than I expected it to. That’s okay. It’s worth it, I promise.
One point at which I have been thinking about this morning is—
All meaning must be derived or created.
Meaning does not exist naturally in the world around us, but rather, is a result of our attention and our emotional state.
Some soft evidence of this is how science has shown it is difficult for us to create memories—if we are depressed. And what are memories but imprints of meaningful moments?
To look at depression, briefly, it could be described as a deep lack of purpose.
When we are depressed, we feel disconnected from the world around us. We feel less when something happens that should cause us to feel something. I’m speaking partially from experience here as someone who’s struggled with depression at many times in my life.
When we feel an intense emotion—we are more likely to remember that event.
Meaning is quite similar in this way.
We are most likely to find something meaningful when an experience makes us feel an intense way. Or, in other words, when we feel deeply connected to the moment.
People who have had psychedelic experiences often (and even more so in clinical settings) report that these experiences are one of the most significant moments of their lives.
On a relatively normal dose of psychedelics, you are prone to experience intense and sometimes overwhelming emotions. These emotions can range from pleasant to euphoric, or negative to overwhelmingly sad.
If our normal emotional bandwidth can be likened to an un-stretched rubber band, then taking a dose of psychedelics is like stretching out that rubber band.
The propensity for intense emotions—either positive or negative—is greatly increased.
In this light, I suggest that one of the reasons that psychedelic experiences are so meaningful is because it gives us the chance to be at our utmost sensitive and emotional states.
We might look at a photo of a family member and feel an intense and overwhelming love for them, or look out at the grass and trees outside—and feel a sense of belonging and peace. No matter what the focal point of attention is, psychedelics improve the quality of attention to the point where everything matters, everything in front of you is important.
A spiritual person on psychedelics might go out into nature, and listen to the birds and the wind. The experience might be euphoric and positive. They might reach the conclusion that they were meant to be in that place at that moment, to experience the trees rustling and the birds singing—and come to the conclusion that the universe has led them there to tell them something. Therefore, deciding that whatever follows will be important and meaningful. They’ve effectively primed their mind to have a spiritual and meaningful experience.
Ultimately, meaning is created or destroyed by our perception of our experiences.
Therefore, if meaning can so easily be created, through acute attention, a strong emotional investment, and a certain receptivity, then it can also be destroyed through similar means. Meaning can be destroyed by simply deciding that something doesn’t matter, or by deciding that a certain moment in time isn’t worth investing in.
So what?
This means we create meaning in our lives by how we show up. We don’t find it somewhere, we live it out.
It can be easy to go through our lives—wanting to find meaning—I mean, that’s what we’re all trying to do, right? We’re trying to find what gives us purpose.
However, if we spend this time searching the outside world for meaning, we’re going to miss a good deal.
This question of meaning is precisely what Viktor Frankl struggles with during his time in concentration camps in the Holocaust. He describes his history rather thoroughly—from a psychological perspective, in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”.
Despite his horrific conditions, Frankyl found that he could still find meaning in his life.
Frankyl is the pioneer of a specific type of therapeutic approach called Logotherapy. He says that it, “focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future.” (Man’s Search for Meaning).
It’s not surprising that a survivor of the Holocaust would take on the philosophy that looking towards the future can give great purpose.
He suggests that “striving to find meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.” He says that to fret and worry over finding your life’s meaning is no mental illness—but indeed normal and natural.
To be sure, man’s search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is meaning in one’s life. […] In the Nazi concentration camps, [those for whom] there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. (Digital Location 75 of 117)
During the hardest times Frankyl spent in his concentration camps, it was the frantic scribbling of his scattered ideas for his manuscript that continued to give him meaning. He says, “I am sure that this reconstruction of my lost manuscript […] assisted me in overcoming the danger of cardiovascular collapse.”
Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaningfully from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium, […] or homeostasis, i.e., a tensionless state. (Digital Location 75 of 117)
What Frankyl urges, then, is not that we create a life for ourselves that is comfortable, easy, but that we need things to strive towards. We need goals, challenges, and we need to struggle for a ‘worthwhile’ goal.
A common conception in our world is that we need less stress and need more pleasure—but Frankyl would likely argue that you don’t need less stress. You just need the kind of stress that you find meaningful to take upon yourself.
He suggests that the only way of finding these goals is by going about our lives—by regularly submitting ourselves to challenges and seeing them through to fruition.
He suggests that it is not by reflection or introspection that we discover meaning in our lives, but by actively struggling against and for different goals. Through submitting ourselves to hard tasks.
But what about the meaning of life?
Frankyl speaks on a problem we’ve all toiled with since the beginning of time, and in modern life, it can be easy to believe that our lives are meaningless. We have transcended survival as a species, and need new reasons to live. New purposes.
He says, on the meaning of life:
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. […]
As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he 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. (Digital Location 78 of 117)
He writes that at the core of Logotherapy is the idea that we should “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time wrongly as you are about to act now!”.
He clearly wants the reader to see that we create meaning, not by asking the question “what is the meaning of life” but by pretending as if we are being interrogated by life. To take responsibility to push ourselves against our goals and our worthy aspirations.
So then, meaning is derived through fulfilling our purposes that we decide are worthy. And by living them out each day, we can say: this is what matters, right now. This is what I am staying alive for. This has meaning.
Thanks for reading.
There’s a wonderful article on the idea:
In the pursuit of meaning, Frankl recommends three different kinds of experience: through deeds, the experience of values through some kind of medium (beauty through art, love through a relationship, etc.) or suffering
I like the poetic idea of life interrogating me. I also enjoyed this idea that there is not a meaning of life in the fact that once you discover it you are done; weirdly, that feels as though it implies you can "finish" life. What is there to do once you've found its meaning? Rather, there is the meaning of the present moment, in whatever form it may take. That idea also allows for the meaningless days to feel more normal; sometimes, you can't find the meaning in the moment. But you have a lot of moments ahead of you where that can change.