What Gives Life Meaning: A Few Ideas to Begin Your Search

In my work as a therapist, a topic that is often at the center of my sessions, whether explicitly or implicitly, is “what gives my life meaning?” All it takes is a scroll through the year’s best selling self help books to gain insight into this intrinsic human search. Each work claims to provide the elixir you need to live a better life: here’s a life-changing tool that millions of people can’t stop talking about (in less than three hundred pages no less). Here’s a way to get past your anxiety and find your life’s purpose. Another seems to imply almost counterintuitively that we have had the answers living inside of us all along.

Whatever you want to call it, whether it be the search for meaning, purpose, a reason to go on, or the like, this is an endeavor that most of us will wrestle with throughout the course of our lives. While I feel as if I am no closer to it than your average late twenty-something, I figured I could share some jumping off points from which to begin your own search.

What Social Media Tells Us

The media that we consume on a daily basis give us a few cursory answers on what it could lead to a meaningful life. Take the idea of work for example. On Instagram, I am met with a blur of beautiful faces communicating— in both words and in visuals— that making a lot of money, minimizing work hours, and enhancing passive income is the universal balm for the meaningless epidemic. A podcast I listened to on my morning commute suggests that the answer is not to decrease one’s time at work, but to find a job that pays well and suits your unique strengths and skills: the “unicorn” job. With a few more flicks of my phone screen, I am told that I don’t need to love my job or even be good at it, but that it should be a means to an end for whatever else I want to do. The moral of the story is that when we look to social media to find meaning, we are going to be met by a slew of conflicting answers regarding what a good life looks and feels like. This is not to say that any of these creators are wrong, in fact, one could argue that a kernel of truth exists amongst these different perspectives, but take this as a cautionary tale to take your search for meaning beyond the bounds of social media.

What the Experts Tell Us

A necessary stop on one’s journey towards finding meaning is in the works of Victor Frankl. Frankl is known for penning the book Man’s Search for Meaning, after his experiences navigating and persisting through life in the Nazi concentration camps. First and foremost, Frankl the researcher and academic who founded Logotherapy, the literal study of what it means to live a meaningful life (which fortunately he has done a lot of the hard work for us).

To put his extensive research succinctly, Frankl suggested that meaning can be derived from three different areas of life: creating (bringing something new into existence or doing a good deed), experiencing (love or perhaps the beauty of nature), and choosing the attitude we adopt when faced with unavoidable suffering. Navigating the cruelties of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Dachau, and Türkheim, Frankl grounded himself in the years of research that he wanted to share once he finally could set foot outside of the camps. He remembered the minute details of his wife and dreamed about the life they might share together one day. In the face of insurmountable struggles, Frankl made a conscious choice to find meaning in the inextricable parts of himself that could not be taken away.

For a more contemporary perspective, you might look to Simone Stolzoff, author of the Good Enough Job. Interviewing professionals from a Michelin star chef to overwhelmed teachers, Stolzoff highlights the importance of diversifying one’s sources of meaning; furthermore, although it might be tempting to place work at the cornerstone of one’s life, it can be dangerous to hinge our worth on something that can be easily taken away for one reason or another.

Conclusion

While these are only a few starting points from which to begin your search, my hope is that it challenges you to begin the process of exploring your own sources of meaning. Schedule an appointment with us to begin your individual search today.