Man’s Search for Meaning (The Meaning of Life:Chapter 1)

I have been searching for meaning in my life for at least 35 years. In October of 1969, I began my collection of quotes, Words to Remember, and the very first entry was the last sentence of Thornton Wilder’s novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey: “There is the land of the living and the land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only meaning, the only survival.” Obviously, in October of 1969, at age 29, married for just 20 months and father to a one-month-old son, I was still interested enough in the views of others as to what constituted the meaning of life that I started writing down anything I read on the topic.

I am not alone. I think most people, once they discover that all paths lead but to the grave, ask themselves:

“So, what is the meaning of life?”
“Why are we here?”
“How should I live my life?”
or similar questions.

Why do we do this?

Many writers think that the search for meaning is a natural reaction to the feeling of emptiness and the experience of absurdity that is part and parcel of being human.

The Russian playwright, Anton Chekov, in his play, “The three sisters”, puts these words on Masha’s lips:

But man has to have some faith, or at least he’s got to seek it, otherwise his life will be empty, empty…How can you live and not know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why the stars shine in the sky!…you must either know why you live, or else…nothing matters…everything’s just nonsense and waste…

Albert Camus, the French-Algerian novelist, dramatist and philosopher, agrees completely with Chekov:

Losing life is a trifle and I will have that courage when I need it. But to see the meaning of this life vanishing, our reason for existing disappearing, that is what I cannot stand. No one can live without reason.

Another playwright (and the first President of the Czech Republic), Václav Havel, puts it even more forcefully:

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning—in other words, of absurdity—the more energetically meaning is sought.

The American philosopher, Eric Hoffer, says we need meaning to make sense of our suffering:

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.

The writer who had the most to say about man’s search for meaning was the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, who wrote a best-selling book called Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl postulated that the search for meaning is the primary motivation of humans. He compared his theory with those of two other Viennese psychiatrists, Freud and Adler. He noted that whereas Freud proposed a will to pleasure (Libido) as the root of all human motivation, and Adler a will to power (the drive for superiority), he (Frankl) assumes that a will to meaning is our primary motivation.

As evidence for this view, Frankl points to research that shows a strong relationship between meaninglessness (as measured by “purpose in life” tests) and such behaviours as criminality and involvement with drugs. He says that watching violence and drug use on television, in movies, even in music, convinces the meaning-hungry that their lives will improve if they imitate their “heroes.”
He says that people often become anxious on Sunday afternoons because all of the distractions that keep them from confronting the meaninglessness of their lives are unavailable then. “Sunday neurosis”, he calls it.

He then goes on to explain how many mental and emotional disorders are caused indirectly by a lack of meaning in one’s life. The hypochondriac, for example, not understanding that his anxiety is due to a lack of meaning, focuses the anxiety on the possibility of contracting AIDS; the agoraphobic sees her anxiety as coming from the world outside her door; the person with a social phobia focuses on performing in public. All anxiety neurotics thus try to make sense of their discomfort with life – without even realizing that the source of their anxiety is what Frankl calls the existential vacuum in their lives.

Similarly he describes the trio of aggression, addiction, and depression as symptomatic of the feeling of meaninglessness or existential vacuum that exists in our society.

In the first lecture of my Theories of Personality class I say to the students: “One test of any one of these personality theories is whether it is true for you. Has the theory matched your own experience? Does it explain what you have done and felt and thought?” If you use that test on these three views of the human motivation, many of you will probably come to the conclusion that I did, namely, that Frankl is closer to the truth than are Freud or Adler.