On The Importance of Meaning

As human beings, we strive to fulfil an innate need within us: the need to feel significant. When we feel important, we experience contentment with the nature of our lives. This need for significance is so crucial that not being able to meet it regresses our baseline functioning (not to be equated with wellbeing).

A number of psychologists have focused on the human need to feel superior, important, desired, and significant. A part of me agrees with the notion that each one of us strives for superiority. However, a part of me equally addresses the importance of self-transcendence, that is, looking beyond oneself. Viktor Frankl argues that even when one achieves the external validation that one assumes one requires, the existential void can creep in from a lacuna.

Well, where is this little opening that renders a welcome to existential anxiety? In the lack of meaning in one’s life. Somewhere we realise that we’re fulfilling one end of things and not perhaps the other. But what is this other? We believe the other to be the next relationship, the next job, the higher paycheck, the new car, the next vacation, the new degree, and so on. It does not end — no matter how many steps you have already climbed, there is always “the next step” to stand on. Soon, we start to feel stagnated even after continuously achieving the next best thing. We start questioning the meaning behind the decisions we have taken in our lives, and we question the satisfaction that we attained after accomplishing our goals. Lo and behold, there emerges a conflict within our skin where we feel that perhaps we have not led a life that is authentic to us. The next question is, but what truly is authentic to us? But, since arriving at an answer to this question is one of the most challenging experiences ever, we sometimes withdraw from engaging in such exploratory endeavours.

I would not go ahead and blame us for choosing to disengage from such existential questions, I acknowledge that it truly is very painful. However, I would like all of us to give it one try, at least. At the end of the day, the primary purpose of a human’s life is to find meaning in their life, and dictate one’s life to fulfilling that meaning.

Frankl proposed the concept of a neurotic triad (includes: depression, aggression, & addiction) — he posited that depression, aggression, and addiction are cultivated in an existential vacuum. A lack of purposeful living makes the individual question the significance of their own life (a core element of depression); the frustration stemming from one’s inability to find meaning in one’s life (frustration exhibited outwardly in the form of depression); and, the individual somewhere hopes to fill the existential vacuum with drugs (striving for meaningfulness through consumption of drugs) — hence, meaninglessness being the primary cause of psychological disturbances.

Now, perhaps we have an insight on the importance of meaning, but how do we attain this meaning? Well, Frankl believed that meaning cannot be made, but can only be found. And, found where? In the other: beyond oneself. He was of the view that every individual has the capacity to go beyond themselves — a space where they are not concerned about their own being, not because they are selfless, but because they have done the work on themselves and now it is time to look towards the other. Love, according to him, is the ultimate form of self-transcendence: one can be in love with any cause, and one will be able to find meaning in it. In this journey, the essential element is the development of the will towards meaning. If we have a will, we will find the way.

Meaning gives us a purpose in our lives, a purpose that is beyond ourselves, a purpose to which we can dedicate our lives to, and what does it give us back? A will to live. And a legend once said: once we have a why to live for, the how comes by.