Meaning

After the ini­tial euphoric high accom­pa­ny­ing my first read­ing of Baar’s “Born Only Once: The Mir­a­cle of Affir­ma­tion” inevitably the pos­i­tiv­ity started to sub­side as the day-to-day mean­ing­less­ness of life began to wear on me again.

At this point, I turned to the sec­ond book that accom­pa­nied Baar upon deliv­ery at my house, “Man’s Search For Mean­ing” by Vik­tor E. Frankl.

As best I can tell, both Baar and Frankl agree that “mean­ing­less­ness” in life is a direct result of peo­ple being inad­e­quately affirmed, and that believ­ing that life is mean­ing­less (as exis­ten­tial­ism would have us do) is self-defeating; instead of empow­er­ing peo­ple, it makes them feel less and less meaningful.

I was def­i­nitely sur­prised by how this seemed to res­onate with “Zefrank” and his views/ideas as said in his episode of the show “base­line” (you can watch it here: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/12/121906.html) In that cer­tain emo­tions can feed on them­selves, but I think it goes a step far­ther too, at least Frankl does.

To Quote Frankl, “I con­sider it a dan­ger­ous mis­con­cep­tion of men­tal hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equi­lib­rium or, as it is called in biol­ogy “home­osta­sis,” i.e., a ten­sion­less state. What man actu­ally needs is not a ten­sion­less state but rather the striv­ing and strug­gling for a worth­while goal, a freely cho­sen task. What he needs is not the dis­charge of ten­sion at any cost but the call of a poten­tial mean­ing wait­ing to be ful­filled by him.”

Frankl then con­tin­ues by coin­ing the term “exis­ten­tial vac­uum” to mean, “the total sense of inter­nal emptiness/meaninglessness of life that so many peo­ple today feel.”

“The exis­ten­tial vac­uum which is the mass neu­ro­sis of the present time can be described as a pri­vate and per­sonal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the con­tention that being has no mean­ing.”

So how then does one over­come the exis­ten­tial vac­uum? Frankl would have us believe that its through “logother­apy” his beloved method of psy­chother­apy that stresses that:

“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.”

If this were the end of his ide­ol­ogy, I’d have some strong points of con­tention here regard­ing the dan­gers of assert­ing that mean­ing is rel­a­tive, as it allows for all kinds of atroc­i­ties to be jus­ti­fied as long as they’re “mean­ing­ful” the sociopaths who com­mit them.

But Frankl you’re smarter than that, so you con­tinue, by stat­ing that respon­si­ble­ness is the very essence of human exis­tence, and as such, “…the true mean­ing of life is to be dis­cov­ered in the world rather than within man or his psy­che, as though it were a closed sys­tem. I have termed this con­sti­tu­tive char­ac­ter­is­tic “the self-transcendence of human exis­tence. It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to some­thing, or some­one, other than one­self– be it a mean­ing to ful­fill or another human being to encounter. The more one for­gets himself–by giv­ing him­self to a cause to serve or another per­son to love–the more human he is and the more he actu­al­izes him­self. What is called self-actualization is not an attain­able aim at all, for the sim­ple rea­son that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is pos­si­bly only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”

Wow, talk about a big block of text to get your head around. So Frankl, you’re say­ing what Baar is say­ing in regards to the futil­ity of self-affirmation, that it has to be given to you by some­one or some­thing else exter­nal to you, ok, got it.

What inter­ests me more than almost any­thing, is that both Frankl and Baar devote most of their writ­ing to affirmation/actualization by another per­son, and yet nei­ther of them deny that it can be found in the non-human world, the world of nature. In fact, Frankl seems to think nature is one of three key ways to give life mean­ing! “…we can dis­cover this mean­ing in life in three dif­fer­ent ways: (1) by cre­at­ing a work or doing a deed; (2) by expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing or encoun­ter­ing some­one; and (3) by the atti­tude we take toward unavoid­able suffering.”

This throws me back to a key point he men­tioned only a few short para­graphs ear­lier, “It is, there­fore, up to the patient to decide whether he should inter­pret his life task as being respon­si­ble to soci­ety or to his own conscience.”

I’m not entirely sure what to make of every­thing. I am amazed by the elo­quence with which both authors talk about the “exis­ten­tial vac­uum” (which I believe Baar would accept as Frankl’s equiv­a­lent of his emo­tional depri­va­tion dis­or­der) and whole­heart­edly agree that find­ing mean­ing in one’s life is the sin­gle key to inevitably expe­ri­enc­ing hap­pi­ness, for as Frankl writes, “But hap­pi­ness can­not be pur­sued; it must ensue. One must have a rea­son to “be happy.” Once the rea­son is found, how­ever, one becomes happy automatically.”

I also tend to agree that there are mul­ti­ple ways to find the “mean­ing” to your life, which will likely be ones rea­son to be happy. The ques­tion, that I ask myself over and over, is which way is going to help me find the mean­ing of my life? And that’s where I feel let-down by Baar and Frankl, they both speak so pas­sion­ately about the need to be loved/affirmed for the sake of your­self (and not for exter­nal rea­sons) and the need to find mean­ing in your life, but nei­ther of them offer any kind of solu­tion as to how to go about find­ing mean­ing! Baar at least gives some point­ers to make one­self more open to affir­ma­tion, but Frankl just gives a list of case-studies that showed his psy­chother­apy to “work” but it feels too forced to me, as though he had to hunt for sce­nar­ios that trans­lated decently to his writ­ing. I don’t mean to dis­credit Frankl, or Logother­apy, but rather to express my frus­tra­tion that he totally hit the nail on the head, which is frus­trat­ing to be so drawn to some­thing, and not have a clear answer at the end, e.g.

“Yes, I feel like life is mean­ing­less, no I don’t want to feel this way, so I need to find the mean­ing to my life, but HOW do I even begin to start this journey?!”

And after all this quot­ing and writ­ing, we reach my final point (this post was all started by a face­book com­ment today that I should just go fin­ish a degree, and get a job, and fall in line) and while its not of the same nature as the works of Frankl and Baar, I feel its rel­e­vant to help express my frus­tra­tion with lack of direc­tion. And I thank one of my amaz­ing pho­tog­ra­phy pro­fes­sors at Moor­park Col­lege for this very pow­er­ful quote that he had on his office door, as it still speaks to me today, and likely always will:

“At its best, school­ing can be about how to make a life, which is quite dif­fer­ent from how to make a liv­ing. Such an enter­prise is not easy to pur­sue, since our politi­cians rarely speak of it, our tech­nol­ogy is indif­fer­ent to it, and our com­merce despises it.” — Neil Postman