Forget About Finding Meaning in Your Life
The Best Way to Find It Might Be to Stop Looking for It.
A
few years ago, I got sick. Death was a real possibility — at one point,
I prepared for the worst. But after three weeks in the hospital, some
life-changing surgery and a whole load of morphine, I emerged — stick
thin, balding, and jaundiced, but alive.
My
response to this experience was rather cliched. The brevity of my
existence became sharply apparent. I cursed myself for wasting my youth
getting wasted and playing video games. At one point I may even have sworn to “live life to the fullest”. I was determined to discover my life’s purpose and meaning.
After all, we’re all supposed to have a purpose. Life is supposed to have a meaning, even if we don’t know what it is. Like Nietzsche said:
“He who has a why can bear almost any how.”
The trouble was, I was never sure what “meaning” meant. Douglas Adams perfectly captures this problem in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
To find an answer to the “Ultimate Question”, an alien race build a
supercomputer. After working on the problem for 7.5 million years, the
computer offers the nonsensical solution “42”. You don’t understand the
answer, the computer suggests, because you never understood the
question.
The World Has No Plan For You
For
existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, the Ultimate Question of the
meaning of life has no fixed answer. Sartre sets out his concept of
meaninglessness in Existentialism is a Humanism. An object like a chair is created with intention — its purpose, to be sat on, is integrated into its design. Its essence precedes its existence.
Humans aren’t like this. If we begin with the proposition that there is
no God, then there’s nothing to suggest we are created with any purpose
in mind. Our existence precedes our essence — we are created first, and find purpose later.
So the meaning of a chair is something created to be sat on. What’s the meaning of me?
How can the world make use of me? The psychologist Paul TP Wong
approaches this question from the same starting point as Sartre but at a
more clinical angle. Wong calls his model of life purpose “PURE” — Purpose,
Understanding, Responsible Actions, and Enjoyment/Evaluation. Get these
four things nailed down, Wong says, and you can live a meaningful
existence.
The
first requirement of Wong’s PURE model is to find a purpose — choose a
life goal. When I recovered from my illness, I set about trying to find a
new vocation. I’d only ever held low-paid, low-status jobs before then;
none of which I’d really cared much about. So I started scrabbling
around for something resembling a purposeful career.
First
I thought I might be a social worker, but the training was impractical.
Then I decided that I was destined to become a teacher, but I failed
the initial application. Then I commenced my training as a therapist. I
tried to persuade myself that I’d finally found my calling.
Your Job Might Not Be Your Purpose
Psychiatrist
Viktor Frankl was a man who found a great deal of meaning through his
work — despite enduring some of the worst circumstances imaginable.
Separated from his family and imprisoned in Auschwitz, Frankl survived
the horrors of the Holocaust by maintaining a sense of purpose. Frankl
attributes his remarkable ability to cope with the concentration camp to
having found deep meaning in his work as a psychiatrist to his fellow
inmates.
In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl says:
“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment.”
My
own work as a therapist, in incomparably easier circumstances than
Frankl’s, was engaging and highly rewarding. But somehow it didn’t
provide me with the meaningfulness that I craved. I yearned to be
successful at something, and being a therapist was the thing that I had
decided I would succeed at. This, I believed, would provide me with a
sense of purpose.
Looking
back, I believe that my method of finding meaning through work was a
naive approach to the problem. Frankl would certainly agree. He says
elsewhere in his book:
“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.”
If
I choose to derive my entire life’s purpose from my job, or from
success in my field, what will happen if I don’t succeed? If my purpose
in life is to climb mountains, what will happen if an accident renders
me unable to walk? There are stories of people who find a way to
succeed, even in seemingly impossible circumstances. But we don’t hear a
lot about those who fail, through no fault of their own.
If
you attach your sense of purposefulness to a particular set of material
circumstances, you’re in danger of losing all the meaning in your life
if those circumstances change. This is not a purely hypothetical
proposition. Rates of depression among the long-term unemployed are twice as high as those among people in work.
Meaning As a Feeling
How
would I have known when that search for meaning in my life was
complete? What would meaning look like once I’d found it? Meaningfulness
is such a broad and abstract concept. Is it actually possible to define
something so vague?
Albert
Camus believed that discovering or creating meaning in life is
impossible. All that we can do is find the things that make our lives
worth living — and what makes life worth living is a matter for each of
us. In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus
considers a man who is cursed by the gods to undertake a meaningless
task for eternity. Sisyphus must continually roll a stone up a hill.
Each time he reaches the top, the stone rolls back down and Sisyphus
must begin again. Sisyphus, once he has resigned himself to the
absurdity of his fate, can live this meaningless existence with
happiness and contentment.
I
eventually stopped trying to find a purpose by clambering around the
job market. That’s not to say I settled down — I’m now training as a
lawyer. Every time I’ve managed to get my stone to the top of my hill,
it’s rolled back down and I’ve started again.
The purpose of life isn’t to get the top of the hill and wait around until you die.
Confucian philosopher Tu Wei-Ming says:
“We can realize the ultimate meaning of life in ordinary human existence.”
Meaning
can come from some unexpected places. For me, it’s the feeling of
profundity that comes when I have a direct experience of life. This
feeling is not exclusive to extraordinary circumstances. It’s not only
found when skydiving over the Grand Canyon, or swimming with dolphins.
It can be provoked by something completely trivial.
I
remember first noticing this feeling when I was watching a group of
birds take off outside my apartment. It might come from drinking a cup
of coffee, or joking around with my wife. And purpose, too, can be felt
in the everyday — giving my daughter a bath. Cleaning the house.
Camus
might have laughed at the absurdity of calling this feeling “meaning”.
But sometimes everyday occurrences feel meaningful in their
significance.
You may imagine that your purpose waits for you at the top of the hill. But perhaps it will come to you on the way up.
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