Oftentimes when someone says to me, ‘do you have any questions?’, I’ll jokingly respond with ‘yes, what is the meaning of life?’
Maybe the inner urge that bubbles this question up is not so uncommon.
I read this morning in Man’s search for Meaning that ‘a survey of 7,948 students at forty-eight colleges, was conducted by social scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Asked what they considered “very-important’ to them now, 16 percent of the students checked “making a lot of money”; 78 percent said their first goal was “finding a purpose and meaning to my life.”
I found some very powerful lessons in this book, perhaps the greatest one in the realization that…
‘There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning to one’s life.” -Victor Frankl
In fact, after years of the most horrible abuse the mind can imagine, Victor Frankl dedicated the remainder of his life to a school of Psychotherapy he founded called Logo-therapy, which seems to have at it’s core, the goal of helping others find meaning and/or purpose to their lives.
He writes that ‘Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or that gap between what one is and what one should become’
He goes on to say ‘What man needs is not a tension-less state but rather the 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 of potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
The lack of something to do, something to achieve, a better future that beckons – creates what he calls an existential vacuum that he implies, cab be a breeding ground for depression.
With the realization that this meaning, this purpose is essential to our sense of happiness, usefulness and fulfillment in life, the question again, bubbles to the forefront of the mind…
What then, is the meaning of life?
Some hints.
‘Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.’
The task before us each then, is to find this thing unique to us.
And another clue.
‘The true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche.
…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.’
W Clement Stone wrote in The Success System That Never Fails, that if he ever got to a point where he felt like not continuing to move forward along this earthly journey he would try to remember that his life could always be useful and worth something to at least 1 other person in the form of some sort of service.
In this thought, he felt, he could always find meaning and motive to move forward, no matter how dark life might get.
What then, are you here to do?
Who then, are you here to serve?
Perhaps in your answers to these questions can be found the meaning of life.