My Pursuit of Meaning

Meaning is a lot more powerful and more important than pleasure. All kinds of pleasure are really only temporary sensations. Even if some forms of pleasure last a long time, they all will run out eventually. Further, even when they’re happening, they may be appealing to some extent but they’re often shallow and ultimately unsatisfying, which leads to the pursuit of even more pleasure. Meaning sticks around long after the pleasure ends. It’s a much deeper, richer feeling. The feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself. Something that will outlast you. Something that’s been there before you were born and will be there after you die.

Viktor Frankl wrote a lot about this in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. He believed that the pursuit of meaning could get one through extremely difficult situations. Indeed, he used that to get himself through his time in a concentration camp during WWII. As I think about him and other people who went through extremely harrowing, depressing, and dangerous times, I often wonder what they did to keep going. What it was that got them through those situations and out the other side. Some of the most difficult times in my life (such as right now) have come when I struggled to find meaning and purpose in what I was doing. Wondering what my place was in the world.

This has been a real struggle lately as a lot of my plans have fallen through; they either haven’t worked out at all or haven’t worked out the way I’d hoped they would. I’ve had to rethink a lot of things and make some deals with myself. Ultimately, I decided I’m going to follow through with the big plans I have despite my concerns and setbacks. My plans may not work out exactly as I have in mind but they definitely won’t work out if I don’t attempt them. If they do work out, it’ll be a wonderful story to tell. Even if the plans won’t work out no matter how I approach them, at least I’ll have given it my best, I’ll have stories to tell, and I can pursue a more conventional life path as a backup.

All this having been said, I wish that things had worked out as I initially imagined they would. I wish that I had succeeded early on so that I could be a lot closer to where I want to be in life than I am now. To bridge that gap, I’m on a quest to find meaning in my life. This can be in big ways, such as fulfilling my big plans, discovering the purpose of my life, or learning my place in all of this. Or it could be through something smaller, like spending time with a good friend and having a wonderful, special, deep, and fulfilling interaction with them. However it appears, meaning is what I’m looking for at this point. I hope I’ll have good news to report on this soon. It’s been a heck of a year already and it’s just getting started. We’ll see how the rest of it plays out and what I can do to make it a good one.