What can we do when life loses meaning?

The Shrink

Meaninglessness is a frequent visitor to the therapist’s consulting room. Many people who seek therapy are not suffering from any “pathology” but simply find that meaning has drained from their world, a feeling that can creep up on us or be precipitated by big life changes. Some may think that this kind of problem would be better addressed in a church, synagogue or meditation centre. “Meaning” is a fuzzy concept, and there are those who like to tie it to spirituality and the hope of somehow transcending human horizons.

This may not be the most helpful approach. A sense of meaninglessness is by no means always bundled with searching for God or losing religious belief. It could manifest itself simply as a certain inner emptiness, a feeling that some vital ingredient has gone missing from our life. If finding meaning always required spiritual transcendence, those of a more naturalistic bent would be condemned to a meaningless life. Instead, meaning can and does arise from the world around us.

Someone who knew this well was Viktor Frankl – concentration camp survivor, psychiatrist and author of Man’s Search for Meaning – who wrote about the “existential vacuum” that can sometimes overpower us. Frankl believed that a narrow concern for our own state of mind is not conducive to a meaningful life, and that we can more readily find meaning when we engage with things outside ourselves.

Frankl thought there are three main ways to infuse life with meaning. The first is getting involved with a project by “creating a work or doing a deed”. The second is “experiencing something or encountering someone” – be it nature, art, or loving another human being. And the third is “the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering”. Even when we cannot change a situation for the better, Frankl advises that we can still look for more skilful ways of dealing with the reality facing us. Adopting one or any combination of these paths can be enough to breathe meaning back into life.

The Sage

For philosophers, loss of meaning in life is a regular occurrence. It happened in Germany in the late 19th century, when Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of the nihilism that confronts us once the claims of religion and objective truth have been shown to be false. It happened in Britain in 1936, when A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic heralded the arrival of logical positivism, with its belief that statements about life’s meaning are literally meaningless. And it happened in France in the 1940s, when the existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre announced that life has no pre-existing purpose.

But these philosophers did not so much deny meaning as redefine it. The meaning of life does not exist as a fact in the world, waiting to be discovered. We are not born with a purpose, but that does not mean we have to live without purpose. There is no meaning of life, but there can be meaning in life, if we put it there ourselves.

So, Ayer, for instance, wrote that “there are many ways in which a person’s life may come to have meaning for him in itself”. Anything that we find worthwhile can be a source of meaning, from child rearing to stamp collecting. Similarly, Nietzsche claimed that the “meaning and morality of one’s life come from within oneself”, a sentiment broadly shared by Sartre and Camus. All these thinkers took meaning with one hand, and gave it back, transformed, with the other.

Some people recognise nothing in their lives that fills it with such value, while others find that this kind of meaning just isn’t enough. They feel what contemporary philosopher John Cottingham calls a “need for transcendence”, a connection with something beyond the “immanent” material world that only religion can provide.

The harsh message of existentialism is that you can yearn as much as you like, but what you’re yearning for ain’t there. Life can have meaning solely in the here and now, but no one can guarantee that you’ll succeed in creating it. Meaninglessness is a constant threat for everyone, philosopher or not.

The Shrink & The Sage live together in south-west England