[yt-sdb]

My favorite quote on the meaning of life, from Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning":

> For 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. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. 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.

[hayst4ck]

I remember reading this book and there were 3 paragraphs of philosophical value in the whole book. This is one of those three paragraphs. I found the book very disappointing. "The meaning of life is to live every moment as if it had meaning?" That is a thesis which felt foreign and useless. I felt no closer to meaning after reading that book.

It was in a self help psychology book that I thought communicated the core idea of meaning and purpose the best: Meaning == Feeling

The author (I believe of: running on empty) made the statement that a struggle to find purpose is the same thing as a struggle to feel and that life's purpose is to feel. Feelings are the fuel for our lives. So those with blunted emotions obviously feel no sense of purpose because the purpose of life is to feel emotions.

Struggling with a lack of meaning is the same thing as struggling to feel. If you knew what would make you feel, it would obviously be meaningful to interact with that.

Bringing this idea back to Frankl, his work becomes much more accessible: The purpose of life is to live every moment with feeling. Finding meaning means seeing what makes you feel.

[manmal]

“The meaning of life is to live every moment as if it had meaning” sounds wise and livable to me.

> a struggle to find purpose is the same thing as a struggle to feel

I think feeling is a means to an end, and that there are deeper reasons for a lack of purpose:

- Loss (eg after death of loved ones, or of abilities)

- Change (eg of the shape of a relationship) that is hard to adapt to

- Inability to end current adversity (eg emotional pain that can’t be stopped due to circumstances)

For those, people find “workarounds” that numb their feelings (drugs, workaholism, constant distractions etc) so they don’t have to feel the emotional pain (which they currently have no real fix for) all the time. The search for a purpose is IMO a search for anything that resolves the emotional pain. As soon as the pain is gone, “feeling” is safe again and no longer has to be suppressed.

[marcus_holmes]

There are lots of people who are unable to clearly feel emotion (Alexythemia). Are these people doomed to wander without purpose or meaning? Obviously not.

Emotions are fleeting, ephemeral, things that should definitely not be used to drive our lives. You can have 10 different, conflicting, feelings in 5 minutes (and for some of us this is a common occurrence).

Meditation allowed me to get past my random thoughts and emotions and achieve some semblance of coherence to my inner life. Detaching from my emotions has done more for me achieving any meaning in my life than following them.

Defining my values and using them to guide my life has created meaning for me. YMMV

[hutzlibu]

"Finding meaning means seeing what makes you feel."

What about late stage cancer patients. They do feel pain. Does this mean, they find it meaningful to suffer till they die?

Or a mother that lost her only child, feeling now only misery?

So I would rephrase that to:

Finding meaning means doing what feels right.

So yes, in your specific case it meant, allowing yourself to feel again at all, to understand what you want to do.

I hope you manage.

[papandada]

I've been thinking about this comment for a few days now, just wanted to say thank you.

[qingcharles]

I really enjoyed reading this book whilst I was in jail. It made me feel a whole lot better about my situation.

[anonymouskimmer]

Except for the last two sentences, this seems like a non sequitur. It conflates value of one's self (meaning of life) with action by one's self (mission in life). The question was not "what's the meaning of what I do", but rather "what's the meaning of me". And the horrible corollary in this conflation yields "your life has no meaning" when you stop acting. "May as well pull the plug, as he has locked-in syndrome."

[nine_k]

The concept of self in general is a bit of exaggeration, and an immutable self that represents a person all their life is even more of an illusion.

If the self stayed unchanged, people won't even be able to develop through their lives, which is demonstrably not so.

So, with the "self", changes the idea of a meaning of life that appeals to that "self".

[whitemary]

Nonsense. One's life meaning is traditionally simply their social role. The reason people lack meaning now is that we started determining our social roles by way of market whims, which means our roles are temporary at best and imaginary at worst. It also creates a market for braindead individualist philosophizing to explain why everyone feels so lonely and lost. Sterile precarity is the problem, not the solution.

[Juliate]

Having your social role defined by tradition (that is, really, what other people thought it should be) is not much good either.

[aaronblohowiak]

The context in which frankl wrote this was as a concentration camp survivor, quite different than the postmodern capitalist lends you seem to be evaluating it through

Notably, man’s search for meaning was 1946 iirc and postmodernism didn’t really ascend until some time later

[anonymouskimmer]

I don't agree with this approach at all, but even accepting what I think are its foundations, this seems to be conflating "social role" with "employment". Unless I misunderstand.

[andrewjl]

> One's life meaning is traditionally simply their social role. The reason people lack meaning now is that we started determining our social roles by way of market whims

John Stuart Mill noted that liberalism leaves the determination of social roles to individuals because the end result drives more progress than the alternatives.

> Sterile precarity is the problem, not the solution.

What to do instead? Non-sterile precarity as in feudalism?

[fogzen]

We can choose our social role. We can choose the market we want to serve.