How To Imbue Your Life With Meaning

Viktor Frankl endured horrors that most of us couldn’t imagine. He was sent to the infamous concentration camp, Auschwitz, and was imprisoned there for several moths. He watched his fellow prisoners die simply because they upset the wrong guard. He was subject to observe, and experience, countless atrocities.

Frankl made a fascinating observation, those who survived Auschwitz shared something in common: they were able to find a greater meaning for their suffering. For example, the prisoners who had family members back home they wanted to return to and protect were far more likely to make it out of the camp alive. According to Viktor Frankl, meaning gives us the resilience necessary to endure even the most traumatic suffering.

Nietzsche famously said, “He who has a why to live for can endure almost any how.” Meaning fuels us, it gives us the strength we need to persist through hardships and do whatever it takes to accomplish our goals.

We live in a generation less imbued with meaning than any of our ancestors. We spend most of our time on screens being entertained and distracted, and we spend little of our time dedicated to a greater purpose. We think about ourselves, we Tweet about ourselves, we post pictures of ourselves — we have become an increasingly narcissistic generation.

I don’t say this from some superior stance, I see the same narcissistic behaviors in myself that I see in others. I’ve often experienced a sense of meaninglessness, and finding a sense purpose in my life has been immensely difficult for me.

In the modern world, we don’t have a deficit of things, we have a deficit of meaning. Today, we have such comfortable lives that we have the luxury to fixate on “first world problems”. Instead of fighting for the right to vote, we fight for likes and shares. Instead of fighting for freedom, we fight against boredom. Instead of fighting to change the world, we fight for the next stimulus.

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden astutely said, “Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.”

Jordan Peterson expressed similar feelings (less dramatically) in his best selling book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: “In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centered cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.”

The institutions that provided previous generations meaning are no longer at the center of our lives. Not only do modern people identify less with religious faiths, we identify less with our country as well. Our increasing individualism isn’t inherently bad. But it begs the question, if we live in a culture in which there’s nothing worth dying for, can there be anything truly worth living for?

Traditionally, meaning has been found externally, through belief in something outside of ourselves, and while this has merit, it isn’t the only source of meaning available to us. If you don’t identify with a particular religion, philosophy, country, or group enough to dedicate your life to it, you can still live a meaningful life.

When the culture doesn’t give you a cause to fight for, you must find a personal cause worth fighting for.

Slay The Dragon

The most potent source of meaning derives from your own experiences. Metaphorically, your individual purpose is a dragon you must slay. It’s an obstacle you have yet to overcome. It is personal, it is dangerous, and confronting it is a frightening prospect.

This obstacle that you derive meaning from represents a desire that is personal to you.

Elon Musk’s purpose is fighting for the future of humanity. He has worked to accomplish this through popularizing electric cars, expanding access to solar power, and by taking steps towards the eventual colonization of Mars. Musk’s purpose is powerful in that he is impacting the future of humankind as a whole. He has dedicated his life to securing humanity’s future because that speaks to him, that’s what he cares about most.

We don’t all have such grand ambitions, and that’s okay. Elon Musk’s purpose isn’t correct, while an artist’s desire to share their art is incorrect. If your greatest desire is to cure cancer or to eliminate poverty, pursue that goal. But it is a mistake to think that meaning is determined objectively, meaning is subjective to your own values. Don’t follow a path just because you feel obligated to do something “important”.

Howard Thurman wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

If the notion of bringing entertainment to people through creating video games resonates with you, follow that path. Elon Musk’s ambitions are noble and grandiose, but if your passions are humbler, don’t judge yourself or feel guilty for following a path that won’t change the course of humanity’s future. Don’t hesitate to be ambitious, just be careful that your ambitions are your own, and you’re not dedicating your life to a cause that you’ve learned you should care about — but doesn’t resonate with you personally.

What is the dragon you want to slay? You would think it would be obvious, but it’s often clouded by our conflicting emotions, and our fear of missing out. There isn’t one right answer. We’re not born with one true passion that we’re meant to pursue. This is a cultural myth akin to the idea that we have one true love we’re meant to find. It’s a quaint idea, but it’s unrealistic and can only serve to confuse and frustrate us.

Although I’ve dedicated myself to writing, I don’t think I made the one right choice. I could have lived a fulfilling life following any number of different passion of mine, but I chose to focus on one because if I didn’t make a firm decision, I would have wasted years of my life dabbling and switching between one pursuit and another.

Overcome Obstacles

Traditionally, when we think of finding our purpose we think of a career, but a sense of meaning can be found by overcoming obstacles in any area of your life. For the “toughest man in the world”, David Goggins it was physical fitness. Goggins was obese as a young man, his desire to prove that he could change from a weak kid into the toughest man on the planet drove him to accomplish the unthinkable. Goggins has not only run multiple ultra marathons (100 plus mile races), he became a Navy Seal, and set the world record for pull-ups done in a 24-hour period (4,030 pull-ups, to be exact).

We all have obstacles, we all have lacks, we all have unfulfilled dreams. Part of self-awareness, and finding a sense of purpose, is identifying those unfulfilled dreams you’re willing to fight for. What problems frustrate you? What do you think about on a daily basis? What do you spend your money on? These are the questions that will help you find your passions — those things that have meaning to you.

Fantasy Versus Reality

We can derive a faint sense of meaning from our fantasies. Seeing ourselves as more successful, more attractive, or happier in the future gives us a feeling of hopefulness.

Unfortunately, when rubber meets road, our fantasies are replaced by reality. We imagine the body we’ll get from the gym, but when we actually start working out, that fantasy is met with the cold reality of an unexciting diet and hard work. We imagine conquering our fear of rejection and finding a boyfriend or girlfriend, but when we actually go out into the world and meet people, we’re met with the reality that meeting people is anxiety provoking, and usually ends in some form of rejection.

We avoid actively pursuing the goals that would imbue our life with meaning because doing so replaces our fantasies with the comparably non-thrilling reality of struggling to overcome our personal obstacles.

There is no escaping this. A meaningful life involves accepting certain daily mundanities: whether that be facing social anxiety time and again to meet new people, submitting your writing to publishers only to get rejected countless times for each small success, or repeating the same exercise routine time and again to lose weight.

The rewards of pursuing meaning in your life are rarely as colorful as we envision them to be. We imagine that when we overcome some major hurdle in our life, we will experience life with new eyes. But in reality, progress is so gradual that we barely notice it.

The true reward in pursuing a meaningful life, in my experience, isn’t in achieving some goal, it’s in feeling that you are living in alignment with who you want to be. Meaning isn’t a destination, it’s a process. Meaning doesn’t exist at the summit, meaning is the journey up the mountain itself. When I’m on my path and purpose, I feel more alive and my frustrations with myself that normally itch at me, are quieted.

Meaning isn’t some epic achievement that lies in the distant future, it’s available to us any day, we simply must actively pursue goals that are in alignment with our values. To discover what these goals are, you can start by making a list of the biggest frustrations in your life.

(You can download a free template for this exercise here).

Here’s what this list might look like(these were my actual frustrations a few years ago):

1. I’m frustrated with the fact that I’ve gained 40 pounds in the last year.
2. I’m frustrated that I have to work a 9–5 job for a company I don’t much care for in order to make a living.
3. I’m frustrated that I waste so much of my time.
4. I’m frustrated that my brother is depressed, and his life seems to be slowly getting worse.
5. I’m frustrated that I spend 90% of my time at home.
6. I’m frustrated that I spend most of my time thinking about myself and my own needs, and little time helping others.
7. I’m frustrated that I haven’t made a significant impact on the world.
8. I’m frustrated that I spend most of my time staring at a screen and little of my time interacting with people I care about.
9. I’m frustrated that haven’t made a successful online business.
10. I’m frustrated that I haven’t traveled much in the last 5 years.

Dig deep, think about what you really want to change in your life. These frustrations should be based on the values you have, but are not currently living up to satisfactorily.

Make the list substantial, anything less than 10 items is too short. If you’re stuck, think of frustrations you have in the core areas of your life:

1. Your Social life (friends, romantic, family)
2. Your career
3. Your physical health (fitness, diet)
4. Your passions (hobbies, artistic pursuits, travel, etc.)
5. Knowledge/Spirituality (are you learning new ideas, do you have a guiding life philosophy?)

Your frustrations translate to specific goals you can accomplish. Here’s what this might look like using the above example as a template:

1. I want to lose weight.
2. I want to find a career I’m passionate about.
3. I want to read more/ I want to start playing sports in my free time.
4. I want to spend more time with my brother and help encourage him to engage in social activities and get out of the house.
5. I want to spend more of my time going out into the world.
6. I want to donate to charity regularly and I want to make a point to think about how I can improve the lives of those around me..
7. I want to write a book that has a far-reaching impact on the world.
8. I want to spend some of my daily free time with friends or family.
9. I want to make enough money to sustain my lifestyle with my online business.
10. I want to travel more in the next year.

Take Responsibility

It’s important that you frame your frustrations in such a way that you can take responsibility for them. You can be frustrated that the economy sucks, but then what are you going to do to make the best of a bad situation? Having frustrations and conquering their associated obstacles imbues your life with meaning. Being upset about a situation you can’t control deprives you of hope.

The upcoming need for control chapter has a step-by-step system you can implement to accomplish the goals in your life that will give it meaning. Here, you’re simply identifying what frustrations are getting in your way, and what goal you can accomplish to overcome those frustrations.

Meaning isn’t only found in accomplishing goals that make your own life better, but that’s the first essential step that few people take in earnest.

The next step — offering some kind of value to the world- will also make your experience of life more meaningful, but too many of us focus on changing the world without first addressing our own pressing issues. The depressed therapist, the overweight nutritionist, the closed-minded teacher, the online social justice warrior, these are all examples of people who have taken it upon themselves to fix the world, without fixing their own problems, first.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t fight for social justice or become a nutritionist, but it is important to keep your goals for the world in alignment with your personal goals.

Ultimately, a meaningful life involves a balance between serving yourself and serving others. But to effectively serve others, you must meet your own basic needs, first.

Furthermore, serving your own needs will help you serve the needs of others as a byproduct of who you are. The more you improve your own life, the more inspired the people you meet will be to do the same in their own lives. The best way to change the lives of those you care about is to change your own life, first. You can give your friends and family the best advice in the world, but they won’t likely act on it unless they’ve seen how following that advice has already transformed your life.

Yes, meaning can be found in a religion, in a philosophy, in working towards a cause greater than yourself. However, the most immediately potent source of meaning is in dealing with our own frustrations –living in alignment with your own values is an essential step to living a meaningful life (one that few people ever take).

The Power of Choosing

The process of living up to your values is not a cure for negative emotions and stress, rather it allows you to replace negative emotions that result from your circumstances, with negative emotions that you’ve chosen to take on.

Instead of feeling stressed that you don’t have the job or the social life you want, you will experience the stress that comes with actively pursuing a better social life and a better career. It is still stress, it can still be painful, but it is a much more bearable type of stress. Essentially, when you are pursuing something purposeful, the pain is bearable, but when your pain is caused primarily by your circumstances, it is far more damning.

Having self-awareness doesn’t mean that you understand how you can eliminate stress from your life, it means understanding that stress is an inevitable part of life, and that you can choose stress that is worthwhile, or you can be battered down by stress that does not help you improve.

Take an inventory of your frustrations, dig deep and discover which of your values you aren’t living up to. Then, using the guidelines in the next chapter (The need for control), you can devise an implementable plan to start living in alignment with those values.

This article is taken from the book: The Power Of Self-Awareness