Since humans have been conscious of their passage through the world, finding meaning in life has been a necessity. What is it that makes a life meaningful? Does it relate to developing our own abilities or to our contribution to the world? Probably both.
During lockdown and the months immediately afterwards, in the United States a social phenomenon emerged known as The Great Resignation, the great resignation. Broadly speaking, it involved this: many people who worked in the service or logistics sectors –waiters and waitresses, shop assistants, warehouse workers– did not return to their jobs when the doors of the world opened again.
Does your work fulfil you?
In just two months, millions of employees resigned from their posts, many without an alternative. During the lockdown they had had time to think, concluding that the kind of work they did did not make sense for them.
They preferred to tighten their belts while retraining for another activity or even ventured into the freelance arena.
Subsequent analyses confirmed that for a large part of the population – at least in the first world – neither a decent salary nor a good schedule suffice to spend a third of your life at work. Two more conditions are necessary:
1. The individual must feel that they grow in their job, that they are not just a cog in a machine. They need to learn and offer their creativity.
2. Their work must contribute to the community. Nothing gives more meaning to a task than seeing the impact it has on the world. A worker with meaning must be able to perceive the impact of what they do.
The reason for living
The French existentialists claimed that life does not have meaning of its own, but that each person has the capacity to invent it. We might discuss whether that purpose guiding existence is created from scratch or something that is more a discovery than a creation.
In “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Viktor Frankl analysed an extreme environment like the concentration camp in which he was interned to understand human behaviour. In those hellish conditions, the survivor was not the strongest nor the most adaptable, the author suggested, but the person who found a why to live and, as Nietzsche had asserted a century earlier, that propelled them to endure any how.
Why living with purpose
The existence of the ‘why’ for living is further illustrated by a famous idea: the easy way out of suffering is to ease the suffering of others. In the concentration camps, those who cared for the sick or at least tried to cheer them had an extra motivation to stay alive. Their life then acquired a task, a practical purpose.
helping others helps you
The same Frankl, after surviving the Holocaust that claimed almost his entire family, once back at his post as director of a psychiatric department, spent his spare hours volunteering at home to help people who had lost their sense of purpose. “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs,” he asserted.
In my talks I recount a case I encountered firsthand as a coordinator during the Balkans conflict. Posted to a refugee camp in Bra, at that time I was working in a makeshift kindergarten in a nightclub.
In that Croatian island, which had been and would again be a hub of mass tourism, thousands of Bosnian families lived there temporarily. With the front not far away, the volunteers were almost exclusively young people, bold enough to have travelled there.
I say “almost” because among the group of volunteers there was a Swedish septuagenarian. A tall, thin man whom everyone wondered what he was doing in a refugee camp amid the conflict. I could not help asking, and he told me his story.
A life experience
Already retired, after the death of his wife he fell into a severe depression. With no job to go to and alone in his flat, he found no meaning in anything and even contemplated suicide. But then a stroke of fate enlightened him.
After visiting his city’s hospital for a routine check-up, he passed through a ward where many patients were completely alone. Our man noticed their faces of sadness and resignation and, following an impulse, decided to sit beside one of them.
While he considered how to lift their spirits, he remembered that as a youth he had been told he had a wonderfully beautiful voice. Although half a century had passed since his choir days, he still knew some popular songs, so the old man began singing to the patient, whose face lit up at once.
They ended up singing together, and the central figure of this story felt his heart lighten. After that episode, he began attending the hospital daily to sing and to encourage the patients to sing, whom looked forward to his visits.
the keys to finding meaning
Bringing together what we have seen throughout this article, we can conclude that there are three steps that can help us live with meaning, and they relate to the ikigai circles:
- Recognise your talent. Your life’s purpose is connected with something you carry inside you and whose aim is to contribute it to humanity. Thus, the first step is to identify what you want to put at the service of others. In the case of the Swedish octogenarian, it was the beauty of his singing.
- Identify a need. Ask yourself: In what way can I deliver that gift? To whom will I benefit most with my ability?
- Incorporate it into your daily life. Once the first two steps are in place, the aim is to weave that help or service into your everyday life. Frankl used to dedicate his afternoons to free consultations. How can I incorporate this dimension that gives meaning to my life — and perhaps to the lives of others — into my routine?
A personal thread
Writer Anaïs Nin remarked that “there is no grand cosmic meaning for everyone; there is only the meaning that each individual gives to their life, a meaning, an individual plot, like one’s own novel, a book for each person.” We write its pages as we live, so we can always give the plot a new twist.
What gives me life? The poet Cummings is said to have said that being alive is more than merely not being dead. If we accept this, the question we must ask is what or who gives us life. That is what we should promote and nurture. Conversely, what dries us out or puts us on autopilot distances us from the meaning of existence.
Find your motivation
Many people seek complex answers to the question of life’s meaning. On this, American anthropologist Joseph Campbell notes that each person assigns their own meaning to life, though, ultimately, the meaning of existence is simply being alive.
This model, popularised by Simon Sinek, contemplates three levels of purpose in organisations. There are those that know what they do. At a second level, there are those who know how they do it. But the most powerful are those who know why they do it. Having a shared purpose means the company works with meaning and transmits that vision to its customers.
