5 ms·

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 a

by yt-sdb 3y ago

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.

whitemary 3y ago
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.
- aaronblohowiak 3y ago
  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
  - whitemary 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - msla 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - locusofself 3y ago
      which concentration camp survivors wrote communist books?
      - epicureanideal 3y ago
        When reading this question I just happened to recall a Soviet writer, who was Jewish, who I think did see the concentration camps and write about them but wasn't a victim of them. But, this person didn't write in favor of communism despite being a writer in the Soviet Union. Their books were censored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Grossman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Grossman I found his book "Everything Flows" to be extremely interesting. It is a fictional account of a Soviet gulag survivor returning to his home, and reflecting on the people he meets and his life. https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Flows-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590173287/ https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Flows-Review-Books-Classic... I think it's much better than "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich".
      - whitemary 3y ago
        See: they weren't made famous, History is written by the victors, which says nothing of its accuracy.
    - maxbond 3y ago
      What is that meant to establish?
- fogzen 3y ago
  We can choose our social role. We can choose the market we want to serve.
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    We always choose the god we serve, even if its not a god.
    - throw0101b 3y ago
      What is your highest good (summum bonum)? This is what you worship. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summum_bonum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summum_bonum * https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06640a.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06640a.htm
      - worthless-trash 3y ago
        I like how you put that.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  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.
  - whitemary 3y ago
    Before employment, there was only social roles. In other words, they should absolutely be conflated. It is absurd and foolhardy to attempt separating them.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      > we started determining our social roles by way of market whims Plenty of social roles are still not determined by market whims. Such as friendship and family relations.
- andrewjl 3y ago
  > 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?
- Juliate 3y ago
  Having your social role defined by tradition (that is, really, what other people thought it should be) is not much good either.
hayst4ck 3y ago
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 3y ago
  “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.
  - hayst4ck 3y ago
    I read Frankl's book as a depressed person who saw lack of meaning as the root of my problems, namely of anhedonia (used casually, not medically). Frankl's book is written for normal functional people. What wasn't clear is that the state of anhedonia is not a result of lack of meaning, anhedonia is lack of meaning. I was reading it hoping for an algorithm to find any meaning at all. For you "meaning" seems to mean something. For me "meaning" was a null pointer exception. The variable name "meaning" is understood in a general sense, but when you try to manipulate the idea or collide it with other ideas, everything breaks down. If you can't de-reference "meaning" then Frankl's work is quite opaque since "meaning" is primarily a feeling and most people's understanding of it is intuitive rather than prescriptive. Frankl is never able to jump out of the intuitive understanding of meaning, and so for someone who the idea of "meaning" is not intuitive his work was quite inaccessible. Once you understand that meaning is feeling, then you can think about meaning in a more prescriptive sense and his work starts to make more sense. I would probably have a wildly different experiencing reading it now than when I originally read it. I had a childhood where my feelings did not matter very much. My dad was a narcissist and my mom was too busy bread-winning. This resulted in suppression of emotions since they had very little value. As an adult the lessons learned as a child are carried through. Childhood emotional neglect is the state of not learning how to have purpose because you don't matter. The depression stage of grief seems closer to the state of having lost meaning. I guess for a summarized critique of Frankl, it's that much like the article posted is saying, meaning is not a linear monolothic idea. If you frame the conversation around meaning as Frankl's book does, that's a very different conversation than one framed around emotional regulation. The emotional regulation conversation helps find meaning, but the meaning conversation is unlikely to help a person with emotional regulation.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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".
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Sure. Here I just meant it to be the being that is currently experiencing one's own existence.

by yt-sdb 3y ago

whitemary 3y ago

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.

aaronblohowiak 3y ago
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
- whitemary 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - msla 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - locusofself 3y ago
    which concentration camp survivors wrote communist books?
    - epicureanideal 3y ago
      When reading this question I just happened to recall a Soviet writer, who was Jewish, who I think did see the concentration camps and write about them but wasn't a victim of them. But, this person didn't write in favor of communism despite being a writer in the Soviet Union. Their books were censored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Grossman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Grossman I found his book "Everything Flows" to be extremely interesting. It is a fictional account of a Soviet gulag survivor returning to his home, and reflecting on the people he meets and his life. https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Flows-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590173287/ https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Flows-Review-Books-Classic... I think it's much better than "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich".
    - whitemary 3y ago
      See: they weren't made famous, History is written by the victors, which says nothing of its accuracy.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    What is that meant to establish?
fogzen 3y ago
We can choose our social role. We can choose the market we want to serve.
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  We always choose the god we serve, even if its not a god.
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    What is your highest good (summum bonum)? This is what you worship. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summum_bonum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summum_bonum * https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06640a.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06640a.htm
    - worthless-trash 3y ago
      I like how you put that.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
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.
- whitemary 3y ago
  Before employment, there was only social roles. In other words, they should absolutely be conflated. It is absurd and foolhardy to attempt separating them.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > we started determining our social roles by way of market whims Plenty of social roles are still not determined by market whims. Such as friendship and family relations.
andrewjl 3y ago
> 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?
Juliate 3y ago
Having your social role defined by tradition (that is, really, what other people thought it should be) is not much good either.

hayst4ck 3y ago

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 3y ago
“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.
- hayst4ck 3y ago
  I read Frankl's book as a depressed person who saw lack of meaning as the root of my problems, namely of anhedonia (used casually, not medically). Frankl's book is written for normal functional people. What wasn't clear is that the state of anhedonia is not a result of lack of meaning, anhedonia is lack of meaning. I was reading it hoping for an algorithm to find any meaning at all. For you "meaning" seems to mean something. For me "meaning" was a null pointer exception. The variable name "meaning" is understood in a general sense, but when you try to manipulate the idea or collide it with other ideas, everything breaks down. If you can't de-reference "meaning" then Frankl's work is quite opaque since "meaning" is primarily a feeling and most people's understanding of it is intuitive rather than prescriptive. Frankl is never able to jump out of the intuitive understanding of meaning, and so for someone who the idea of "meaning" is not intuitive his work was quite inaccessible. Once you understand that meaning is feeling, then you can think about meaning in a more prescriptive sense and his work starts to make more sense. I would probably have a wildly different experiencing reading it now than when I originally read it. I had a childhood where my feelings did not matter very much. My dad was a narcissist and my mom was too busy bread-winning. This resulted in suppression of emotions since they had very little value. As an adult the lessons learned as a child are carried through. Childhood emotional neglect is the state of not learning how to have purpose because you don't matter. The depression stage of grief seems closer to the state of having lost meaning. I guess for a summarized critique of Frankl, it's that much like the article posted is saying, meaning is not a linear monolothic idea. If you frame the conversation around meaning as Frankl's book does, that's a very different conversation than one framed around emotional regulation. The emotional regulation conversation helps find meaning, but the meaning conversation is unlikely to help a person with emotional regulation.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago

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 3y ago
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".
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  Sure. Here I just meant it to be the being that is currently experiencing one's own existence.