The last sentences of his lengthy tome, Existential Psychotherapy, sum up his solution: "The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away." How he lands here is an intriguing path through a slew of philosophers and psychiatrists. Even without symptoms of a problem, attention to meaning is necessary as it gives birth to values, which become principles to live by as we place behaviours into our own hierarchy of acceptability.
"One creates oneself by a series of ongoing decisions. But one cannot make each and every decision de novo throughout one's life; certain superordinate decisions must be made that provide an organizing principle for subsequent decisions."
Yalom doesn't, however, suggest coming up with a list of values that can become meaningful to us, but that we immerse ourselves in life to become more aware of which values we already have.
WHAT'S THE POINT? IT'S FOR US TO DECIDE
According to Yalom, we've hit this crisis point in meaninglessness because we have the leisure to think and because our work is no longer clearly purposeful, both of which are relatively recent experiences for such a large proportion of civilization. It's no longer just the philosophers of the day asking, What's it all for? What's the point of it all? He takes the existential position that it's up to us to figure it out.
For most of history, we've been "comforted by the belief that there is some supraordinate, coherent pattern to life and that each individual has some particular role to play in that design." It's mainly in the last 500 years or so, and primarily in the Western world, that we've had to determine our own purpose. For eons, we were also consumed with our own survival. It's curious that Yalom doesn't mention Marx when he explains, basically, that our alienation from the means of production created an alienation from ourselves (see Capital or this brief video) as we became cogs in the machine of our various workplaces. Many of us work in jobs where we are tasked with one component of a bigger whole and can easily lose any sense of value in our input. By contrast with the past, Yalom points out, "Who, after all, can challenge the task of growing food with the question, What for?"
In the last century, existentialists attempted to address this loss of meaning: Our attempts to make sense of the world butt up against the lack of any actual meaning inherent in it, and we have to come to terms with the truth that the world is indifferent to us. Camus calls this the absurd: "the plight of a transcendent, meaning-seeking being who must live in a world that has no meaning." Camus derives meaning from facing "nights of despair" with a "prideful rebellion" to live with dignity in the face of absurdity. Acknowledging the truth, in turn, generates values for conduct: courage, solidarity, love…
Sartre believes that we can't figure out our morality by following our feelings, since feeling comes from our deeds, so we're obliged to develop rules for ourselves. We have to acknowledge we do this, and aim to do it free from "bad faith" or defense mechanisms like rationalisation, denial, and displacement. Yalom turns to Sartre's play, The Flies, for explicit instruction. He follows the character Orestes who takes a leap:
"He chooses justice, freedom, and dignity and indicates that he knows what is 'right' in life. There is no absolute meaning; he is alone and must create his own meaning. To Zeus he says: 'I am doomed to have no law but mine.' … One must invest one's own meaning (rather than discover God's or nature's meaning) and then commit oneself fully to fulfilling that meaning. This requires that one be, as Gordon Allport put it, 'half-sure and whole-hearted'."
He suggests some secular activities that can provide us with a sense of life purpose:
"These activities are supported by the same arguments that Sartre advanced for Orestes: they seem right; they seem good; they are intrinsically satisfying and need not be justified on the basis of any other motivation. … Activity can provide a potent antidote to meaninglessness--namely engagement."
However, it's vital that the content of the engagement be less restrictive than the momentary joy felt from an achievement or purchase or avoidant numbness of busyness. It's most impactful if our actions focus outward, transcending ourselves: "this concept of 'self-transcendence' is central to life-meaning schemas."
He proposes altruistically "leaving the world a better place to live in, serving others" even if it's just a stoic attitude towards your own death to be a good role model for dying. We can be dedicated to a cause and "contribute to something greater than ourselves." If we have skills, we can "create something new, something that rings with novelty or beauty and harmony . . . The creation justifies itself, it defies the question What for?, it is 'its own excuse for being'." We can acknowledge the gift we've been given here, "to live fully, to retain one's sense of astonishment at the miracle of life, to plunge oneself into the natural rhythm of life, to search for pleasure in the deepest possible sense." Finally, Yalom writes,
"To strive toward something or someone outside or 'above' oneself. … It is only necessary, Buber states, to ask the question 'What for? What am I to find my particular way for? What am I to unify my being for?' The answer is: 'Not for my own sake.' … human beings have a more far-reaching meaning than the salvation of individual souls … reaching outside of oneself and caring for the being of the other."
This all too human despair at meaninglessness starts when we first "become aware of the absolute relativity of the values one once considered as absolutes," and life starts to feel a little topsy-turvy. Yalom cites research that found that people with a sense of meaning have clearer life goals, a greater sense of self-transcendent values, and lower rates of psychopathology. It's good for us, but we're really bad at figuring it out.
HOW WE GET SIDETRACKED
Without the sustained effort to develop our own sense of meaning, we're in danger of falling into conformity and submission, blindly accepting meaning created by a group, getting subdued by nihilistic destruction or apathy, searching for a pre-conceived meaning to be found instead of cultivated, or mistaking a fear of death or loneliness for a quest for meaning.
Yalom cites Salvador Maddi's 1967 exploration of three other manifestations of existential sickness: Some become obsessed with one cause after another in compulsive engagement of an indiscriminate nature. This pattern of frenetic activity "serves as a caricature of meaning" and creates "false centering"; when the activity has no intrinsic goodness, "then it sooner or later will fail the individual." Others seek the angry pleasure of destruction, rationalizing that there's no reason to do good: "He will be quick to point out that love is not altruistic but selfish, how philanthropy is a way of expiating guilt, that children are vicious rather than innocent." He suggests this version of nihilism is so common that we don't even notice it anymore. And still others become "vegetative and bland" and lose any selectivity of behaviour; all actions become equally immaterial, from typing an email to killing a man.
Yalom has concerns with Viktor Frankl's three categories of meaning: What we give to the world (creativity and accomplishments), what we get from the world (beauty, love, experiences), and our attitude towards suffering. For Frankl, it's more comforting to believe meaning is out there to be discovered, something we should be searching for. Yalom praises much of Frankl's work in the area, but he's critical of where Frankl lands, calling it a faith-based philosophy. For Yalom, meaning is elusive and can't be pursued. It comes only when we're engaged outside of ourselves.
We also have to separate meaning from the three other existential issues. Our question is often contaminated by our fear of death, responsibility, and isolation. He explains, when Tolstoy says, "All my acts, whatever I do, will sooner or later be forgotten and I myself be nowhere. Why, then, busy oneself with anything?" it reveals a concern with transience, not meaning. Much of our search for meaning is a fight against the reality of our finite existence as death anxiety masquerades as meaninglessness. We want a leave-behind.
While meaninglessness appears to be recent, the hope to overcome death goes back millenia. In Plato's Symposium, Diotima addresses this fear:
"The mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality … I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal. … Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones?"
We reject our mortality by leaving behind lasting artifacts we created or, if we're not that clever, we have some kids to carry on our line, or, today, a ton of photos on instagram to mark our place. We want to matter to the world, but even "Tolstoy failed to find a meaning that would destroy death."
Yalom argues meaning and death are two separate issues since even if we lived forever, we'd still want meaning in our lives. He writes,
"Envisioning existence as part of some grand design that exists 'out there' and in which one is assigned some role is a way of denying one's freedom and one's responsibility for the design of one's own life and a way of avoiding the anxiety of groundlessness. Fear of absolute loneliness also propels one into a search for identification with something or someone. To be part of a larger group or to dedicate oneself to some movement or cause are effective ways of denying isolation."
Yalom also parts with Frankl in his suggestion that achievement is a category of life meaning. For Yalom, striving, creating, and progressing are not part of our deepest layers. They're superficial. Up until four or five hundred years ago (or more recently if outside of the dominant Western world), goal-directed ambition wasn't acknowledged as a way of finding meaning. It was sometimes perceived as a way to cheat death, but, typically, people searching for meaning, searched for serenity. For Yalom, instead of doing, searching, and acting on life as a problem to be solved, we find what we need in being, harmonizing, and unifying in an acceptance of life as a mystery to be lived. He traces the change in our focus through Calvin's effect on Christianity that "everything is preparation for something else." Yalom concludes, "The belief that life is incomplete without goal fulfillment is not so much a tragic existential fact of life as it is a Western myth."
So, we have to untangle our quest from other anxieties. We also have to get beyond any pursuit of "sexual clamor," prestige, or materialistic goals. He says, "In my work I have become aware that therapy is rarely successful unless I help the patient focus on something beyond these pursuits." For so many, much of our lives are spent showing off what we have and where we've been, and in accumulating things and events to display on our various platforms, largely in hopes to stave off isolation. We have to be able to move away from this demonstration of life if we hope to find any sense of meaning in life.
JUST TWO STEPS!
Yalom suggests we have meaningful lives, but we're just not sufficiently aware of them. First, we can begin to notice "meaning threads" in our daily lives: our belief systems and how we serve others, how we love, how we experience joy, where we find beauty, our creative expressions, and our distant hopes. We're already experiencing meaning-providing activities all the time; it's a matter of bringing them to the surface as significant. That Sunday hang-out with friends might take on a new patina when viewed as meaningful. However, we need to notice these and let them happen without pursuing them as meaningful! Frankl calls this "dereflection": diverting our gaze away from ourselves and our problems and towards the "intact" parts of our personalities and all the meanings available for us in the world. In other words, stop focusing on yourself, and instead start noticing everything else. Like Sartre, Camus, and Kierkegaard (and Steven Hayes' Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), Yalom suggests we have a baseline level of anxiety that must just be accepted as irreversible; since much of it is from our family history, genetics, and circumstances, it can't be helped much beyond medication. Worse, an extended inward focus can exacerbate some conditions instead of alleviating them. We need to direct our gaze externally, and work on developing curiosity, concern, and compassion for others and the world.
Secondly, we tend to naturally look for patterns of meaning in random events, but Frankl and Yalom diverge on what to do with this tendency. Frankl stresses the uniqueness of each person's meaning but also leans towards directing his clients by hinting broadly in order to form meaning for them around his triad of categories: creativity, experience, and attitude. He reminds clients that nobody can take away their moments of happiness or goodness in the past and to embrace current suffering as a challenge. To Yalom, Frankl's explicit direction appears authoritarian and forced: "He offers patients meaning but, in doing so, moves the patient even farther from assumption of full personal autonomy." Yalom's criticism goes further in a note:
"There is, in my opinion, no coherent logotherapeutic system. Logotherapy consists of improvised attempts to help the patient detect meaning. Logotherapy manuals describe two basic techniques: the first, dereflection, I have already discussed; the second is called 'paradoxical intention' and is basically a 'symptom-prescription' technique where the patient is asked to experience and to exaggerate his or her symptoms. Thus, the stutterer is asked to stutter intentionally. … It allows them to appreciate that they can influence--in fact, even create--their symptoms. To the extent that paradoxical intention allows one to assume responsibility for one's symptoms, it may be considered within the domain of existential therapy; but its function as a technique to provide meaning is, at best, obscure."
Yalom rejects Frankl's assumption is that if the therapist can find a pattern in their lives, then the client will adopt it and feel a sense of meaning from it.
Yalom further cautions that we notice patterns as we step back to examine our lives, but "the galactic view presents a formidable problem." Looking at our place in the world can result in seeing ourselves as a speck, rendering us inconsequential. He resolves this by recognizing that, "If nothing matters, it should not matter that nothing matters, and yet it does matter." Meaninglessness is a perception that we can choose to take or not take. "Things matter to us all the time. … When things matter, they don't need meaning to matter!" Current doubting doesn't vitiate the reality of past mattering.
Instead of stepping back, we need to, once again, step forward to engage with the world. We can leap into commitment and action and care about the world. But the task is not to seek out meaning in the activities. The more we try to catch it, the more it evades us. We have so much dissatisfaction from relationships and work because of subtle expectations of there being something greater to find in them than what is.
"Meaning, like pleasure, must be pursued obliquely. A sense of meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement. Engagement does not logically refute the lethal questions raised by the galactic perspective, but it causes these questions not to matter. … To find a home, to care about other individuals, about ideas or projects, to search, to create, to build--these, and all other forms of engagement, are twice rewarding: they are intrinsically enriching, and they alleviate the dysphoria that stems from being bombarded with the unassembled brute data of existence."
Many people seek out help to get motivated at work or to stop being distracted, but the help most people need is from removing obstacles in the way that stop them from living more meaningful lives, like worrying about reputation or amassing investments. We need to consider why our relationships or work don't feel more significant to us. We need to deal with our fear of death, responsibility, and isolation issues separately, notice where we already have meaning, and immerse ourselves in real life to get a glimpse of meaning from the periphery.
BUT CAN WE DO IT?
I question the efficacy of Yalom's hope to encourage people to engage self-transcendence by caring. For people who don't currently feel engaged or even feel a void of interest in anything outside themselves, I'm not convinced that caring can be provoked or willed into being. But I do think we can will ourselves to be virtuous, which might get us part of the way there.
Yalom's careful form of engagement is reminiscent of another piece of Plato not discussed: the degeneration of the soul. Plato cautioned that we can start by acting rightly, but then get caught up in ambition and distinction, which is followed by an obsession with wealth, and then popularity, until we hit the final stage of the "wild beast."
"He gives up the kingdom that is within him to the middle principle of contentiousness and passion, and becomes proud and ambitious. … Instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and of money, and they honor and revere the rich man and make a ruler of him … Of all conversions there is none so speedy or so sure as when the ambitious youth changes into the avaricious one. … This sort of man will be at war with himself. … The young man passes out of his original nature which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures. … Excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. … The wild beast in our nature gets the upper hand and the man becomes drunken, lustful, passionate, the best elements in him are enslaved."
When we try to be virtuous, to be honest or fair or courageous, we have to watch for the traps of behaving poorly in order to get likes or to get rich quick to the point that we're just driven by our compulsions. It's not a threat to make us better citizens, but a warning to help us get more from our lives. Caring seems to include a disposition outside of our control, but we can drag ourselves to right action through moral obligation. I can make myself volunteer, but I can't make myself warm to it or the people or activity. However, that might happen as a matter of course. If we start with activities, we might develop caring, and then meaning will appear in the shadows. If Yalom is right and engagement is where meaning comes from, then it seems possible to glimpse it incidentally through other-centered activities.
Or, as David Foster Wallace said 20 years ago, our default setting is all about us, and meaning comes from attention and awareness of others. Where we put our attention in the world is a choice.
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