Man’s Search For Meaning

Such a beautifully written piece of art delivering helpful guidance to everyone’s inescapable urge to search for the meaning of one’s life.

 

Reflecting back on my own journey of finding the meaningful purposes of my existence, I realized I once misunderstood Nihilism, stating everything is meaningless (rather than there is nothing). Let me repeat a quotation from George A. Sargent: “...you must realize that the world is a joke. There’s no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There’s no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There’s no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act.” Why searching for a meaning where there is nothing is meaningful at all?

 

I was once trying to find the ultimate meaning of my life by asking myself: Why I was born? To which direction I am supposed to go? What is at the end, the meaning of my existence? Apparently, there is no such universal meaning of life. So, instead of you asking life for reasons, it should be life asking you what the meaning of your life is. We are to find our purposes of life since the meaning of life uniquely varies.

 

The guidance given by Viktore is surprisingly simple: Logotherapy, which briefly three main avenues to arrive at the meaning of life: by creating a work or by doing a deed; by experiencing something or encountering someone; by being proud of his suffering. My favorite avenue is the last one where people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the grand process of the past in which they have gone through with courage and dignity. I learned to be proud of my sufferings and those will be meaningful anchors keeping me live up to the future.

 

Besides, it is as if I was living in Auschwitz through an authentic description of a Holocaust survivor. Such a horrendous slide of history, but it has been a weighty lesson for us.