Man's Search for Meaning
Written by: Kaitlyn (25-U1)
Edited by: Athens (25-I1)
Designed by: Kaitlyn (25-U1)
Komorebi is the Japanese word for the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. It only exists once, at that moment. Wim Wenders, Perfect Days (2023)
Say you turn sixty in Tokyo.
You wake at exactly the same time every morning. Drive the same marine-blue van to the Tokyo Toilets, take up your mop – and right on cue, your shift begins. Grab lunch from the convenience store in the park. Drive home, dine by the izakaya. Sleep, repeat.
Such is life for the film Perfect Days titular character, Hirayama. His is a future parents warn their children about in whispers on the street – the words toilet and cleaner together don’t exactly paint a picture of glory and passion, after all.
But when Hirayama wakes, he (literally) does so smiling. He fills his drives with his favourite soul music, cranes his neck to gaze up at the komorebi in the park. Cleans the rims of toilet bowls with such mechanical precision that his coworker questions how can you put so much into a job like this?
It is a perfectly reasonable question. How can one devote themselves to a life that should be, by all accounts, unfulfilling?
so what’s the Meaning in life?
We tend to throw this question around all too often. Meaning – the word, the essence of it, has since become so entirely abstract that it seems impossible to pin down what, exactly, it could imply in the even broader context of life. This age-old struggle can be traced back to our confusion between subjective and objective meaning – the meaning in life and the meaning of life.
When we marvel at nature and wonder why we live alongside it, we are fundamentally asking about the meaning of life itself. When tragedy strikes us, someone we love, or the innocent, we once again question the meaning of life – whether human suffering is merely borne from the bad luck of a draw. As the creator of the Meaning in Life questionnaire summed up: The “meaning of life is about huge, existential questions, the answers to which we must take on faith or inference.”
Conversely, the meaning in life is about what makes our own, personal lives worth living. We can understand subjective meaning through the psychological Tripartite model:
A felt sense that your life makes sense (also understood as coherence), that it has an overarching, long-term direction (purpose), and that it matters or is worth living. (significance).
So: why do we live? Why are we here? Let’s briefly turn to Philosophy – a field of study that exists primarily because human beings have grasped at these existential questions for millenia.
Nihilism, borne from the Latin word nihil (nothing), asserts that there is no inherent meaning to human existence. This view suggests that “living a genuinely meaningful life is impossible, that there is no higher reason to continue living, and that all human effort, achievements, happiness, and suffering are ultimately pointless.” Essentially: since there is no objective meaning of life, attempting to uncover a subjective meaning in life is fundamentally futile.
Next, nihilism’s more hopeful cousin: existentialism. Like nihilism, it refutes the existence of a universal meaning, a product of its background in the Second World War. Existentialism, however, maintained that a subjective meaning in life could be created regardless of whether objective meaning existed or not. Popularised by existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, the maxim ‘Existence precedes essence’ suggests that we first exist, then independently define and create ourselves through the choices we make.
But the thought of such radical freedom didn’t excite existentialists as much as you’d imagine. Man, Sartre famously proclaimed, ‘is condemned to be free. Once thrown out into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.’ In any one moment you must make a choice – whether through your actions, your inner responses or simply by not choosing at all. You must confront the consequences of your choices, good or bad, over the course of your life.
Take Perfect Days’ Hirayama. Recall: how can he devote himself to such a life? Hirayama’s days, after all, are a practiced imitation of his last. Clock into work, clock out, visit the park, the onsen, the izakaya. Where others accumulate riches to realise meaning in their lives he needs barely a sliver. Somewhere between these simple, stripped-down everyday choices Hirayama forges a meaning of his own: a deeply personal perspective of living he continuously creates and maintains. Though Perfect Days is perhaps best exemplified by Eastern philosophies, it echoes the heart of existentialism – that our recognition of meaning in life is unique, forged through a constant reflection and practice of how we choose to live.
The goal in life is to experience
Our question cannot be answered in its current state – for meaning, much like happiness, is not an end goal to be relentlessly pursued. It will ensue – so long as we choose to immerse ourselves in our own ‘deeply personal perspectives on living’. Meaning ultimately comes from leading a life that we feel is worth continuing.
We’ve likely all heard iterations of Alysa Liu’s success story – teenage girl burns out on her way to the Olympics, retires from skating at the tender age of sixteen to live a life defined by her choices alone. Makes it to her second Olympics in five years – and, in a dizzyingly triumphant turn of events, wins gold.
Yet Liu was also the quickest to call attention away from her success. ‘Winning,’ she explained in an interview, ‘isn’t all that. And neither is losing. It’s just something that happens. It’s the outcome. But what matters is the input and the journey.” Basically: life is a journey, not a destination. Should we, like Liu, approach life with pure enjoyment, meaning would paradoxically emerge as a by-product of living authentically rather than if we had fixated on the achievement itself.
We can see this furthered in Alan Watts’ essay You Play the Piano. Ideally, one does not work a piano. Nor does one mechanically bang its black-and-white hinges, counting down until the song is over. Its music sounds most natural and affecting when one sits down to play the piano, gets lost in the movement of their wrists, their fingers, the notes descending over and into one another. Like Liu, Watts asserts that one will “miss the point of life” in fixative pursuit of a serious goal or answer. By this he means: when we see the trees for the vast, expansive forest, we forget that life is composed not in success or wealth or retirement but the everyday mundane, found in average days like the one you and I are likely living today.
So: plunge into the present moment. Enjoy the passage of time, these perceivably insignificant moments that make up the majority of our lives. Savour the youth you will one day look upon. Give little care to how it must seem or how your time is wasted – because in Watts’ words: life is a musical, playful thing, beckoning you to ‘sing and dance while the music is being played.’
And sing and dance you shall!
But are we truly free?
Sartre’s existentialism claims we are free human beings, capable at every instance to make choices that directly shape the individual we become. But are we really? If things were truly that simple, wouldn’t we see more people finding fulfilment?
Look, for a moment, across the world. There is inequality further than the eye can see. Women in conservative societies where feminism is denounced as a sin. Developed nations and their ever-expanding gulfs of wealth. A mere 4,920 miles from Singapore, people in Gaza live through horrors most of us will never witness over the course of our lives. Everywhere there are people living under the rule of social, historical and material conditions which invariably constrain their freedom.
A more realistic approach to existentialism can thus be found in philosopher Martin Heidegger, who developed the concept of thrownness. Thrownness depicts human beings as ‘thrown’ into the world with no agency over the circumstances of their birth. We do not choose our family members, just as we do not choose our bodies, our nationalities, our immediate socioeconomic situation or the era in which we are born into. While we will always be free to create ourselves, the degree of freedom we hold over our choices – and the degree to which we can recognise our capacity for constant choice – has already been mediated by our personal backgrounds.
Yet even those in secure societal positions have grown increasingly conflicted in their search for fulfilment. To explain this collective affliction, we can turn to perhaps the most common culprit of our woes today – modern life. David Foster Wallace put it best in a particularly prescient quote in 1996:
At a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.
Everybody knows social media is, to some level, bad for us. I won’t go on to belabour the point: how people all over the world are connected, yet lonely and at odds with themselves. How it sucks time away. Time that could have been better devoted to something you look forward to continuing. Time that does not exist in service of a Social Media Corporation with dollars and cents on the mind. We know this – and yet social media is still so prevalent and alluring that it continually nestles its way into our lives.
Recall the Tripartite definition of meaning in life. Assuming you continually immerse yourself in harmful, self-reinforcing content on social media – or simply just use it for over-extended daily periods – it is understandably difficult to come to a point where you feel that your daily actions align with your values and ambitions (coherence). In more severe cases, this can also distort one’s sense of purpose and significance in life, fostering the mental health crisis rampant in our generation today.
We can always choose to live our lives as freely and as meaningfully as we so desire. But if you remain unaware of the option for choice, or if you lack the immediate capacity to choose, my previous advice may seem impractical. Even if you do achieve a desired state of meaning once in your life, its effects are not necessarily permanent – it may fade as your mindset changes, as you encounter life’s challenges and struggles.
What, then, can be done?
Despite everything
‘Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except for one thing,’ psychologist Victor Frankl wrote in his 1946 memoir Man’s Search for Meaning. ‘Your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.’ Here Frankl gestures to his imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. Or, more specifically, his and his fellow inmates' experiences trying to find meaning while living through the unimaginable: a hopeless situation entirely beyond their control.
We are thrown into the world at birth, and it is a given that we will experience setbacks – whether they are exceptionally pronounced, like Frankl, or less so, like Alysa Liu’s, is up to circumstance. But as Frankl put it: your unique opportunity to live meaningfully lies in the way in which you bear your burden. At the heart of every situation in life, however desirable or dire, lies a singular meaning only we can uncover and fulfil. We may not be able to alter reality, but we can always alter our attitudes towards it.
And this, paradoxically, alters reality. This, too, is a given.
How to …?
First, a word of caution: don’t dwell on thoughts of finding meaning. In the funny way paradoxes go, meaning will thwart you the more you pursue it – for it is not something you can productively gain from hours of theoretical study. It is, as aforementioned, best found in practice. In choosing to reframe your actions and thoughts in a manner coherent with your aims and values. Meaning is not an end goal but rather a process in which we discover ourselves and grow satisfied with our lives.
Frankl outlined three fundamental ways in which we can realise meaning.
The first: creatively. What can you give to life? This does not solely refer to artistic pursuits but rather the fundamental act of creating: by contributing to something, creating a work, or other action-oriented activities. Many, for instance, find fulfilment in serving something they deem greater and more valuable than their own existence – whether their cause lies in helping those close to them, or working to address a broader societal ill. Just as many devote themselves to the tangible creation of science and art.
Next, experientially. What can you learn and receive from life? By experiencing all the world has to offer – like beauty, truth, or the uniqueness of our loved ones. Try as many new things as you can. Do things that scare you, that you usually wouldn’t imagine yourself attempting.
And finally, as previously elaborated on: through the attitude or stand we take towards our circumstances. This will become especially significant when we are confronted with unavoidable suffering like burnout, grief, or death.
You are looking at every week (3200, on an estimate) that has passed and will pass in your life. The phrase Life is how you spend your days has never felt truer, so numbingly real. But if you take away one thing from this article, let it be this: we have all our life ahead of us to choose, consciously, the way we want to spend our days.
Look up one day on your commute home. Watch, like Hirayama in Perfect Days does, the komorebi that only exists once, in that moment. How the light dapples through the leaves of the trees and creates a shadow, pooling over the windows and the people and the ground. Life is how you spend your days. Everything is changeable – and there is so much to live for! And nothing – nothing at all in life is ever wasted.
He felt his life ahead of him as a great and wonderful thing, something that was his; and he said aloud, with the blood rising to his head: “all the great men of the world have been as I am now, and there is nothing I can’t become, nothing I can’t do; there is no country in the world I cannot make part of myself, if I choose. I contain the world. I can make of it what I want. If I choose, I can change everything that is going to happen: it depends on me, and what I decide now. Doris Lessing, A Sunrise on the Veld
Getting Started
Perfect Days (2023), a movie by Wim Wenders
You Play the Piano, an essay by Alan Watts https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=2212
The fear of being average https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLl3xREFEsY
Everything is a win when the goal is to experience https://substack.com/home/post/p-186774651
How to end your extremely online era https://substack.com/home/post/p-176949267
Margaret Atwood’s speech at the University of Toronto, 1983
https://whatrocks.github.io/commencement-db/1983-margaret-atwood-university-of-toronto/
Level up!
Meaning-in-Life: A Vital Salutogenic Resource for Health (I referenced: 8.1, 8.2)
Existentialism (I referenced: 1, 3, 4.1, 4.2) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/?st_source=ai_mode#Free
Man’s Search For Meaning, a memoir by Victor Frankl. His knowledge, as summarised: https://viktorfranklamerica.com/meaning-from-a-logotherapy-perspective
Being Real: Gen-Z, Self-Presentation, and Authenticity on Social Media
https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=comm_honors
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