Why "meaning"?

My goal for 2026 is to make meaning for myself. I think this is important because so many forces in the world right now are working to make our lives flat and empty. Companies manufacture that emptiness so that they can sell us stuff to fill it with, and yet that stuff turns out to be laden with the wrong kind of meaning, a sort of meaninglessness that becomes a burden that we then have to contend with: sorting, donating, throwing out, recycling. Our lives become an endless flat series of repeated purchases and expurgations.

Add to this that the world seems to be getting continuously worse. Politics are a shitshow; the news and social media are daily full of fresh horrors. Especially since COVID, there has been a palpable juxtaposition of the exploding catastrophe in the world and the imperative that we all just hunker down and continue on working as if nothing is wrong. The parallel juxtaposition of police bodycam videos or images of genocide and cute cat memes in one social media feed is the digital equivalent.

How can we make our lives colorful, full, and human against the backdrop of this slowly unfolding apocalypse? How can we find a sense of purpose and meaning even when the world seems bleak, empty, and without hope?

You'll often see Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning referenced in self-help texts whenever the idea of "meaning" is invoked. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor whose book is 2/3rds a memoir of that horrific experience and 1/3 an essay on his approach to psychotherapy, which he branded "logotherapy" (from the Greek logos, or "meaning"). Frankl had originally trained as a psychoanalyst, and he borrows the psychoanalytic language of "neurosis" to speak about the larger societal angst that was pervasive in the post-WWII era. At this time existentialism was very influential, as was the atheistic scientism of high modernism. Life indeed was being thought of by many as essentially "meaningless," in the sense that there was a rejection of any larger teleological plan, deity, or purpose except for the one lived out by a person during their own lifetime. It was a humanistic and highly rationalistic point of view and it's still very pervasive today.

Frankl pushed back on this point of view: "I would strictly deny that one's search for a meaning to his existence, or even his doubt of it, is... a disease." He sought to help people find what they desired "in the depths of their being." (108) He saw humans as essentially meaning-making and meaning-seeking beings. (Here you can almost hear a mid-century sarcastically deriding someone who was searching for "the meaning of life.") He defined "meaning" not as an overarching sense of divine purpose but rather a question to be asked of oneself on a moment-to-moment basis, resulting in responsible action. In other words, Frankl encourages people to making meaning through doing. Again, you can hear a mid-century parent's voice admonishing their child, "Don't just sit there! Do something!" (A counterpoint is given by a popular Buddhist-inspired meditation mantra: "Don't just do something! Sit there!")

Frankl's "doing" is focused on helping others, recognizing the beauty of the world, and on turning suffering into something meaningful. He encourages his patients to see their fate as their destiny, themselves as their own hero of a story. When faced with challenges, he suggests a kind of reverse pyschology which falls short of later approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. In an additional strange twist of magical thinking, he also tells people to avoid being fearful or fixated on things, for "fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes." (126)

Strangely, Frankl attributes society's overall lack of "meaning" to the increase in leisure time and therefore boredom granted by modernization. (111) He describes the phenomenon of "Sunday neurosis" as "that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest." (112) Compare this to 2026's "Sunday scaries": "a common dip in mood experienced as the weekend ends and the new workweek approaches." (Peng et al, 2025) You wonder if what Frankl was misinterpreting as boredom was actually dread at returning to the emptiness of alienated modern work, despite the fact that the workweek had been shortened and working conditions for many employees were much better than they had been in the previous century.

I opened up Frankl's book hoping for an interesting take on narrative therapy, but I found his theory disappointing and dated. Instead of making meaning, it seems that he is encouraging people to run away from it by staying busy and tricking themselves into thinking positive thoughts. I'm sure that's a reductionist way of presenting his theories, but as the child of Baby Boomers I actually find his point of view triggering because (in its popular form) it is such a familiar attitude among their generation: avoid difficult feelings, don't "give in" to depression, don't sit with your sadness.

Frankl's book came out in 1959, and almost at the same time, in 1961, an even more famous former psychoanalyst, Carl Jung wrote his final work in the months before his death. This was published as Man and His Symbols in 1964 along with 4 other essays by some of his well-known followers. Even in this short essay, it is apparent that Jung has a firmer grasp of "meaning" than Frankl. For Frankl, "meaning" seems to really just be "doing" (he says his approach is not introspective or past-oriented but rather action- and future-oriented), whereas for Jung, "meaning" is the way that humans connect with the larger and ultimately unknowable collective unconscious and with their own nature as organic beings in an organic world.

Jung brings out some of the same critiques of modern society as Frankl does, but with a different slant.

Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe. He can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced that htey make sense; he is crushed when, on top of all his misfortunes, he has to admit that he is taking part in a "tale told by an idiot." (76)

So far this almost sounds like something straight ouf Man's Search for Meaning. But while Frankl then asserts that we must find a "will to meaning," Jung urges introspection.

'Where there's a will there's a way' is a superstition of modern life. Yet in order to sustain his creed, contemporary man pays the price in a remarkable lack of introspection. He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food—-and above all, a large array of neuroses. (71)

For Jung, it is our loss of connection to the realm of the symbolic — i.e. things that exceed their literal meaning and point to something bigger that can never be fully comprehended — that characterizes modern life. To reconnect to that realm, Jung thought that engaging with dream symbolism was paramount. Each person should, in Jung's view, dig into the inner realms of their own psyche through developing an understanding their own personal symbolic language, and as they do that, come to know and embody their true essence. This personal language of symbols, in turn, bridges out into the larger communal, social, and universal symbols that connect us all.

Jung was not a utopian. He didn't believe that the "individuation," as he termed his process, would necessarily remove all suffering. But he did think that it would make the world a better place by connecting people to the world in a fuller way. He feared what he saw as the "monstrous" rise of technology and rationalization, and rightly saw it as a threat to humanity itself.

Frankl's focus on the "heroic" aspect of meaning-making ("human potential at its best ... is to transform tragedy into a triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement" - 116) calls to mind another Jungian, Joseph Campbell, whose The Hero With a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, popularized the idea of the "hero's journey." But even in the opening pages of the book, Campbell describes how heroic myths are "the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation." (3) They are symbolic, and therefore point to something larger than just a single moment, a single deed, or a way to trick oneself into enduring suffering.

Even if in 1959 they were something different, the "Sunday scaries" in 2026 are about much more than collective boredom. We are massively overstimulated, trapped in an existence where everything calls for our attention and "heroic" action and yet we have little power to actually change anything. If Frankl was once useful for a generation, that use has run out. We need something more than a sense of "responsibility" to guide us. For me, this year, focusing on meaning, on the realm of the symbolic, which, as Jung says, is created by the human psyche the same way a flower is created by a plant, arising spontaneously and organically, sometimes overnight, is my answer to the existential crisis all around me.