Life With Meaning
By Sterling Hawkins, MSW, LICSW, LCSW-C
Have you ever been invited to a large banquet reception with friends in celebration of something or someone? Your relationship to that someone or something is the reason you received an invitation to be an honored guest. The rationale for being a guest is because your presence is honored. Your presence, therefore, creates the context for meaning.
So, what is meaning, and why do cultures all over the world celebrate events and people both living and dead? The short answer is because meaning is something that helps us to define how we live. Meaning in life says I have a purpose, and I make a difference. Without meaning in life, we die. Because of culture, societal, and religious values, people may hold different judgments and beliefs on what makes certain people and activities meaningful.
If we return to my banquet illustration, I believe this point will become clear. The person sitting to my left at the table may value a particular type of food because it represents something important to them. Perhaps it is a cultural dish or meal they enjoyed as a child. That same dish for me, while tasty and delicious, holds no association with anything I value (except perhaps as an epicurean delicacy). It is, therefore, meaningless. Something or someone can only become meaningful when it is attached to experience or something outside of the "self" Philosophers refer to this as a transcendental belief which goes beyond or exceeds the limits of our human experience.
To explain this theoretical concept using a cognitive-behavioral approach, I would like to cite American Psychologist, Abraham Maslow who is best known for his self-actualization theory of psychology, which argues that the primary goal of psychotherapy should be the integration of the self. Maslow proposed that as humans, we are goal-driven and that our drive is first to satisfy our physical needs, followed by our need for safety, love, and belonging, self-esteem and finally, the desire to become the most or best (self-actualized) that we can be. There is some overlap, but Maslow's hierarchy represents the striving for a life filled with meaning.
Based on Maslow’s theory, our striving is on-going, and most of us are engaged in the struggle to meet one or more of these needs because of the natural forces, which erode and often strip away the physical, and psychological attachments we form in our efforts to meet them. When we assign meaning to any one thing in our natural life, it is a created meaning and, therefore, can be lost or destroyed. Our bodies become deconditioned through aging and disease. Our material goods wear out, stop working, and break. This often results in dissatisfaction and making adjustments in healthy individuals. Still, if conditions persist and modifications and resolutions fail to occur, dissatisfaction can lead to depression or impaired judgment and even suicidal thoughts.
Viktor Frankl in his classic work Man's Search for Meaning in describing his experiences as a prisoner of war in German concentration camps during World War II writes, "Besides these physical causes, there were mental ones, in the form of certain complexes. The majority of prisoners suffered from a kind of inferiority complex. We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be ‘somebody.’ Now we were treated like complete non-entities. The consciousness of one's inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things that cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners possess it?"
Meaning in life, therefore, carries with it an enormous amount of psychological weight, that requires us to reason and weigh the implications of our values. The question we must each ask: Is there anything meaningful in my life that can be diminished or destroyed through suffering? Given that we being human are vulnerable and subject to the limits of our humanity in a finite and material universe, the only way to cope with the uncertainty and inevitable ubiquitous loss is to identify with something outside of ourselves and our world, which cannot be lost or destroyed. Meaning in life which is not created (by us) and attached to anything material may be able to sustain us during difficult times. What we believe spiritually and philosophically about our lives, in general, may help us to construct our meaning.
To further illustrate this, Frankl continues, "The prisoner who had lost faith in the future--his future was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay. “ While Maslow's approach helps us to understand what moves us to behave in specific ways, it is mostly a closed-system. The reason for this is that the system of human needs from bottom to top is hierarchical. While I believe Maslow gets it partly right, his theory- Self-Actualization ignores other thoughts of belief which lie outside the material or finite world. In short, the influences, whether emotional or spiritual that may cause physiological and safety needs to be subjugated to our need for esteem, love and belonging.
In contrast to Maslow, author Stephen Buhner in his book "The Fasting Path," contrasts a hierarchal and linear world view with one which is more complex and psychodynamic. He writes, " Compared to the mechanistic worldview that is now so dominant, older perspectives of the Universe are much more complex and multidimensional. Ancient and nonindustrial cultures understood that the Universe and the Earth were deeply sacred. Human beings, along with all other life forms, are, within those earlier perspectives, considered to be inextricably embedded in this sacred world, indeed to be an integral part of it. These ancient viewpoints are not beliefs as we now understand the term but are representative of a living experience." Buhner refers to a broad epistemology in how people not only see reality but also how their experiences and beliefs help them to define it. — In other words, finding meaning in things that guide our decisions for living in ways that a purely hierarchical or linear worldview cannot.
To conclude, perhaps April Lawson, writer at the New York Times, says it best. "Meaning has become the stand-in concept for everything the soul yearns for and seeks. It is one of the few phrases acceptable in modern parlance to describe a fundamentally spiritual need.
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Brooks, D. (2015) The problem with meaning. New York Times. Retrieved on 11 October 2019. Available https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/opinion/david-brooks-the-problem-with-meaning.html