How to Escape a Meaningless Life

The following is a transcript of this video.

“One third of all the sorrow I must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death.” 

Aldous Huxley, Island

When we suffer, it is common to believe that the cause of our distress lies within the story of our life. Childhood wounds, destructive habits, unresolved conflicts, regrets, or painful memories are factors we often point to as responsible for our sorrow. But a lot of suffering results not from past events, but from an inability to reconcile ourselves with, and courageously face up to, the fundamental problems inherent in the human condition.   

In this video, we investigate two of these problems – the problem of death and the problem of meaning. We explore how our awareness of death and our need for meaning are deeply connected, and how our response to these problems determines whether our life is marked by growth and fulfillment, or burdened by suffering and neurosis. 

In his book Existential Psychotherapy, Irvin Yalom writes: 

“The fear of death plays a major role in our internal experience; it haunts as does nothing else; it rumbles continuously under the surface; it is a dark, unsettling presence at the rim of consciousness…death itches all the time, and our attitudes toward death influence the way we live and grow and the way we falter and fall ill.”

Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

Our deepest drive is to continue living, yet we know that one day we will die. This awareness creates a fear of death that permeates our being. Some believe the best way to deal with this fear is to shut it out of awareness and immerse ourselves in the business of living. This overlooks the profound influence death exerts on us. For much of what we do and pursue is shaped, often unconsciously, by the fear of death.  

“…the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity.”  

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

In his 1974 Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argued that the primary way the fear of death shapes our life is by motivating us to strive for heroism. “…heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.”, he wrote.   

Becker’s concept of heroism refers to the pursuit of “symbolic immortality.” This involves striving after ends we believe will persist following the death of our physical body. Some pursue heroism through the creation of works of art, others through invention, achievement, the creation of family, or the building of a legacy; while others devote themselves to social, political, or religious causes. 

The desire to live a heroic life is a basic human need. “The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest,” wrote Becker. For heroism is the primary defense we have to protect us from the fear of death.   

Through the pursuit of heroism, we sublimate the fear of death; we take the energy inherent in this fear and use it to create and strive towards meaningful ends. The more convincing and effective our striving for heroism – the more meaningful our life feels – the less the fear of death haunts us. But the reverse is also true. When we feel that our life is unheroic, the fear of death weighs us down. Becker even argued that many forms of mental illness are, at root, failures to sublimate the fear of death through a convincing form of heroism. Or as he wrote:  

…mental illness is really a general theory of the failures of death transcendence…..When the average person can no longer convincingly perform his heroics or cannot hide his failure to be his own hero, then he bogs down in the failure of depression and its terrible guilt…Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.”  

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

A heroic life is a deeply meaningful life. But how do we structure our life to live heroically and find the meaning we need to sublimate the fear of death? Here we encounter another problem inherent in the human condition. For while we need to live a meaningful life, human existence appears to have no objective meaning or purpose, at least none that we can discern with certainty. Or as Yalom writes: 

“The problem of meaning, then, in its most rudimentary form is, How does a being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that [appears to have] no meaning?” 

Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

In his book On the Genealogy of Morality, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called the problem of meaning “the curse that lay over mankind so far”. The Russian author Leo Tolstoy is an individual who felt the heavy weight of this curse. At the age of fifty, at the height of his literary fame, surrounded by wealth, land, servants, and family, Tolstoy was seized by a crisis of meaning so severe that he called it a “life arrest.” As he wrote:   

“I asked: ‘What is the meaning of my life?…Or to put it still differently: Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?…I clearly saw that there was nothing ahead except ruin. And there was no stopping, no turning back, no closing my eyes so I would not see that there was nothing ahead except the deception of life and of happiness and the reality of suffering and death, of complete annihilation…I grew sick of life.”  

Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

Since there is no obvious meaning to human existence, to solve the problem of meaning we must create or discover our own. To help us in this task, we can examine the various forms of meaning human beings have used to ward off existential despair.  

The most obvious meaning that has sustained people throughout history is a religious or cosmic meaning. This is the idea that the universe is purposive – it is moving towards some definite end – and that our life, in some heroic way, is contributing to that purpose. In the Western World, this cosmic meaning has been encoded in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition which maintains that the universe and human life are part of God’s divinely ordered plan. But a cosmic meaning to life can be found outside the bounds of institutional religion. In his final interview before his death from cancer at the age of 47, Ernest Becker wrote:  

“I don’t think one can really be a hero in any really elevating sense without some transcendental referent like being a hero for God. I think this is the most exalted type of heroism. Being the hero for the creative powers of the universe. Feeling that one has lived to some purpose that transcends one.”  

Ernest Becker, Interview with Sam Keen

Carl Jung suggested that the purpose of human existence is to participate in the completion of God’s creation via the expansion of consciousness. The more conscious we become, the more God, through us, becomes conscious of his creation. God needs us to realize his divine purpose. 

“Man is indispensable for the completion of creation.”

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Or as the great 20th century German author Thomas Mann echoed: 

“With the generation of life from the inorganic, it was man who was ultimately intended. With him a great experiment is initiated, the failure of which would be the failure of creation itself…Whether that be so or not, it would be well for man to behave as if it were so.”    

Thomas Mann, Life Grows in the Soil of Time

In our secular age, belief in a religious or cosmic meaning to life is untenable for many. The existentialist philosophers of the 20th century gave voice to this skepticism, arguing that the universe has no inherent meaning and that human existence has no objective purpose. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, wrote: 

“All existing things are born for no reason…It is meaningless that we are born; it is meaningless that we die.”   

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Although Sartre believed that life has no objective meaning, he recognized that we have a deep need for meaning, and thus it is our task to create our own. Or as Yalom noted:   

“What is important for Sartre is that human beings recognize that one must invent one’s own meaning (rather than discover God’s or nature’s meaning) and then commit oneself fully to fulfilling that meaning.”  

Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

There are several secular paths through which we can create our own meaning. One is altruism, which involves serving others or working to reduce suffering in the world. Another is dedication to a worthy cause. This involves choosing a value or ideal and committing ourselves to its realization, whether it be the struggle for political freedom, or the effort to bring more beauty, truth, or goodness to the world. The historian Will Durant advocated this path to meaning as he understood that when we devote ourselves to something larger than our personal self, we gain the sense that we are living heroically, and this helps prevent the fear of death from weighing us down. As he wrote in his book On the Meaning of Life:  

“Join a whole, work for it with all your body and mind. The meaning of life lies in the chance it gives us to produce, or to contribute to something greater than ourselves. It need not be a family (although that is the direct and broadest road which nature in her blind wisdom has provided for even the simplest soul); it can be any group that can call out all the latent nobility of the individual, and give him a cause to work for that shall not be shattered by his death.”   

Will Durant, On the Meaning of Life

Another source of meaning that has sustained many individuals is creativity. In the act of creation we give outward form to our inner life. We take what is subjective within us – our ideas, experience, suffering, insight, and perception of the world – and we embody it in a creation that, perhaps, will influence other people and outlast us. Through the creative act we attempt to objectify and immortalize the self, which is one of the reasons it is felt as deeply meaningful.  

“By the creative act we are able to reach beyond our own death.”

Rollo May, The Courage to Create

Or as Becker wrote:  

“In some sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life…The artist takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.”  

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Being a hero for God, or devoting ourselves to altruism, a worthy cause, family, or creative work, can feel deeply meaningful because these paths carry us beyond the narrow boundaries of our ego. They give us the sense that we are serving, creating, or participating in something that will outlast our physical body. And this seems to be one of the requirements of a meaningful life: in finding or creating our own meaning, we must choose something that directs our thoughts and energies beyond mere survival and the gratification of egoistic desires. 

“All heroism is relative to some kind of “beyond”; the question is, which kind?…What is one’s true talent, his secret gift, is authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself?”

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Or as Yalom continues:   

“A long tradition in Western thought counsels us not to settle for a nonself-transcendent purpose in life. Martin Buber notes that, though human beings should 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.” One begins with oneself in order to forget oneself and to immerse oneself into the world; one comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.” 

Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

Whether we satisfy our need for meaning through religious or secular means, Becker believed it is important not whether our chosen path is “true” in an absolute and objective sense. The decisive question is whether it is life-enhancing. Does it help us transcend the narrow boundaries of the self, enrich our experience, strengthen our character, and grant us the symbolic immortality that diminishes the fear of death? If so, then our pursuit of meaning serves its purpose and promotes well-being, even if its ultimate validity remains uncertain. 

In this respect, the pursuit of meaning requires we adopt an attitude similar to Soren Kierkegaard’s knight of faith. The knight of faith cannot prove, with objective certainty, that God exists or that his life serves a higher purpose. Yet he lives as if God exists and his life has ultimate significance. Or as Kierkegaard explains: 

“Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.” 

Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

In a similar manner, the task is to discover a self-transcendent meaning to which we can commit ourselves wholeheartedly. At the same time, we must accept that doubt can never be fully overcome: all may be vanity, and death may render everything we do meaningless in the end. But to live with faith despite this doubt — to live as if what we do matters in some higher sense, even though we don’t know whether it really does – is one of the greatest and most difficult tasks of being human. It is also necessary to avoid the neurotic suffering that plagues people who feel their life is meaningless. Or as Becker writes: 

“Men avoid clinical neurosis when they can trustingly live their heroism in some kind of self-transcending and meaningful drama…To lose the security of heroism is to die — that is what [stripping a primitive tribe of their meaning-system] means and does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life then becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor.”

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Further Readings

Art Used in this Video