The Search For Meaning

In Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl wrote: "Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life." Later, he writes that meaning in life can be discovered in three different ways:

1. Creating something of value or doing something worthwhile (our legacy)
2. Experiencing goodness, truth, beauty etc. or experiencing love for a person
3. Seeing unavoidable suffering as ennobling rather than degrading

This is strong stuff. I first read Frankl in graduate school, and my encounter with him was transformative. His little book was inspired by his experiences in the concentration camp, and the many barbaric and seemingly random experiences he had there. Where, he had to ask himself, is God in all of this? Where is the meaning of it all?

Some of you might be wondering: what does this have to do with one's career? A career can be congruent with our deepest selves, with our identity as human beings and our sense of being called to do something with our lives that makes a difference. Or, it can be something we do just because it's there, or because we've drifted into it.

I've known many people who have said to me that when they go to work it's to make money for the time when they're not at work, or to put money away so they can retire early and do the things they really want to do. They have claimed that their careers don't have to have meaning: making a decent salary in a comfortable environment is enough. Is it?

Suppose one starts work after college at the age of 22, and retires at the age of 66, with three weeks off each year. That's 44 years times 49 weeks per year times 40 hours per week. This person will spend 86,240 hours on the job over the course of his/her career; with overtime, that's over 10 years of his/her life. And it's a substantial fraction of a life to be spent in the hope of better things after the need to work for one's daily bread is done.

Frankl would say, I suspect, that one needs work that meets one or more of the criteria above so that our lives will be filled with meaning. Essayist Frederick Buechner wrote that we're called to the place where our joy and the world's need meet. Finding a career that fills us with joy and creates meaning for ourselves and others is more than a career goal: it's essential to our being human.