Human Beings And The Meaning Of Life

Along with someone’s life, he might ask himself why did I get here? Is there any true meaning to life or is just meaningless gibberish? We usually think of this in a very, let’s say, narcissistic point of view; we never sit down and think if maybe a dog or a fly or a clock thinks of life and its meaningfulness. Just the thought of it sounds ridiculous. The search for meaning in life is exclusive to humans, right? It’s what humans do best than any other thing in this planet: question everything.

So in order to begin to tackle what the meaning of life is, it might be useful to know what makes a hjuːmən.

What makes humans, humans?

This is Viktor Frankl.

He was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist from the XX century. He lived through the concentration camps of the Second World War. He underwent the misery, starvation, slave labour and saw oodles of people die around him.

During this period he had a revelation: Humans are animals driven by purpose. Above all, we strive for a sense of meaning in our lives, and if we don’t achieve it we get extremely dejected.

To quote Frankl himself: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

For the longest of time (or at least the longest of human

Viktor Frankl time) the definition of a “good day” for a human person consisted in finding food, finding water and trying not to get eaten by anything else. These were the first steps of the universally beloved: Homo sapiens.

These hunter-gatherers could only, for the most part, focus their lives on: staying alive. That was their sole purpose to life, thus they were (We can assume) fulfilled.

However as time went by, these human people got fed up of having to chase the food and of everything that carried with it. So human persons started to control the food, this provided the minimum stability and wellbeing that human people needed to form the first civilizations, and consequently the first religions. As people didn’t have to solely focus on acquiring the basic needs to stay alive; their sense of purpose wasn’t satisfied. So the figure of a God(s) fulfilled the lack of purpose caused by the rise of social stability.

Regardless of the existence (or not) of a superhuman being, it inarguably gave humans a purpose in the universe; it meant they were special and that they meant something in the grand scheme of things. So, for the most part, human people were satisfied in their sense of purpose or meaning.

However, some things have changed since the V century B.C., to begin with: education is at an all time high, health and medicine is somewhat better since the bronze age, social wellbeing has improved in general and objective and pure science and research is as high as it has ever been. This evolvement in society has granted us, modern age humans, an unrepresented level of knowledge and social wellbeing. Even the average “western world” person has more advanced things than the most powerful kings or emperors from the middle ages. However, consistently, many people find themselves lacking something, with some sort of shadow in the background of all their lives. From an outside point of view this seems utterly ridiculous and weirdly paradoxical; we have more than any of our previous ancestors but, however, we still feel hollow, and unsatisfied.

This big missing thing, Viktor Frankl argued, is meaning. Frankl gave a name to this lack of meaning: Existential Vacuum.