Search for Meaning
In a previous post, I mentioned my burnout and ways to handle it. See how-to-combat-burnout. In the solution, six tips are proposed:
Choose the right kind of HARD.
Don’t stay too close to the full capacity.
When you see a hill, sprint.
Tackle all problems from those six triggers, not only overworking.
Exercise, exercise, exercise.
Some aim to solve mental struggles, while the rest aim to build a robust physical existence. Working together, they can bring the stress to a maintainable level. However, this is not the complete picture, and they are not solving the root problem of burnout. This one thing can drastically fuel the energy and execution power. It lays the foundation for any action to combat burnout. Broadly speaking, it is also the central theme of everyone’s life. It is called Meaning.
When I was, and am still, under the influence of severe burnout, my inner voice was shouting all the time.
Why am I struggling with meeting after meeting without an outcome? Why do I have to deal with this person that only brings trouble with him? Why should I care about the floating point of the last few digits when they will be eventually rounded? How could an engineer always think with an empty brain and try to solve the wrong problem? How could a manager vomit words and expect others to follow? How would a company keep its existence full of people at Peter’s Principle? Why am I suffering from these? Is all this worth it?
All those questions tortured my mental stability. And getting stuck in this inner world of resentment greatly influenced my physical participation. I would sit longer, running actions in my head, chasing after multiple deadlines, staying up late calculating the impacts, and constantly worrying about the consequences.
Yet, the question remains: is all this worth it?
“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
Viktor Frankl referred to this quote from Nietzsche several times in his book A Men’s Search for Meaning. The Why to Live is the meaning of life.
Viktor was a psychiatrist and holocaust survivor. The book was written in two parts. The first half is about the experience in various Nazi Concentration Camps. The second half is a brief introduction to his life work, Logotherapy.
Logotherapy is a meaning-centered psychotherapy that believes that striving to find meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. This is in contrast to Freudian psychoanalysis’s Search for Pleasure. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled alone; only then does it achieve a significance that will satisfy his own will to meaning.
Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibility; therefore, he must be left with the option of what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible. That is why a logotherapist is least tempted of all psychotherapists to impose value judgments on his patients, for he will never permit the patient to pass the responsibility of judging to the doctor.
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What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not of talk and meditation but of the right action and the right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks it constantly sets for each individual.
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This uniqueness and singleness, which distinguishes each individual and gives meaning to his existence, has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility that a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.
The meaning is found in actions throughout one’s life.
There could be a northern star to guide one’s actions. This symbol can representationalize itself into a concrete meaning at any given moment of one’s life. Given all the experiences, physical embodiment, temporal variations, and environmental conditions, the meaning is different from one to another. The northern star can be called the harmonization of one’s imaginative identities. It can be called a spiritual God. No matter which way, it passes one identity like a question to one. One answers it through action and, thus, realize his meaning of the moment.
And this moment, the right action and right conduct, can be called Flow (see book-club-flow-and-internet-attention) or Synchronicity (by Carl Jung, see my next post). Being in the flow, experiencing synchronicity, and acting to answer life’s question of meaning all point to the same thing. And in the very existence of this moment, the suffers, the burnout, have their meaning.
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