Frankl: "Meaning" and "purpose" trump happiness and success

 Frankl writes:
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a 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 which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how." (from "There's more to life than happiness," by Emily
Esfahani, The Atlantic, January 9, 2013, below taken from Frankl's work, Man's Search for Meaning)
The search for meaning can be an awesome and somewhat intimidating pursuit. It posits questions about how to know if and when one finds "it"...and what to do with the overwhelming responsibility when one discovers "it" and then the other imposing question, "How am I doing?" posed so frequently by the recently deceased Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, all the while he served as Chief Magistrate of that city. Finding a piece of marble, from the broken cathedral levelled by the Nazi's in 1941 helped Frankl "see" his meaning to stay and accompany his parents who were likely to be imprisoned by the Nazi's, instead of going to America to pursue his professional career.
Another frequently repeated story about Frankl was his reputed hiding his thesis in his shoe, after being imprisoned, and being the first to work in the mornings on the Nazi-supervised chain gangs, the thesis being his "raison d'etre" and his motivation to face each day.
However, for a contemporary counsellor to "prescribe" Man's Search for Meaning as part of what is known in the trade as "bibliotherapy" is not adequate to transfer the import, with all of its implications, to the client. In a struggling marriage, I experienced such a prescription, only to have it fall on what were then deaf ears and sensibilities, perhaps because one party to the therapy questioned the therapist's credentials because he asked, "Are you concerned about your marriage?" Her 'take' on the question was,"Why would I be here if I were not concerned?"
One can only guess, but the therapist's purpose in asking the question could easily and reasonably have been for the client to openly express that anxiety, so that both she and he would hear the response, as part of the consciousness raising goal of the sessions.
Working in the United States, in a religious institution, I too frequently encountered persons searching for their own happiness, without comprehending how that search was sabotaging its very possibility.
Expressed differently, happiness was being substituted for purpose or meaning, and rendering those individuals superficially attending to the acquisition of material goods, fashion, status, bravado, and a form of theatre that could only be characterized as pretentious. Granted, there were many different formats of this drama, in different venues. Some in social status positions sought refuge with others also in high status social positions, especially when they became embroiled in headline-grabbing conflicts.
Others, of the blue-collar variety, proudly proclaimed their VietNam war experiences, without ever having set foot in VietNam, consciously (or perhaps unconsciously) parading the vaccuity of their military experience and the story they fabricated around their boot camp training. Others claimed to have a high-fashion artistic flare, without either having studied or demonstrated mastery of the ambition. And there were others who flailed around as sycophants to those with wealth, as their method of securing some modicum of purpose and meaning and thereby stature. Others there were whose self-esteem relied exclusively on their holding some official position in the institution, especially focused on the bank accounts of the institution, so that they were, in effect, "in control" of the restrictions on the life and the life-giving mission of the institution...but they had power! And that was the satisfaction of their pursuit of happiness!
For myself, I was in a foreign country, where I knew no one, where I was uninformed that two years of national advertising had failed to secure a "sucker" for the position I was offered, and where there had been no relationship between the small mission and the wider church for decades. I only too late learned that responsible observers had recommended the mission be closed for five years, and then re-opened, in order to lance the many historic "boils" of anger, dysfunction, bigotry, and self-imposed alienation into which, like a misguided Don Quixote, I marched.
Having a preference for challenging "opportunities," I knew immediately I had discovered what was to prove to be "more than a match" for my abilities, talents, energy and imagination.
In the short-run, I was determined to not let the situation "beat me" so found as many useful tasks as I could to occupy my time and energy. However, as the noose of public opinion began to constrict around my neck, I began to look for escape routes, of which there appeared to be very few. One route took me to another state, where the search committee were obviously looking for a female incumbent. That quality I could not provide, although I am told I was second to the final selection.
Another took me to an urban site, where once again, I was a finalist, in competition with a southern candidate, who rejected a minimalist contract offer. Finally, the noose became prohibitive of the passage of both physical and emotional oxygen, and I resigned, amid a flurry of angst, anger, and the kind of spillage that comes from all boil-lancings, as the one solely "responsible" for the flare-up.

Of course, the pain was soffocating.
Of course, the disappointment was debilitating.
Of course, I knew that I could not and would not return to the profession.
And, of course, I also knew that I did not fit the description of a Republican, conservative, non-alien, red-neck who was required for the post, and that I should never have been sent there, and should never have accepted, once having arrived.
Upon returning home, I tended the wounds to my pride, my professional confidence, my sense of self, and my recently planted seeds of a different kind of hope, based more on a grounded engagement with the nuts and bolts of everyday existence, and less on the florid language of homelitic rhetoric, pastoral prayers and visits, smiling newsletters of evanglizing, marketing and recruitment of both bodies and dollars. (At the beginning there were six people, and after forty months, there were fifty, operating on a budget of $50K!) As if that were "meaning"...and it was according to the church hierarchy.
However, it could not be, and was never "meaning" or purpose for me.
I had naively anticipated engagement with parishioners; that really never happened, except for one or two, so intent were they on "control" and so intent was I on "not being controlled and manipulated".
I had anticipated some support from the wider church; they never happened, because I was an "alien" in a foreign land where acceptance of "aliens" was anathema to the culture. Even a much younger professional dubbed me, "too much for me!" in his words. (His response reminded me of a previous female supervisor who judged me, "Too intense!" to which I barked, "I'm also too bald; so deal with it!")
In my year of healing, I was visited, three or four times by a woman who had witnessed the drama in the sagebrush mission, and surprisingly had found something in me that she wished to help return to health. And in the process, I also found many things in her that evoked my own hopes, dreams and meaning in a discovered "mutuality" of sharing both good and rough times, of sharing imaginative expression in music, art, words, photography and in forthright conversation. And now, twelve years later, I am humbled to be able to write, for me there is meaning in this husband-wife relationship, beyond the striving for "success" and for achievement that was at the heart of the expectations of others, presumably significant if only because of their rank and status and power over me and hundreds of others. And in their striving for their own achievements, they also compromised the kind of meaning and purpose that lie at the centre of a healthy spiritual pilgrimmage. And for that, too many churches are emptying, sadly, while others grow into monsters of magnificence of huge crowds, even bigger budgets and large television audiences...in a triumphal denial of the humility of the spiritual pilgrimmage, and the discovery of meaning and purpose.

There's more to life than being happy
By Emily Esfahani, The Atlantic, January 9, 2013
Emily Esfahani Smith is an associate editor at The New Criterion and editor of the blog Acculturated.

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"

As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. "In both cases," Frankl writes, "it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them." For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a 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 which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
In 1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club listed Man's Search for Meaning as one of the 10 most influential books in the United States. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. Now, over twenty years later, the book's ethos -- its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self -- seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning. "To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"
According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high -- as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word "happiness" in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy, without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness."
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This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."
"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.
How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.
Nearly a quarter of Americans do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful.Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.
"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers write.
What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.
The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.
"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy," Baumeister told me in an interview.
Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.
Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.
Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering."
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Which brings us back to Frankl's life and, specifically, a decisive experience he had before he was sent to the concentration camps. It was an incident that emphasizes the difference between the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of happiness in life.
In his early adulthood, before he and his family were taken away to the camps, Frankl had established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna and the world. As a 16-year-old boy, for example, he struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and one day sent Freud a two-page paper he had written. Freud, impressed by Frankl's talent, sent the paper to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. "I hope you don't object," Freud wrote the teenager.
While he was in medical school, Frankl distinguished himself even further. Not only did he establish suicide-prevention centers for teenagers -- a precursor to his work in the camps -- but he was also developing his signature contribution to the field of clinical psychology: logotherapy, which is meant to help people overcome depression and achieve well-being by finding their unique meaning in life. By 1941, his theories had received international attention and he was working as the chief of neurology at Vienna's Rothschild Hospital, where he risked his life and career by making false diagnoses of mentally ill patients so that they would not, per Nazi orders, be euthanized.
That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself even further in his field.
As Anna S. Redsand recounts in her biography of Frankl, he was at a loss for what to do, so he set out for St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to the organ music, he repeatedly asked himself, "Should I leave my parents behind?... Should I say goodbye and leave them to their fate?" Where did his responsibility lie? He was looking for a "hint from heaven."
When he returned home, he found it. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His father explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues that the Nazis had destroyed. The marble contained the fragment of one of the Ten Commandments -- the one about honoring your father and your mother. With that, Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo whatever opportunities for safety and career advancement awaited him in the United States. He decided to put aside his individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates in the camps.
The wisdom that Frankl derived from his experiences there, in the middle of unimaginable human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then: "Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself -- be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is."
Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves -- by devoting our lives to "giving" rather than "taking" -- we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.