I gave this piece such a title that I felt crushed by its weight even before I started writing. A voice inside me said, “Man’s Search for Meaning—well, well, you’re quite ambitious. Let’s see how this goes.”
When I look at the people around me—starting with myself—or at the friends who come to me for advice, I realize that we’re all actually on a deep quest for meaning.
Most of the time, we aren’t even aware that we’re searching for it. For example, when I ask directly, “Do you have a sense of meaning and purpose in your life?” I sometimes don’t get a clear answer. But as I delve deeper, I’ve come to see that all of us—even if we don’t realize it—are striving to make sense of certain aspects of our lives.
Some of us pursue this search much more actively than others. These individuals stand out from others in certain ways. Either a traumatic event has happened to them, or they’re trying to break free from a cycle they constantly find themselves in. “Why did this happen to me?” “What am I supposed to do about this now?” Or, “No matter what I do, things always end up the same way; I keep attracting the same kind of people or events into my life”—they seek to make sense of what is happening. It is this desire that drives us to act.
Over the years, I’ve observed that the human spirit cannot find peace until it makes sense of something and integrates that understanding into its life. At the same time, those who can find that meaning gain the strength to endure any kind of pain and hardship.
Indeed, in the life stories of those who have survived horrific experiences like concentration camps, there is always a search for and discovery of meaning. Those who can move from asking “Why me?” to asking “What’s next?” are also the ones who can find that meaning. In those who achieve this, we see that the hope arising from the meaning they’ve found is what keeps them alive. When Victor Frankl says, “What makes a person human is the ability to endure suffering. Because as long as a person can give meaning to their suffering, they can cope with it,” he is referring to this very idea.
If we know why we are living, we find the “hows” more easily.
The relationship between pain and meaning is not limited to this alone. As Gibran said, “Pain is a crack that breaks the shell of your understanding. Therefore, look upon it with love.” It is easy to say “I accept,” but hard to do. However, for those who are capable of change and transformation, it is always that pain that has sparked the first step toward a more inclusive, embracing, and accepting perspective—achieved through their efforts to find meaning in that pain. Because a person grows only through pain.
Because even if a tragedy befalls us, imbuing it with meaning is like making a ghost visible. We grasp what we can see more clearly. We can more easily figure out how to cope with it, how to overcome the ghost. The abstract has now become concrete. Being aware of this and accepting the misfortune that has befallen us lightens the burdens on our shoulders.
That is why, the moment we begin to engage with these issues—no matter how unsettling they may be—we also begin to build our new life moving forward. Because, as Kierkegaard said, life must be understood in retrospect and lived looking forward.
Moreover, this new life we are building will be closer to our true selves. After all, it is the light drawn from that essence that makes us so resilient in the face of difficulties. Since this light also contains a divine aspect, it is immune to all manner of hardship and evil. I don’t think we’d be exaggerating if we called it the most powerful thing in this world. Because its source lies beyond this existence.
The word “to long for” also comes from this. “To long for” is related to remembering what is in the essence. A person longs for what they love because the reason they love it is that it is a part of their own essence. There, a person feels a sense of unity. To long for something is to feel a desire to reunite with that thing whose absence we sense in our essence, in order to feel whole again. We always seek that missing piece to complete what is lacking in our essence. These things—a distant friend, a heart-to-heart conversation, a lover’s embrace—are what hold meaning for us.
Just as we piece together a broken vase, we rebuild our essence throughout our lives by gathering the things we’ve imbued with meaning. More accurately, our true self is already there and is whole, but the events and traumas we experience throughout our lives shatter that essence into pieces and scatter them to the four corners of the world. Then, to put the vase back together and see the beauty that emerges, we keep searching for its pieces in every direction.
This search is humanity’s quest for meaning, and ultimately, what we find is ourselves.