Press play to listen
There must be something seriously wrong with me. We have a lovely home in the suburbs, our children do well in school, my wife has a great job, we have the latest smartphones and streaming services, we’ve gone to Disneyworld three times, and we have a cabin up at the lake. Furthermore, I’ve never lived in a time of greater patriotism and national pride. We go to church on Sundays and I have 10 years of sobriety. My job is secure even in these uncertain times. So why am I staring out the bay window overlooking the river and wondering why I’m alive? Is there no purpose to my life? Why do I feel so unhappy when I have everything I always wanted? I must be nuts.
A day without meaning is like a day without sunshine. No matter what window we look out, everything is gray.
So many of us don’t realize that we cannot live for ourselves alone. Each of us has a natural yearning to have significance in ways that go beyond our personal gain. When we don’t honor this yearning, we become unhappy, no matter how successful we are in other areas of our lives. A noted spiritual mentor, Rabbi Harold Kushner, wisely stated, “You don’t become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something.”
The man in the story above is not nuts. He is like many of us who have bought into our cultural prescriptions for happiness and have attained some degree of success, but are still unhappy and empty. We aren’t unhappy with our material successes, but we don’t balance our lives with works that nurture our souls.
Valuing the Sacredness of Life
It may seem rather self-evident that life is sacred. Yet many of us take our good fortunes for granted and fail to realize that valuing life is something we need to do regularly, in order for the feelings of sacredness to be real.
There are three ways we find value and satisfaction in living: we master important life tasks such as completing school, learning to drive, and developing a career; we enjoy emotionally close relationships with loved ones; and we develop a personal identity that makes a difference in the world at large. So many of us struggle at being successful at work and in love that we neglect that third aspect of ourselves, which connects us to all of mankind and enables us to transcend any adversity.
Often, we don’t realize that to have an impact on the world, we don’t have to do great things; we just need to do small things with great love. In the poignant film Life Is Beautiful, directed by Roberto Benigni, a hapless waiter named Guido survives a Nazi concentration camp with his son and wife through the sheer and determined power of his personality and love. No matter how cruel his circumstances were, Guido was able to find the good in everything and survive the unsurvivable.
Those of us who live in our own self-imposed concentration camps can feel the sacredness of life too, by constantly witnessing the beauty in ourselves and those around us, no matter what our circumstances. When we focus on the sacred, we become free and our lives have meaning.
Those of us who are in 12 Step recovery learn to look beyond the veneer of our outward successes or failures and feel a common bond with the humanity of other recovering persons. We essentially allow our souls to vibrate to the rhythms of other people’s souls and we are never alone. Such vibrating may take us beyond our immediate circles. We may feel connections to nature, the animal kingdom, and the world of people we hardly know or appear to have little in common with. A good friend of mine once said it well: “When we connect with strangers, we affirm the divine in each of us.” Such leaps of faith sanctify life.
How Our Lives Get Robbed of Meaning
Some of us have had life’s meaning stolen from us. We may have been abused and exploited in childhood and grew up being betrayed by the very people who claimed to love us. It may feel impossible now to feel uncorrupted love, or to realize that our own damaged lives could ever have larger-than-life meaning.
Others of us allow meaning to be stolen from our own lives by expecting other people to tell us who to be. We think we have to defer to experts and heroes and we blindly accept cultural values. We’re told how to live and we think we have to be someone other than who we are to be acceptable.
Too many of us reduce our whole identities to one or two dimensions as we equate our entire happiness with attaining material success, being thin, being the head honcho at work, or getting approval from others. It may never dawn on us that the mere fact that we are looking outside ourselves to be happy is itself a dead end. It may never occur to us that we already have inside ourselves what we need to find purpose and meaning in our lives.
Some of us even become slaves of popular culture. We act like herded sheep when it comes to conforming to culture, and we never question the value of what we’re doing. We run to the malls when the latest craze is identified on TV. We escape into the online world for facsimiles of real life. We become mesmerized by drug companies that promise us happiness in a pill. We overuse food as a comforter, confident that no matter how much weight we gain, a magical diet will save us.
Alarmingly, there are no happy pills or magical diets to offset the emptiness of leading soap opera lives. Many of us need to spend less time in pretend worlds, get into real life experiences, and develop a sense of autonomy from the culture in which we live. When it comes to culture, a mind is a horrible thing to waste.
Taking a Personal Inventory
To guide yourself in your quest for meaning, ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I have an “I am not my brother’s keeper” attitude?
- Do I regularly avoid exposing myself to the real life suffering and needs of others?
- Do I have some creative project or volunteer work in mind that I’ve put off because I don’t feel that what I have to offer would ever be good enough?
- Am I a daily seeker of wisdom and a witness of the beauty of the people around me?
- Can I find inspiration in silent time alone and passion in simple things?
Cultivating Purpose in Our Lives
To feel more meaning in our lives, we don’t need to beat our breasts or deny ourselves material comforts. We simply need to regularly put energy into areas of our lives beyond our own self-interests. Doing good deeds for others — family, friends, neighbors, and strangers — is an inescapable necessity for happiness. Such investments nurture our souls and provide us with lifetime security, as their impact goes beyond any worldly limitations. They give us indescribable joy. For further reading on this topic, Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough [or Desiring God by John Piper / Editor added] is highly recommended.
I find the greatest satisfaction not in having more or being more, but in being happy with what I already have and who I already am. Gratitude fills my life with meaning.
John H. Driggs, is a retired Licensed Clinical Social Worker in private practice in St. Paul, MN and co-author of Intimacy Between Men (Penguin Books, 1990).
