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Concept

The Will to Meaning

The will to meaning is Viktor Frankl's term for what he saw as the primary human motivation: not the pursuit of pleasure or of power, but the search for a meaning to fulfil in one's own life.

Frankl set the idea against two earlier schools of Viennese psychology: Freud's emphasis on the pleasure principle, often summed up as a will to pleasure, and Adler's will to power. In Man's Search for Meaning (1946), and in logotherapy, the school of therapy he founded, Frankl argues that people are moved first by a need for their lives to mean something, and that pleasure and status are by-products or substitutes. When the will to meaning is frustrated, he says, the result is an existential vacuum: boredom, a sense of emptiness and a turn to distraction, money or pleasure to fill the gap. His years as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps shaped the idea. He observed that those who held on to a reason to live, a person waiting for them or a work still to finish, were often better able to endure, and he liked to cite Nietzsche's thought that someone with a why to live can bear almost any how. Frankl also insisted that meaning is discovered rather than invented, and that it is specific to each person and each moment. A healthy life, in his view, keeps a certain tension between what a person is and what they could still become.

A real-life example

Ferhat, a clerk at a tax office in Edirne, has been caring for his father since a stroke last winter. Some weeks, between the office and the night-time checks, he runs on empty. One evening he wrote his why in two lines: so that his father can stay in his own home, and so that his daughter grows up seeing how this family looks after its own. He keeps the note in his wallet and reads it on the hard days.

How to use it

  1. 1Ask what your current situation is asking of you, rather than what you expected from it.
  2. 2Write your why for the hardest part of this week in one or two concrete lines.
  3. 3Keep it where you will see it on a hard day; if the emptiness lasts for weeks, speak to a professional.