What is the meaning of life?

What did life mean to the millions of people who awaited their death in Hitler’s concentration camps? Any day, not too distant, they could be gassed to death. Their bodies might end up in a corpse factory [Kadaververwertungsanstalt] that converted human body fat into glycerine and soap. Becoming toilet soap cannot be the meaning of anyone’s life.

What did life mean to Hitler himself and his accomplices who ran the camps? Murdering millions of people cannot render anyone’s life meaningful. Hitler saw himself as the saviour of Germany. Eliminating the Jews was part of his messianic mission. The mission was the meaning of life for Hitler. But what about his victims?

Viktor Frankl was one of Hitler’s victims. His mother, wife and brother were murdered by the Nazis. Frankl survived the horrors and brutalities of the camps and wrote the celebrated book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Meaning is what makes life bearable even in a concentration camp, even in the face of death. Even suffering can attain a profound meaning provided you are willing to discover that meaning.

Meaning of life is a discovery. Your discovery. You discover the meaning of your life. You create the meaning of your life. Of course, you can also borrow it from someone else. From religion, for example. There’s no harm in that. But the sense of fulfilment you get in the end may not be as much as what your own creation would give you.

The meaning of your life is the sense of purpose you discover in your life. It is what gives direction to your life. It is what gifts you with wisdom. It is what makes you assert that “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” That is what Viktor Frankl said standing in the death row.  

Frankl was fortunate enough to escape death. He had endured much in the meanwhile. The endurance taught him some of the profound lessons of life. One of those lessons is that “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” That why is your meaning of your life.

Why am I here? Ask yourself the question. Your answer is your meaning of your life.

Ulysses

In one of Tennyson’s poems, the Greek King Ulysses is bored of his idle life in the palace with his “aged wife”. He decides to enjoy “life to the lees” by going on yet another voyage. He had already “seen and known” much: “cities of men, and manners, climates, councils, governments … and drunk delight of battle with (his) peers.” That was the meaning of life for him. Kingship does not excite him. He decides to leave the country to his son who loves “common duties … in offices of tenderness”. Ulysses calls his mariners, men who had travelled and struggled with him for years and years, men who had grown old with him, and tells them that “Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.” Before death closes everything, they should do something noble, something that befits “men that strove with Gods.” And so Ulysses and his sailors set off “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

That striving was Ulysses’ meaning of life. The seeking and finding without yielding except to the ultimate fate of death is a meaning that has excited me for years now. I describe myself as a learner. I keep learning: from books, other people, my students, anyone, anywhere. That is my meaning of life.

The meaning you create for your life must leave you with a sense of fulfilment too. My learning does that to me. When I transfer something of that learning to my students, I get an extra sense of fulfilment. When some students tell me occasionally that I inspire them, it is a bonus sense of fulfilment. Nothing else can match that sense: not religion, not any readymade meaning.

Next: Religion and Meaning

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