I found this person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl
He specialized in the psychology of depression and suicide; his project managed that not even one more student (of the widespread student suicide in Vienna) commit it during that year. He wrote on the meaning of life and humanity’s attempts to answer the question:
https://www.amazon.com/Viktor-E.-Frankl/e/B000APVZJU?ref_=dbs_p_ebk_r00_abau_000000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unconscious_God
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning
Surely this will prove invaluably useful!! I myself searched for meaning for 3 years; and I found that the question “What is the meaning of life?” to be faulty, but in the process I found the answer to all I need.
4 comments
Viktor Frankl was a smart dude, but I don’t think it makes sense to ask the question in the first place. If we didn’t have language, there wouldn’t even be a question to ask.
Exactly! What you said is up to the core! It is the very reason why, on my long search for meaning, I ended up finding the question “What is the meaning of life?” to be a faulty question; what I did find, however, is priceless, no matter where I am put or made to go through.
Exactly! Meaning is in every moment, as Viktor Frankl says, even in every breath. I say this because, once one realizes that the question “What is the meaning of life?” is faulty, one assumes that there is no meaning of life. And that’s faulty too! Meaning is in literally everything; there’s nothing meaningless, nothing that somehow doesn’t affect something else.
Meaning is something we contrive outside of the world that exists. If there were no lifeforms that used language to symbolize it, meaning would be irrelevant. All the rest of nature exists without it and has no problem going on like that, while we get hung up on it. We’re a very backwards species.
My train of thought was: Imagine a box with balls inside it; the balls move freely, colliding with one another, they don’t care about meaning; now substitute those balls for atoms. Therefore, the question “What is the meaning of life?” is faulty, I concluded.
However, in the process I found that there is more to our reality than atoms, than the material world; there is so much more than what we can see and hear. So much beauty, the way it was all ordered, the rejoicing reaching to the highest places; and the cries and sorrows echoing in the deepest pits.
I find this beautiful, I’d love to share it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost