Meaning — The Fundamental Human Orientation
The search for meaning (Logotherapy, Dharma, Telos) is universally recognized as the deepest human motivational drive — more fundamental than pleasure or power — and its discovery or creation is the source of the deepest human wellbeing.
Viktor Frankl's discovery — in the concentration camps — that meaning, not pleasure or power, is the deepest human motivational drive, synthesized what every wisdom tradition had always taught: humans are not primarily pleasure-seeking animals (Freud) or power-seeking animals (Adler) but meaning-seeking animals. The Buddhist teaching that the 'precious human birth' is uniquely valuable because it alone provides the cognitive and volitional capacities necessary for spiritual liberation is a teaching about the unique human capacity for meaning-making. The Confucian commitment to living in accordance with the Way (Dao) is the commitment to a meaningful order. The indigenous understanding that every person has a unique medicine (gift and purpose) to offer the community is a teaching about the necessity of individual meaning. What all these teachings recognize is that the sense of meaninglessness — what Frankl called the 'existential vacuum' — is not a psychiatric symptom but an existential reality that requires an existential response: the discovery or creation of genuine meaning through love, work, and the way one faces unavoidable suffering.
Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.
Research by Michael Steger using the Meaning in Life Questionnaire documents that the presence of meaning (feeling one's life is meaningful) is a stronger predictor of wellbeing than the search for meaning, and that both religious/spiritual frameworks and secular frameworks can provide equally effective sources of meaning — confirming that meaning is a universal human need whose content varies culturally.
Universal Wisdom