There is so much talk about mental health these days. We have life coaches, self-help books, expensive retreats, highly-paid human therapists and free chatbot “therapists”, self-care, wellness, abundance of material objects, utilities, and entertainment, and yet it seems that we have declared ourselves not happy enough, and that makes us even unhappier. Suicide rates are on the rise, even among young people and children. People in advanced countries are recognizing mental suffering as such a pressing need that they insist on authorities extending state funded euthanasia to more and more people, including minors. It seems that more and more people cannot find a single good reason to go on, that is they don’t see any meaning in their lives – they have lost it or they have never been aware of it. Looking at the abundance we have at hand to not just cope but thrive and enjoy life, it seems that lack of meaning is like hunger that nothing can satisfy.
Sadly, this is not just a private matter. Meaning (or lack of it) reaches into all our relationships and shared endeavors, into all other aspects of our lives and shapes our decisions and even unconscious responses to whatever comes our way. Here is why meaning has to be taken seriously.
What is meaning?
Meaning makes our experiences feel like parts of a connected whole, like elements of a bigger picture rather than isolated incidents that make no sense. Meaning makes us see our lives as going somewhere, building toward something. Whatever happens seems to matter beyond the immediate moment. Things matter, life fits together. Or if they don’t, and that has been our situation for long enough, we start asking ourselves “What’s the point?!?” and find no answer.
Why meaning is not optional
If you are reading this, there is a big chance that you are aware of the widely accepted modern belief that there is a hierarchy of needs (often represented by the famous Maslow pyramid), and meaning sits on the top of it – as the cherry on the top of the cake. Below it are many other needs, starting from food, shelter and physical safety. It seems that meaning is a kind of luxury the poor cannot afford.
Fortunately, the modern world has offered not only this perspective. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived in Nazi concentration camps, including the notorious Auschwitz, dedicated the rest of his life to studying what helped people survive the death camps. The decisive factor was one – meaning. The people who had a good reason to survive – a person to return to, a work to complete, a witness to bear, maintained dignity, purpose, and even humor in conditions that were designed to reduce human life to pure animal survival behavior. Many of those people lost their lives because they were killed, but many others deteriorated on their own – rapidly, regardless of better physical condition and collapsed for lack of reason to go on. Viktor Frankl not only wrote books about his experience but also developed a therapeutic method he called “logotherapy”, and it was focused on finding meaning.
The philosopher Ernst Cassirer went even further and argued that we do not first have experiences and then interpret them and attach meaning to them, but that we function only in a framework of symbols and stories, and if that framework collapses, experience becomes unbearable.
Research in biology seems to point in the same direction: people with a strong sense of purpose show lower stress markers, better cardiovascular health, and longer life expectancy – no matter the income or circumstances. The brain under chronic meaninglessness behaves like a brain under chronic stress.
Historical records can show us the outer limits of this phenomenon: in the second and third centuries, hundreds of Christians (not only men and women but also children) were given an explicit choice by Roman authorities: renounce your faith and live, or hold to it and die in the arena, maimed and devoured by dangerous beasts. They knew exactly what dying would involve. The accounts of these events, even the ones written by people who were neither Christian nor sympathetic, describe those who chose death not as fanatics or people seized by hysteria, but as calm; some accounts even described them as joyful. Historians of Christianity say that this martyrdom was a powerful catalyst for the spread of this religion. The same pattern appeared in the Soviet death camps – as documented by Solzhenitsyn in his book The Gulag Archipelago – the people who were empowered by meaning did not just endure suffering but rather embraced it.
The narrative mode – how meaning is made
Meaning is not something that is attached to isolated facts or moments. Rather, it is what connects everything into a coherent whole that can be “told” as a story – someone wants something, something is at stake, he acts, things change. This narrative structure of our meaningful reality is what makes us human.
According to the psychologist Jerome Bruner, the mind operates in two different modes. One is the logical-scientific mode of categories, causes, rules, and abstract principles. It seeks verifiable truth. The other is the narrative mode of intentions, characters, actions, and consequences. It seeks meaning. Both are real forms of intelligence, and neither can replace the other.
Modern people seem to be preoccupied with the first mode of thinking and strive to develop it not only through formal education but also through toys and activities long before school starts. While I was growing up in the 70s, no toys were marketed as “educational”, and this did not seem to bother our parents. Nowadays people buy “Coding for babies”.
However, most people are not aware that almost every distinctly human activity draws on the narrative mode. We operate in the narrative mode when we think about who we are and what made us that way, when we try to make sense of something painful that happened to us or to understand another person (we do not analyze people as systems but rather construct stories about them). Our closest relationships are co-authored narratives, and their health depends on the story the partners tell about themselves being together. We construct a narrative about who our child is and use it as a lens through which we interpret their behavior and respond to it, make choices about the child, etc.
The narrative mode is dominant in culture – literature, theatre, cinema, fairy tales, myth, religion, ritual, and political life. Children’s first drawings tell stories before they tell anything else. This mode dominates most children’s play, especially the pretend play that children begin practicing almost as soon as they can walk. This is not an exhaustive list of the many forms through which the meaning-making capacity is expressed, and the narrative mode is not simply a common element shared by these activities. Rather, it is the water we swim in, so we usually notice it only when it fails – for example, when we do not see a good reason to get out of bed, when no matter how well we are entertained, we feel that something is missing, etc. It is easier to notice it in other people – for example when they are politically manipulated to buy into a story offered by a demagogue – because they never built a convincing one of their own.
Why this matters, and where we begin
Like all capacities, narrative thinking can be cultivated or neglected. It develops through practice – constructing stories, inhabiting characters, sequencing events, finding significance in what happens, etc.
Some children grow in a narrative-rich environment – they are told stories, their own experiences are narrated back to them, they play freely in symbolic worlds they construct on their own, they first encounters darkness in fairy tales in a shape that can be survived, they have real conversations with adults about what happened and what it meant. These children develop a capacity for meaning-making, and it is something more fundamental than any specific skill.
What if the narrative mode is left uncultivated? That leaves people vulnerable to the suffering of a life that cannot be organized into anything bearable. Such people are easily manipulated by anyone willing to offer a ready-made story in place of the one they should have constructed for themselves. Narrative thinking cannot give a person full control over what happens (as there are so many things out of our control), but it is the way a person can make sense of what happens. That is what makes for a meaningful life, whatever the external circumstances turn out to be.
In the posts that follow we will look closely at how the narrative mode develops in children – symbolic play, storytelling, reading a good book, etc. We believe that modern parenting and education tend to undervalue all these, and we want to make the case for taking them seriously. If you have read our earlier posts on symbolic play and children’s books, you already know where we stand.