What is the meaning of life, really? I suspect it's a question quite a few of us carry. I once asked a class of mine: "Which do you think is worse — a life that's a complete mess, or a sorrowful life?" Most of my students said a life that's a complete mess sounds worse.
Why? Think about it carefully. If a life is a complete mess, sorrow is bound to be one of its ingredients — and on top of that there's the inability to find meaning or direction, not knowing where you've come from or where you're going. A sorrowful life, on the other hand, isn't necessarily a mess. Take Nelson Mandela, who endured thirty years of imprisonment for the cause of equal rights for black people. Or, closer to home, the Hong Kong grassroots politician Leung Tin-kei, who has found himself behind bars — yet we would never say their lives were a mess.
To be born human is to be destined for suffering
When life lacks meaning, it sinks us into a state of not knowing what to do with ourselves. Worse still, to be born human is to be destined to face suffering of one kind or another. Perhaps right now you are perfectly content — in your career, in love, in every respect — but before birth, ageing, illness and death, all of us are equal. And besides, "what you don't have now, you will have one day."
That saying, I'm afraid, doesn't quite hold for life. Far more often it's the other way round: "what you possess now, you will one day lose." Because everyone grows old in the end. Within a life that is destined to bear suffering, meaning becomes a kind of reason — one that keeps our suffering from being boundless and aimless, and turns it instead into suffering borne for the sake of a goal, for the sake of meaning.
Why we need meaning: it gives suffering a reason
To speak of the link between suffering and the meaning of life, we have to mention Viktor Frankl, the father of modern Existential Therapy. Frankl was a Jewish psychologist born in Germany during the era of the Second World War. Living through a time of war, he too — though already an established psychologist — was inescapably imprisoned in a concentration camp.
Inside the camp, he still carried the calling of a psychologist, providing psychotherapy for his fellow prisoners, and observing all the while. He began to notice which sorts of people endured the camp's torments more easily, and which could not endure them at all. He found that those who knew why they had to suffer the camp's torments stood the greatest chance of surviving. Some, for instance, longed deeply to be reunited with their families; in his own case, he hoped to live until the day of his release, so he could publish his work in psychology. It was reasons like these that allowed the imprisoned to hold on. By contrast, those who felt life held nothing worth clinging to — who wouldn't have known what to do with themselves even if they were freed — gave up all too easily under such crushing conditions. When you saw someone in the camp quietly smoking a cigarette, his next step, more often than not, was suicide. Why? Because cigarettes were the camp's currency: with them you could bribe a guard, buy food, carry out all sorts of trades. So when someone gave up the very currency that could sustain his survival for the sake of a single moment's pleasure, it meant he had already fallen into despair. Under conditions so crushing, the meaning of life — or psychological resilience — may matter more than physical fitness, and may be the very thing that allows a person to hold on.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has a famous line: who have a 'why' to live, can almost bear any 'how'." In other words: a person who knows what they are suffering for can bear almost any torment.
You, reading this, might be thinking: but I'm not a psychologist trying to put forward a theory. Never mind family — even a partner is something I'm short of … so what am I supposed to do? How do I find my own meaning in life?
Everyone's outlook on life and the world differs, and when people see different things differently and prioritise them differently, the meaning of life varies widely too. The road to finding it may twist and wind, so here I'd like to offer three ways to help you explore the meaning of your life — a guiding light to point the way.
Exploring the meaning of life doesn't have to be something you face alone. The MindForest App, designed on psychological principles, uses AI conversation and an inspiration journal to keep you company as you slowly tease out "what truly matters to you" — not by handing you answers, but by helping you ask the right questions.
Three ways to help you explore the meaning of life
Psychotherapy has many different schools. Some will ask you to change your own thinking in order to treat your psychological troubles; others will dig into your subconscious as a means of treatment. Many psychologists have tried to identify the single best therapeutic approach, but to no avail — each method has its own strengths, yet there is no evidence to show that any one of them has a higher success rate; we can only say each has its merits. Which brings us to an interesting phenomenon in psychotherapy: the Do-do bird hypothesis. To put it in my own slightly cheeky way — "Everyone's a winner, Super!" Since each has its merits, let's call it a draw!
Different therapies, the same starting point
Although the various schools have different therapeutic methods, the foundation they all share is encouraging the person in therapy to sort through their own life story. Put simply, it's about ordering your own thoughts and recounting the events that have happened to you through conversation with another person. This kind of dialogue is enormously helpful for finding meaning in life. Because life is made up of a great many different events: rushing to catch the MTR to get to work, gathering with good friends, knuckling down and pulling an all-nighter on a project … each and every one of these is an event that makes up your life.
But when you set out to recount your life story to someone else, you have to make choices — paring away the branches you consider unimportant to your life, leaving the things you find meaningful, using reason and emotion to organise it into a complete story, and communicating it effectively. This is precisely the grounds on which psychotherapists believe most forms of psychotherapy work. Research suggests you don't even necessarily need to talk to a licensed psychotherapist — as long as you have a good friend willing to listen, you can sort through your own life story with them. And if you'd rather not bother a friend, or have some private worries, you could try the method of writing. I, too, once kept a journal regularly, in dialogue with myself, gradually working through the knots that had me tangled up — and so learning to accept, and finding along the way some new perspectives on things, until I began to get a feel for the meaning of my own life.
1. A three-minute life story
I'd like everyone to try an exercise: try to describe your life in three minutes. You'll find it's harder than it sounds! As the saying goes, "to love is to choose." Having only three minutes means you have to make choices — distilling it down to the essence, like a film trailer, getting the message across while keeping it coherent. Remember, this isn't a self-introduction for a job interview; it's a piece that has to cover every facet of your life, like a closing reflection summing it up. So please think carefully about what, within these three minutes, you most want to cover.
2. Living towards death
The second method draws on the practice of Steve Jobs (the founder of Apple) and Stephen Covey (the renowned corporate trainer). Both held a similar idea: when a person faces death, the secondary things slip away, and what remains is everything worth cherishing. Psychology has researched and gathered together the thoughts of the dying: essentially, no one regrets not having earned enough money, or not having worked hard enough in their career; instead, everyone thinks of their relationships with the people around them. So both these well-known figures believed that death is the most effective way to remind ourselves of what we truly want. Stephen Covey once proposed a little exercise: imagine that at your own funeral, how would your loved ones and close friends describe the person you were? For instance, if a good friend were to write your eulogy, how would you want them to describe you? Surely no one would want to be described as a selfish person. Although, swept along in society's currents, we are sometimes forced to make selfish decisions, if you want others to see you as a generous person, you'll need to start making changes.
3. Act on it: meaning is something you make
Finding meaning has never been a purely rational exercise. I remember when I joined the anti-extradition movement last year, I saw a video on YouTube of a young man telling his story: he had always felt his life was empty and could find no meaning in it — until the anti-extradition social movement came along, and he felt that this was his meaning in life. Beyond the meaning of life, you'll also find that many things, after a long and fruitless search, turn out to come to you effortlessly. For example, everyone can think of an issue they care about; for most people, these aren't the sort of thing you can dream up just by lying on the sofa and thinking. Most of them come from a cycle of acting, reflecting, and engaging again. For instance, everyone agrees that environmental protection is an important issue, but few people decide to fully adopt a greener lifestyle the moment they see the words "environmental protection" in a textbook or learn about the problem of global warming. On the contrary, if you have friends around you who practise environmental protection, then through getting along with them you slowly change some of your original habits, then enter the circle of environmentally conscious people, and take a further step into the role of an advocate. You'll see that this is a process that unfolds layer by layer, step by step drawing you into this meaning.
Finding the meaning of life takes your head and your body working together. First, think about which issues you care about, or find interesting; then try throwing yourself into some activities, placing yourself in an environment among people who share your interests, and slowly develop a sense of what that issue means to you. If you try to find the meaning of life through theory alone, it's rather like wanting to learn the piano, then spending all your time watching the great pianists perform. Theory matters, of course, but genuinely putting in the time to practise is the most effective approach — and the fastest way to test whether these issues can become one of the meanings of your life.
Finally, I'd like to recommend a good book to all our readers: Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. But please, once you've finished it, rein in any surge of feeling with a little reason. Because you may come to admire the author's attitude to life immensely, and may even want to imitate him, thinking you absolutely must do something grand for your life to count as meaningful. Instead, channel that ardour into small actions — throwing yourself into a few activities you feel are worth spending time on. Investing your time wisely is the most effective approach, and the one most likely to help you find the meaning of your life.
Since suffering and life cannot be separated, then to seek the meaning of life from the angles of both theory and practice is very much worthwhile. I hope all our readers will, through action, draw a step closer to their own meaning in life. To think without practising — or to wait until you have a perfect plan before acting — is, in truth, unrealistic. A plan is, by its nature, a constant cycle of trial and error, correction, and action, never-ending. So take the first step! A journey of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet. The Treehole team will go on being your guiding light, growing together with you all.
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