Assignment 3

Meaning seems to be a very subjective phrase. It would appear to be that everybody has a take on what meaning even if they haven't put much thought into their own lives' meaning. For instance, 2 of my six interviews were similar in that these people had clearly never given more than an ounce of thought into what their meaning is. Person A said "Meaning, well that's the stuff that has importance to you, like, the stuff you like." similar to this was Person B who said that meaning "isn't something that can be easily tossed away, more like the stuff that's precious to you." From these two, we're left to wonder exactly what importance is - what makes something a necessity to someone? Why is it that what one person finds important is a simple trifle to another? For this we can examine another person's idea, where she stated that "life is what's important, whether you are rich or poor, what you do with [your life] is what is carried with us as important." When asked to elaborate, she replied that "if your life benefits someone else's life in some way or another, you have brought meaning into both your life and theirs, however small it may have been." This is clearly a more specific interpretation of importance. Changing tracks for a minute, we can see how psychoanalyst Victor E. Frankl, the founder of logotherapy, describes importance in his book Man's Search for Meaning. Paraphrasing, Frankl describes meaning from the perspective of an Auschwitz prisoner during World War II, where he states that a man's meaning, his importance, especially in times of suffering, is supported wit ha goal that the man is striving for. Specifically, Frankl says that a man who is the camp might live on only for the chance of ever seeing his family alive again on the outside. Frankl sums this up when he says that "Such furtive hopes gave these men their courage even amidst all the suffering in which they presently found themselves."



There was another rift in people’s responses to the question of what they could do to make their lives more meaningful. On the one hand, I found that maybe 60% of people answered that they could start a family and settle down. Elaborating, Person C said that She would like to find herself a steady husband and have two kids with him. She went on to say that she would like to move out of the city when she finishes school, and eventually raise her family in a quiet suburb. She finished by saying “Life isn’t confined to a schedule, which means we have the freedom to make what we want of it. If I make my life into what I really want it to be, then my life would be the most meaningful, because I made it so.” A man from uptown Manhattan had some ideas that conflicted with Person C’s meaningful life. He said that his life meaning was not up to him to determine; his life and his fate determine his meaning, both of which are out of his own hands. “The most control I have over my fate is going to church every Sunday.” He said that closeness to god is closeness to meaning, because “God put us all here on earth, and it isn’t our place to question his meaning.” I asked him whether God has given us parameters for determining meaning, to which he said only that God’s “divine plan encompasses all human emotion and all of the people in the world, so our meaning is predetermined, even if we think we have determined our ‘meaning’, all we’ve done is found what God wanted us to.”
Ultimately, what I’ve gathered from the interviews I conducted is that meaning is a very personal thing for most people. Personal in the fact that you cannot put a blanket description to what meaning really is, meaning is different for everybody. Everybody I interviewed had their own take on meaning, and while some certainly had similarities, they were all different, unique. It seems as though meaning is like a fingerprint or a snowflake - no two are the same. Some people draw their own meanings, and some others draw meaning from something like religion. One might argue that taking meaning from religion or something of the sort means that your meaning is not unique; you’re only a sheep. In theory, this might be true, but in practice, everybody adopts their own system of belief from their respective religion, making them still unique.