A shared universe › Blog › Finding meaning when everything changes · Español
When everything changes, meaning rarely comes back all at once: it is found little by little, in the people who matter to you, in what you can still do and in the way you carry what cannot be changed. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl founded a whole school of psychotherapy around that search. There are times when what gave meaning to your days disappears: a job, a person, your health, a project. And a question is left that you never needed to ask before: what for.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He was deported with his family to Nazi concentration camps, where, among others, his father and his first wife died. According to a 2021 study of his life and work, in 1946 he published the book later known as “Man’s Search for Meaning”, and he founded logotherapy, a form of psychotherapy centred on meaning.
From that experience and from his work with patients he drew a conviction: looking for a reason why is a deep human need, and whoever loses it feels it in everything.
The psychologist Michael Steger, who runs a centre devoted to studying it at Colorado State University, describes it in a 2022 commentary in the journal World Psychiatry as having three parts: your life having a certain coherence so that you can make sense of it, having purposes that move you in the long term, and feeling that your life matters.
In the same piece he notes that feeling your life has meaning goes with less depression and works as a protective factor against thoughts of taking your own life. He also points out that some therapies and ways of working, such as telling your own story, can increase it. Meaning, then, is something that can be looked after.
One of Frankl’s best-known ideas, set out in a review of his book, is that when suffering cannot be avoided, there is still the attitude with which you carry it, and there can be meaning in that too.
That does not mean suffering is good. It means that, even when what is happening cannot be changed, there is still something that does depend on you.
Some people find, over time, that a loss or a crisis also changed them inside. If you are interested, we talk about it in the article on post-traumatic growth, with no rush and no obligation to find anything good in it.
You don’t need to answer them all, or today. Sometimes one is enough, and something very small: calling someone, finishing a task, looking after a plant. If you feel you have to start again, you may find it a comfort to read about starting again.
It can help to write down your answers and come back to them after a while. What seems empty today sometimes fills up slowly, almost without your noticing, as you start doing things with other people again.
When “what for” turns into “what’s the point of carrying on”, don’t go through it without company. Talking to your GP or a psychologist can help you find your way again, and that help exists for moments like this. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free, confidential and answered 24 hours a day. If there is immediate danger, call 112. In another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
In A shared universe, keeping company the star of someone who is having a hard time is a simple way for the day to have been worth something. “Keep someone company” takes you to the stars that have had the least company.
And lighting your own, without names and without anyone knowing who you are, is a way of not carrying the question with nobody beside you.