“Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.”
― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning
Let me guess:
Your life is going pretty darn well by any objective metric. Nice place to live. More than enough stuff. Family and friends who love you. But you’re tired, burnt out, and more. It feels like you’re stuck in the ordinary when all you want to do is chase greatness.
Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust, and in this book he explains that the inmates who survived with him found and focused on a higher purpose in life, like caring for other inmates and promising to stay alive to reconnect with loved ones outside the camps. But these survivors also struggled in their new lives after the war, desperately searching for meaning when every decision was no longer life or death.
Frankl realized that this existential anxiety is not a nuisance to eliminate, but actually an important signal pointing us towards our need for meaning. Similarly, while Friedrich Nietzsche would argue that life inherently lacks meaning, he’d also implore us to zoom out and find our highest purpose now:
“This is the most effective way: to let the youthful soul look back on life with the question, ‘What have you up to now truly loved, what has drawn your soul upward, mastered it and blessed it too?’… for your true being lies not deeply hidden within you, but an infinite height above you, or at least above that which you commonly take to be yourself. “
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 1874
Nihilists get both Nietzsche and YOLO wrong. Neither mean that you give up. Instead, both mean that your efforts are everything.
So when you get those Sunday Scaries, the existential anxiety that your time is ending and the rest of your life is spent working for someone else, the answer isn’t escapism.
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