In search of happiness

By Lionel Wijesiri

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, Austria was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished - but he had survived.

Happiness is the positive range of emotions that we feel when we are content or full of joy

One year after his release, he wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning, chronicling his experiences as an Auschwitz concentration camp inmate. It is a short book and a worthy read. The author’s tale is exceptionally compelling as his observations about life in hellish conditions are enhanced by his training in psychology, going beyond the awful, but familiar horrors many of us know from popular movies and documentaries about the Holocaust.

The central theme of the book is about how anyone can choose to make meaning out of any situation, no matter how bad they are. He uses his personal experiences and observations from the Auschwitz to support this premise. More than the list of platitudes you often find in self-help books, the lessons are grounded by the Part One of the book, which centres on Frankl’s first person tale of starvation, violence, cruelty and epic loss in the German death camps.

Logotherapy

Part Two introduces his ideas of meaningful life and his theory called logotherapy. Rather than power or pleasure, logotherapy is founded upon the belief that it is the striving to find a meaningful life that is the primary, most powerful motivating and driving force in humans.

Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Understanding the meaning of life.

When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, “Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation.” Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, “Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?”

As he saw in the camps, those who found the real meaning of life, even in the most horrendous circumstances, were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation,” Frankl wrote in his book, “You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”

In his book, Frankl gave the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered. These two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. “In both cases,” Frankl wrote, “it was a question of getting them to realise that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish.”

Passages

There are many passages in the book which are noteworthy, but two passages specially interested me. “One’s happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy’. Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness, but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualising the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.”

This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon - laughter. If you want anyone to laugh, you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having him urge himself, to laugh.

Doing so would be the same as urging people posing in front of a camera to say “cheese,” only to find that in the finished photographs, their faces are frozen in artificial smiles.

According to a survey conducted by the US Library of Congress, Man’s Search for Meaning belongs to a list of ‘the 10 most influential books in the United States’. At the time of the author’s death in 1997, the book had sold over 10 million copies and had been translated into 24 languages.

Meaningful life

Now, over 22 years later, the book’s ethos - its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self - seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for true meaning of life. This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness.

In a new study, in the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychologists have found that understanding the meaning of life and leading a happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a ‘taker’ while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a ‘giver’. “Happiness without meaningful life characterises a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,” the scientists wrote.

The key to happiness is to appreciate what you are and what you have

How do happy life and meaningful life differ? Happiness is about feeling good. Specifically, people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. A happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.

Social perspective

Most importantly, from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behaviour - being, as mentioned, a ‘taker’ rather than a ‘giver’. The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: Happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire - such as hunger - you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy.

Meaningful life is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive effects and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness, but not at all with meaning.

Meaningful life, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful life. Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future. People who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaningful in their lives.

Which brings us back to Frankl’s life and, specifically, a decisive enlightening revelation he had before he was sent to the concentration camps. It was a thought that emphasises the difference between the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of happiness in life.

“If there is meaning in life at all,” Frankl thought, “then there must be meaning in suffering.”