The Search for Significance: A Conversation for GenZ

In the modern world of ambiguity and relativism, what gives us meaning? Join the discussion of the significance and meaning of life we must identify to continue flourishing in the 21st Century.

Reading existential philosophy has provided a great deal of hope to me since I discovered it in my undergraduate education. I had grown discontent with the reductionistic and deterministic psychology lessons presented to students today. It seemed that, broadly, we humans were all just “biopsychosocial” machines that merely construct the systems around us with a nuanced, arbitrary justification of the compositions of things like religion, ethics, and mores. Thinkers like Carl Jung, Viktor Frankl, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jordan Peterson helped me to separate the wheat from the chaff and determine what matters and why it continues to be important. Existential philosophy on the whole has certainly pulled me from that empiricist nightmare and helped me see that there is more to humans than mere deterministic biological functions and arbitrary interpersonal connection — everything that each individual had done, is doing, and will do has meaning.

It was at this point I might add that I stopped becoming a "good” psychology student and continued to press past the purgatory of textbooks and PowerPoint death marches. The fact that I was being taught something that, on the whole, was only a third of the picture bothered me and I wanted to figure out what else there was to being a person since that is what my initial drive to study psychology entailed. At this point, I made the best decision of my academic career and stopped reading textbooks; although I might take the liberty in saying that there are seldom students today that read textbooks, but more on that another time. In lieu of textbooks, I found myself reading philosophy books, not merely existential, and bringing those ideas to the classroom and deepening the learning process of myself, my classmates, and my professors. All the while I was learning all of the baseline principles the textbooks covered with the richness of flavor that comes with reading primary authors.

Now, I do not want to blame the professors, all of my past professors were excellent and I give them all the highest praise because they provided much of the groundwork for this curiosity to grow. I have found that in myself there has always been a need to push firmly against what is presented and to relent only once there is sufficient evidence to show that what is standing now won’t quickly fall away. Had I found that all the lessons were sufficient to my understanding and satisfied my curiosity, I would have not pressed firmly enough to see the walls indeed fall from me to reveal the vastness of the plains of knowledge yet to be explored, cultivated, and integrated, and certainly I would not have come to this point in my life at all.

As a first-generation college student from a very low-income family, I fully expected college to be the place where I would find all of the answers to the questions and that I very likely would not need to worry about discovery at all, simply learning. It became increasingly clear, however, that this was not the case and the revelation of the prevalence of the “art of doing” among professors rather than the “art of knowing”. This transition from expecting people to “know” to “knowing that they do” was initially a heartbreaking but eventually inspiring discovery. To “know that they do” rather than simply “they know” shows that the plains of knowledge are plenty and fertile for us to sow seeds for a new harvest.

It seems that for some time I had to learn the same truth in regard to existentialism in psychology and philosophy. When I first read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, particularly the section on logotherapy, I thought that I indeed had found the modality that would help all clients that I would come to serve one day. Now, as I read through it again, I find that Frankl’s framework lacks the same thing Friedrich Nietzsche’s framework for The Will to Power lacks. In truth, all therapeutic modalities and theoretical frameworks, especially postmodern types, lack something of crucial importance.

It is not enough to posit that the world has meaning, either meaning that we create or meaning that has always been there (depending on who you’re reading) because it is abundantly clear that there is sufficient proof from all fields of study that there is meaning in all things and interactions we could encounter to varying degrees. It is exactly those degrees that I believe matter and also hold the torch that can lead us toward flourishing or destruction. The degrees of meaning that we place on certain objects, places, events, ideas, etc., is what we could call significance.

Significance means, of course, something important and contains the meaning of some value to the evaluator. It is also what persists through time and continues to influence further actions, not only for a moment but for eternity if we let it. The fields and concepts that are important to this area of study include but are not limited to ophthalmology, attention, hierarchicalization, nutrition, executive control (insula particularly), religion, politics, and existentialism.

We have the freedom of choice but not the freedom of whether or not we choose. Understanding what drives us to choose the things we do and persist or deviate from those choices is important, especially for a generation like mine which is presented with infinite choices and ambiguity in what we must choose since we all must pick a direction at some point or another. It then begs the question: what is the most significant thing we could possibly choose? What is it that persists the longest while carrying with it the most meaning one could possibly fathom? I imagine that this also leads us to the questions of “Is what is significant also that which leads to our flourishing” and “Does something insignificant lead to our destruction”.

Taking the conversation of meaning from relational to substantial will be perhaps the most important one that my generation could hope to have. From this dialogue we are able to gain much — certainly more than we might lose although the cost of not having this conversation, as things currently are, will lead to insurmountable destruction for those living in the 21st Century.

Regardless of what results from this conversation, I believe that it is time to press firmly against the walls of our current understanding and begin to gaze upon the plains we have yet to tread.