The question of meaning does not arise much in ordinary daily life. The helter-skelter of daily existence, plus the pressure of relationships, do not leave much time for existential speculation. At the time these provide meaning enough. This is what life is about – relationships, job etc. What is difficult to understand are those people whose lives are not full of meaningful activity. It is as though they were being carried by a tide and then were washed up on a sandbank where there is nothing to do. There they wander aimlessly, occupying themselves with little tasks and excursions, or else they sit passively in front of the television. Boredom stalks them like an uneasy ghost. How can anyone be bored? How can anyone meander aimlessly, mind unused, dull, passive? Yet they do. On either side of the sandbank the tide of life surges and eddies – going where? That is the question. Is it going anywhere? Is there a stream of life, flowing, broadening, deepening, pouring itself into… what? A pleroma, a nirvana, the Kingdom of Heaven? And then what? Or, is there merely the tide, ebbing, flooding, surging, its waves whipped up by fractious winds, but going nowhere? That is what I want to know.
What we are doing when we are swimming in the tide, setting goals, striving for them, reaching them, going onward? Are these activities of as little, or as much, or more importance than the activities of animals in their pursuit of food, mating and reproduction? Are human activities, by virtue of being human, of a more profound existential significance and, if they are, what is it that makes them so? Are all human actions of equal worth? How do the total concentration of meditation, or making love, or abusing a child, or changing a nappy, or placing a part in a factory assembly line, or staring boredom in the face, how do all these compare in the eternal scheme of things? Are there actions which carry existential significance, good or bad, and what is it about these actions that makes them so. And are there actions which are of no significance? If so it is as though the people cast up on the sandbank were living in a vacuum.
Viktor Frankl describes the existential vacuum in this way – at the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behaviour is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behaviour are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). There are various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by the will to power, including the will to money. In other cases it is taken by the will to pleasure and a search for hedonistic compensation.
What matters is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. It is like asking a chess master, ‘What is the best move in chess?’ There is no such thing as the best move outside the context of a particular game with a particular opponent. Similarly in life. Each person’s existential situation is unique. As each situation presents a challenge, a problem to be solved, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. One should ask not what is the meaning of life but rather recognise that that it is s/he who is being asked. Each person is questioned by life itself and can only answer in the context of his/her own life.