In my nearly 57 years, I’ve walked many long pathways alongside discouraged, depressed, or despairing friends and loved ones. I’ve sat by their bedsides. I’ve listened to the laments and the outcries of dear souls who feel utterly separated from life’s meaning and joy.
The leaders I serve are not immune from this kind of struggle, either. While others would assume their lives are going swimmingly, leaders, too, can descend into deep discouragement and malaise, even right in the midst of apparent triumph.
Milonica, my beloved wife of 35 years, has encountered long seasons of abject darkness; She who is—hands down—the brightest, most colorful, most deeply alive, and courageous human being I have ever known. And beautiful. Just saying.
When I was a young man, I was terrified of such despair, and I didn’t want to let it come close to me. But over the years, I’ve learned to be a companion to my friends and loved ones in their times of suffering. I’ve learned to be present, to walk alongside, and to be, simply, with. I’ve also learned to listen; really listen, beyond the noise of my own answers and my need to fix (which Milonica credits to my XY chromosome pattern).
One of the simplest and most frequently asked questions I’ve heard over the decades is, “What’s it all for?” This question is asked in a variety of ways: “What’s the use?” “What does any of this mean?” “What’s the point?” Or, when really stripped bare, the question comes out more simply as, “Why?” “Why am I even alive?”
We should be deeply curious about the fact that these questions—and this kind of despair—can strike anybody, visit every kind of circumstance, and torment all types of people. We human beings require meaning, is the short of it, and this fact should raise the hairs on the back of our necks. People who have every advantage, privilege, and perk of life can be brought to their knees with questions about life’s meaning. As can people suffering the worst of human privation. Equally astonishing is the availability of hope, which is no more a respecter of persons than despair. The privileged can live in hope, as can the poor.
A human person needs meaning and purpose, just as a daisy needs sun. We are more than the sum of our material parts; that is for sure. There is a life force – a law of our nature – that is at work within us, beyond survival and material want, and this life force cries out for purpose.
Listening closely over the years to the people I love and serve, I have learned that in our “search for meaning,” money, fame, power, and pleasure do not bring us satisfaction. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with money, fame, power, or pleasure. But men and women who believe that these things are the ultimate goal of life often report, when they gain them, that their despair only worsens.
So, what does answer the heart’s cry for purpose? Thus far in my listening and in my paying attention, I have identified six answers to this question. The human person cries out:
- To be known. We have, within us, an unassailable conviction that we are somebody, uniquely so, with a one-of-a-kind identity. In order to be known, we must go on a journey of learning about who we are, reflecting on our own life, and opening ourselves to feedback and discovery. We, ourselves, need to know who we are, just as we need others to know who we are.
- To be needed. Darwinian survival of the fittest misses the point. Human beings perish when they aren’t needed, useful, valued, or put to service. The retiree who doesn’t have anybody to get out of bed for doesn’t have long to live. Fitness is useful to our survival, but only in the way that coffee beans are useful to a barista; fitness (and coffee beans) can’t explain what gets a human being out of bed in the morning—to make coffee or to do anything else. That somebody needs us can explain our desire to live.
- To make a difference. Beyond being needed, we want to have a real impact in the world. We want to leave an imprint, to be effectual, to be heard and seen and felt. We long to know that the world is different—better—because we lived.
- To create. I have never met a human being that didn’t have an idea, a vision, a plan, or a scheme to bring something into existence. Parents create, as well as painters, entrepreneurs, gardeners, and pianists. Integral to our humanness is the inclination to take a notion, and then to bring into existence that thing we conceived.
- To love and to be loved. The truth about our requirements for love—both to love and to be loved—is manifest everywhere on earth. Suffice it to say that, arguably, the human person is the only creature on earth who cannot survive, let alone thrive, without love. Love is a human requirement, as is food, air, and water.
- To have purpose. Taken together, our cry to be known, to be needed, to make a difference, to create, and to have loving relationships constitutes our experience of purpose. And purpose is required. Life is simply impossible without it.
Recently, late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon fell in his apartment and nearly lost his finger when he caught his wedding ring on the corner of a table as he was going down. The entire ordeal landed him in the ICU for 10 days, which gave him time to think about his life and his purpose. During his hospitalization, Fallon read Victor Frankl’s classic, Man’s Search for Meaning, which he “absolutely loved.” “I know the meaning of life,” Fallon recently said to his audience. “If anyone’s suffering at all, this is my job … this is why I’m here, I want to spread the love.”
Fallon gets it. What’s it all for? We’re here for others. Frankl says it this way:
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”