Why live?
Much needed antidotes to depression
Dear Solution-aries,
Thank you for your patience! I took a month off newsletter writing and also off reporting because I’m working on a new book. My publisher asked me to write a book about… no less than the meaning of life. I know, I was shocked, too! As if I knew the answer!
Well, I’m getting some help though. My German publisher, O. W. Barth, has been the go-to publisher for all things wisdom. From Thich Nhat Hanh to Jon Kabat-Zinn, from Tara Brach to Joan Halifax, from B. K. S. Iyengar to Mooji, O. W. Barth has published all these pioneers of yoga, meditation, and mindfulness.
Because the publisher – who also published the German translations of Dakini Power and Bouncing Forward – is celebrating their 100th anniversary next year, they are envisioning a book with 108 quotes from their most beloved authors, accompanied by essays from yours truly.
Immersing myself in these works of wisdom is eye-opening. I realized how much I had lost myself in the daily tug-of-war between invoices and insights, mindlessness and mindfulness.
I picked up my daily mindfulness meditation again, and instead of turning on my cell phone first thing in the morning, I now turn on my mind first.
When I wrote Bouncing Forward, I found a study that showed forty percent of Americans say they do not have a purpose in life.[i] I find this number startling. Not having a purpose in life has a direct impact on our wellbeing, our health, even our life expectancy.[ii] Researchers found that people who see purpose in their life live several years longer than others. If we don’t know what we’re here for, what are we doing here?
“The purpose of life is to give life a purpose,” said psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who survived Auschwitz und wrote the world bestseller Man’s Search for Meaning. He famously realized. “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
And yet, right now, 30 percent of teenagers in the U.S. are struggling with depression and meaninglessness. Nearly a third say they have contemplated suicide. I recently edited a longform feature about suicide prevention for Rotary International Magazine and wish we would talk more about finding our life’s purpose in schools and other common places, so that we supported each other more by asking some of the deeper questions.
“What is my purpose on this planet? This is a question we should ask ourselves regularly,” physician and mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn says. “Otherwise it could happen that we fulfill someone else’s work and don’t even notice it.”
And in the same book, Full Catastrophe Living, he writes, “Whether you prefer drugs or meditation, alcohol or the Club Mediterranee, whether you get a divorce or quit your job – none of them is conducive to your growth unless you look at the present situation clearly, with complete openness and full awareness. You have to be able to accept that life yourself is your teacher. This means to work with the current situation, with what is here and now.”
I like that he asks about purpose rather than meaning because the two are connected but not exactly the same.
Beloved late Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh expressed it even more simply:
“We should live deeply so the time here doesn’t go to waste. Your purpose is to be yourself. You don't have to run anywhere to become someone else. You are wonderful just as you are.”
When I recently asked the two sons of a friend what they were planning to do after graduation, they both said in unison: To make as much money as possible as soon as possible.
I smiled and didn’t quite know how to contradict them without sounding rude. But I’m convinced there’s a huge difference between temporary happiness (when our goals or needs are briefly met) and true purpose, finding and fulfilling one’s life’s purpose. I believe that’s reason enough to contemplate the question.
A student once asked Frankl to express the meaning of his own life in one sentence. Frankl wrote down his response and asked his students to guess what he had written. After some moments of quiet reflection, a student surprised Frankl by saying, “The meaning of life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.”
“That was it, exactly,” Frankl said. “Those are the very words I had written.”[iii]
With love,
Michaela
[i] According to the 2008 survey of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Rosemarie Kobau et al., “Well-Being Assessment: An Evaluation of Well-Being Scales for Public Health and Population Estimates of Well-Being among US Adults,” Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being 2 (2010): 272-297.
[ii] A life purpose seems to serve as a buffer against stress and even decreases mortality risk. People with a purpose outlive their peers in significant numbers (fifteen percent). For the protective effect it did not really matter how the subjects defined their life purpose, whether it was making their family happy, creating art, or contributing to social change. Patrick L. Hill and Nicholas A. Turiano, “Purpose in Life as a Predictor of Mortality Across Adulthood,” Psychological Science 25, (2014):1482-1486.
[iii] The episode is quoted after William J. Winslade, Afterword to Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, 164-165.