I’m just not feeling “it” today.  In fact, I’m feeling pretty low.  Maybe it’s the weather, or possibly giving up that hour of sleep last night, after staying up a little too late to finish that Netflix series.  It could be a little “Sunday Neurosis” as Frankl would call it – although, I usually look forward to the work week and meeting with people.

Or maybe I’m just grumpy today.

Whatever the cause, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to write you anything uplifting yet original, so I turned to my bookshelf and grabbed the first book that caught my attention.  Ironically, perhaps as a reflection of where my head is at, I pulled out Frankl’s “The Feeling of Meaningless: A challenge to psychotherapy and philosophy” and found this:

“Our industrialized society is out to satisfy all needs, and our consumer society is even out to create needs in order to satisfy them: but the most human of all need – the need to see a meaning in one’s life – remains unsatisfied.  People may have enough to live by; but more often than not they do not have anything to live for.” (p.203)

Followed by a few pages later:

“But man needs not only meaning but also something else: he needs the example and model of people who have fulfilled the meaning of their lives, or at least are on the way to do so.  And this is precisely the moment at which the issue of the family comes in.  For I regard the family as a lifelong opportunity to watch and witness what it means to fulfill meaning in life by living for others, nay, by living for each other; the family, indeed, is an arena where mutual self-transcendence is enacted!” (p. 205)

Life was feeling kind of meaningless for a while.  A little gray and dreary.  But there are some solid answers here.

I think I’ll go spend some time with my family, see if I can’t be a little less grumpy today.

Do you find this kind of information helpful?  Interested in learning more about the work of Viktor Frankl and the theories of Logotherapy?  Check out the my new course The Meaning Project: Logotherapy and the Psychology of Meaning.