Terrestrial meaning, on the other hand, offers an answer to the question: what is the meaning of my life? (Leave a comment below this article if you feel like expressing your beliefs. Everything else is comforting make-belief.
I say that the ‘pattern’ we fit in is nature. If there was such a thing as a grand design, the only meaning I would likely experience in a world like that would be from directly and passionately fighting its sadism. That, to me, is the definition of cruelty. But don’t we have enough to suffer from our consciousness of the inevitability of our own impending death? Cosmic meaning suggests that if there was some sort of thought behind our messy human situation, maybe it would feel lighter. The paradoxical thing is that a grand design seems to offer people comfort.
In his book Existential Psychotherapy (1980), Yalom introduced cosmic and terrestrial meaning.Ĭosmic meaning concerns itself with “ whether life, in general, fits into some overall coherent pattern.” According to Yalom, cosmic meaning implies religious or spiritual connotations because it sees meaning as part of a grand scheme, or, a bigger picture superior to that of the individual. Philosophers, psychotherapists, and researchers have been dealing with this question for millennia and have identified different kinds of meaning. Later in this article, you will discover why that is not the right question either, but it suffices for now. Thus, to avoid confusion, a clearer version of these questions is: “ What is life’s relevance, significance, or value?” The meaning we are focused on when discussing the meaning of life is its ‘relevance, significance or value’. I’ll be a doll and stick to English for now. (So does the Dutch language, by the way). Confused yet? Good.Īs Leontiev suggested, German and Russian are more convenient languages to use when we talk about meaning, because they have different words for different kinds of meaning. It simply means different things and those different things can mean different things as well. That is, we have to make sure that we are on the same page.įirst of all, the word ‘meaning’ in English is incredibly confusing. To dive into the concept of the meaning (of life), we have to deal with semantics first. Living Meaning, Personal Meaning & Life Activity.These creative, science-based exercises will help you learn more about your values, motivations, and goals and will give you the tools to inspire a sense of meaning in the lives of your clients, students, or employees.
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So far, it has already done a remarkable job however, it is a gross understatement to claim that we are still in the early stages of our ‘will to meaning.’īefore trying to determine what an answer to this question might look like (such as 42), and even before coming up with a better question to ask, let us decide what ‘meaning’ means.īefore you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Meaning and Valued Living Exercises for free. In response to this observation, I would like to propose that the field of positive psychology is, more than any other field, responsible for dealing with all matters related to meaning. And it is by no means obvious whether these questions are answerable at all neither do we know with any certainty into which area of expertise the responsibility for answering these questions falls. The question of meaning is not really one question but actually represents a cipher for a vast number of further questions. If you have ever wondered about meaning, you are not alone in that quest for answers.
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