Meaning and purpose.

Those two, big, juicy, forcible words should nag the bejesus out of us Homo sapiens long before our malfunctioning mushy brains start thinking that pouring muesli into the front of your undies is a splendid way to begin the day.

However, humans tend to ignore that irritating, furious ranting inside their noggins with a tolerable degree of folly. It is not a fundamental failure to dutifully dismiss any search for meaning and purpose. It’s just ill-advised.

And if we stubbornly refuse to seek out these two philosophical pillars there is a good chance you’ll morph into a vapid imbecile that gets their high jinx by watching folk imitate goats on TikTok. 

Feel free to rebuff what I’m saying but that awkward desolate feeling that comes and goes during those stages of agonising boredom is part of your genetics.

Our DNA is designed for human enhancement so our genes are urging us to overcome the unending, feckless futility of our existence.

A few minutes after our first ancestor scampered down from a tree and felt the dirt between their hairy crooked, toes, they were jolted upright by a random, cerebral spark that trigged our first ever thought: What the hell are we doing here?

For more than two millennia thinkers have been haplessly urging us humans to pursue some meaning beyond the humdrum buzz of our daily lives.

I have little authority to give some pithy and warm explanation on the topic other than being heavily influenced and swayed by what I’ve read.

There are a lot of brilliant writers blabbering on about the subject but no one has illustrated the point with more self-destructive clarity than Viktor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning.

The Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist was confronted with relentless grotesque brutality at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz. It’s an unpleasant and harrowing read but Frankl’s resilience and self-belief are illuminating and inspiring.

I was scratching out some half-arsed, pseudo-intellectual wank about meaning and purpose when Frankl’s name popped up in my social feeds and then texts between friends days later.

Those moments of synchronicity the father of analytical psychology Carl Jung warns us not to ignore. 

“Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer,” he wrote.

I’d never read Frankl but one passage from his book has been quoted by numerous writers when wanting to examine how that delightful, wretched thing called meaning can be found in almost any situation.

Frankl is on a train bound for another death camp when the Jewish prisoners erupt with spontaneous joy as the caboose veers away from the camp with the chimneys.

Their chances of survival just went up a little. There is no crisp or upbeat way to put it.

It’s a story worth retelling again and again.

“And, when they arrived at the new camp to learn it had no oven, no crematorium and no gas chamber,” Frankl wrote. “We laughed and cracked jokes in spite of, and during, all we had to go through in the next few hours.”

There have been several books penned by people displaying reckless bravery and courage despite the abhorrent suffering in concentration camps.

I read Primo Levi’s If This is Man in my early 30s and I may be going out on a ledge here, but it’s possibly one of the most important books ever written.

It should be compulsory in Year 12 English classes, but I fear a generation of youths would end up raising giant guinea pigs in South America. 

The book left such a deep imprint on me that I felt compelled to anonymously write the bleakest Levi quotes I could find, on whiteboards where I was working at the time. Unsurprisingly, it immediately depressed anyone that read them.

I stopped when a recently divorced co-worker, shaking his nicotine-stained fist in fury, loudly declared he was going to stab the Levi-writing bandit in the eye with a spoon if he happened to meet them.

Levi doesn’t want us to forget. Frankl implores us to find some meaning.

Frankl wrote the book in nine days after finally making his way home to Vienna only to find out the Nazis had murdered his pregnant wife, his brother, both his parents and most of his friends.

Originally he didn’t want his name on the book.

Out of Frankl’s endless suffering, he developed the psychological theory called, logotherapy. It teaches us to not only thrive and survive in the grimmest of circumstances but also to discover our meaning in life.

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked,” Frankl wrote. “In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life, he can only respond by being responsible.”

If we can’t find any meaning we are left with an existential vacuum.

We are not expected to endure the horrors and unimaginable trauma of Frankl to fill the void that may lurk inside us. He also explores what he dubs the “Sunday neurosis”. The gloominess that envelopes folk around mid-afternoon as they remember how empty and meaningless their life is without work.

There is even the example of the frightening aftermath that awaits those people whose identity is solely wrapped up in their work.

They’re recognisable in the workplace. The ungracefully ageing, bad joke teller who is fascinatingly unbalanced. Let’s call him Harold.

Harold confuses even the bluntest of greetings as a chance to launch into a well-orchestrated, dumb as fuck joke, that he’s told every person on his floor.

It would make an interesting premise for a sci-fi novel where people are instantly evaporated after telling the same gag twice in one day. 

That’s why the retirement age is 65 to save office workers around Australia the daily torture of working 15 inches away from a guy who has recorded every episode of Hey Hey It’s Saturday.

Then one day Harold hangs up the boots, with one final piss up down the pub, before juggling some $80 bottle of scotch and a giant card in the back of an Uber.

After a few cheery, hopeful days, a strange, ever-mounting sense of dread starts to grip him.

A week later, he hits peak despair when suddenly seized by an ugly realisation the only joy in his life was pondering whether to purchase a three-way ladder after watching an info commercial on some bland, mid-morning talk show.  

That’s some serious, heavy-duty private agony and I doubt there is a machine powerful enough on the planet to pluck Harold from that pit of sorrow.

So let’s not lead an ordinary, fragile, purposeless existence like Harold.

Frankl argues you can’t avoid suffering like good old Harold but we can fundamentally change our attitude towards it.

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose,” he wrote.

“We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly.”

Or we can just be oblivious to everything and eventually be content filling up our undies with muesli. It’s up to you.