Vic Dalfonzo @vicdalfonzo - Twitter Profile

Viktor Frankl—a Holocaust survivor who wrote the influential Man’s Search for Meaning—his approach starts by inverting the original question: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.” In other words, put aside your need to find a formula for your own gratification and instead see the world’s need for you to find meaning—so that you can do more with your life and benefit the world. In that spirit of service, Frankl put forward three practical ways of discovering meaning: •Create something or accomplish a significant task—you will make meaning simply in the process of striving for an accomplishment. •Experience something fully or love someone deeply—stop thinking about yourself and dive into an external experience or a relationship with another person. •Adopt an attitude of strength and courage toward unavoidable suffering—resolve to learn from your pain. One last point I’d make is that having meaning in life can protect you to a degree when suffering inevitably comes your way. A theme that emerges throughout Haidt’s work is a critique of “safetyism,” the belief that safety is a sacred value, and of the trend among parents and schools to elevate this value above others. Safetyism, in his analysis, is a direct consequence of a decline in people’s sense of life’s meaning, because meaning makes sense of suffering—so if you lack meaning to help you cope with suffering, then safetyism is the reflexive response, to try to provide a shield against suffering. In other words, when pain has no seeming purpose, the only logical course of action is to fight against it. In a doomed effort to forestall suffering, we protect our kids from conflict, danger, and anything that might offend or alarm them. This strategy has proven catastrophic for happiness: It leaves young people ill-prepared for the inevitable threats and challenges that everyone has to face, and for the suffering that is impossible to avoid in our highly complex world. The only reliable way to travel through that world with courage and hope is to do the work to find meaning, and encourage those we love to do so as well.

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vicdalfonzo retweeted

Buitengebieden

@buitengebieden

almost 2 years ago

Feliz Navidad! 🎶

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Robert P. George

@McCormickProf

almost 2 years ago

No matter how the election turns out, please let us all here and now resolve to heed the words of Lincoln--words as timely today as when he uttered them: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

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