Chapter: Healthy, Wealthy, Wise, and. . . . (Part Two)

The fourth sphere of the transformation business

One more

There’s one more sphere of transformation that goes beyond Ben Franklin’s centuries-old observation: purpose & meaning.

It’s very clear that these are enormous factors in today’s world. People desire to have meaning in their lives, to live lives of purpose. It is often in fulfilling one’s purpose that meaning is established. It is perhaps the most important aspect of our selves.

The late psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl taught us all this in his seminal book Man’s Search for Meaning.[xii] Basically doing his own sociological study while in several concentration camps during World War II, including Auschwitz, Frankl established that the primary determination of which Jews survived concentration camps and which did not was whether or not they could find meaning in their lives, even in the most depraved of situations imaginable. He further argued that meaning was a, if not the, central determinant of mental wellbeing.

Viktor Frankl showed that meaning is in fact an essential, basic, low-order need for us as human beings.

Most readers will be familiar with Dr. Abraham Maslow’s famous “Hierarchy of Needs” (even though Maslow himself never presented it as a hierarchy, and many object to that representation of it). The highest-order need is self-actualization, which Maslow wrote “might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming”.[xiii] In other words, self-actualization is all about transformation. The lowest-order need is physiological, particularly the body’s need to maintain itself through food and water, and after that comes safety, then love, and after that esteem, before reaching the level of self-actualization.[xiv] (You will find many variations in the wording and number of these in any search on the Internet, many of which include purpose & meaning under self-actualization.[xv]) According to the theory, the lower-order needs must be progressively met before the higher-order needs can be sought.