Emily Esfahani Smith

The classic example of this is Viktor Frankl, the Jewish Holocaust survivor from Vienna, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, a beautiful book.

And it's about his experiences in the concentration camps during the Holocaust.

And he writes about how the inmates in the camps had lost everything.

They'd lost their families, they'd lost their homes, their freedom.

And so understandably, a lot of them decided that there was nothing else left to live for.

But there were some people

who continued to believe that there was some purpose or meaning driving their lives, like being reunited with their children who were living, you know, elsewhere in safety.

And those who were able to hold on to meaning were more resilient in the face of suffering and even more, Frankel writes, apt to survive given the general degradations of camp life.

And we know this, you know, from the research as well that, you know,

when researchers look at what's predicting this rising tide of despair all through the world, rises in depression, loneliness, et cetera, it's not a lack of happiness in people's lives, it's a lack of meaning.

And people who have a sense of meaning in life are more resilient to suffering, do experience greater longevity.

So there's something really powerful about meaning that kind of goes deeper for us.

Yes, I'll take the example of the pandemic, because that is something, obviously, that we all went through.

It was several years long.

We saw a lot of people in major transitions losing their jobs, deciding to leave work, or suddenly being plunged into an environment where they were around their children all the time and tried to do work, just navigating a lot.

Or maybe the work that they did was not possible anymore because of what was happening.

And so that source of meaning was gone.

And so what the pandemic was basically for a lot of people was a life transition.

And we all experience life transitions.

Personally, ever since I wrote my book in 2017,