Do we need meaning?

Do we need to find meaning facing COVID-19? When faced with a possible life-threatening experience, psychologist Carla Willig finds this difficult, arguing that in times of trouble we can live with senselessness.

In Willig’s article on her cancer diagnosis, she quotes Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl (1962), who argued that meaning is essential for life. But Willig finds this difficult, saying that trying to make meaning involved her "whole body in the struggle against the black hole of meaningless" (p. 183).

In her search for meaning, she finds a ‘serviceable’ narrative in fatalism by drawing on Heidegger’s philosophy that we are thrown into this world “and we find ourselves in a position of having to act, make choices and take responsibility in a situation not of our choosing” (p.182). Willig finds that “the realisation that I could choose to accept, to stay with, this situation rather than having to find ways of escaping from it, relieved my anxiety greatly” (p. 184).

But after her cancer is treated, she develops a new perspective, asking do “attempts to find meaning ... interfere with accepting that life is, and always will be, uncertain, unpredictable and (to a large extent) uncontrollable. Trying to make sense of the senseless should not prevent us from living with and in spite of it” (p. 188).