Meaning vs. Distraction
Why Viktor Frankl Still Saves Souls in 2025
In an age obsessed with optimisation - better habits, better skin, better productivity, better everything - it seems almost radical to talk about meaning.
Happiness is the currency our culture worships.
Dopamine is the god we keep feeding.
And still, everyone is quietly falling apart.
I see it every day in my therapy room: high-functioning, high-achieving, highly-lost people who have everything except a reason to wake up thrilled by their own existence. They are not depressed - not exactly. They are directionless. Their lives are full, but they are not filled.
Viktor Frankl, writing from inside a concentration camp, understood something we have forgotten:
Happiness isn’t something you chase.
It’s a side-effect of a meaningful life.
Our modern world has flipped this.
We chase happiness and wonder why we feel empty.
We run from suffering and wonder why we feel anxious.
We plaster meaning with distraction - sex, success, intensity, late-night scrolling, aesthetic spirituality, curated identities - and wonder why nothing lands.
Meaning is found in three places:
Frankl said meaning is discovered in:
what you created
who you love
and how you suffer
Notice he didn’t include happiness, ease, or comfort.
He didn’t mention “alignment,” “manifestation,” or “your dream self.”
He wasn’t interested in dopamine highs.
He was interested in depth - in the person hardship forces you to become.
Suffering isn’t a glitch - it’s a requirement
In the therapy room, the clients who grow the most aren’t the ones who escape pain quickest.
They are the ones who let suffering carve them into someone wiser.
But most of us don’t suffer, in fact we do our best to avoid it.
We numb, distract, escape, self-analyse, reinvent, spiritual-bypass, dopamine-chase, or perform.
This is especially true for those raised on stoicism without soul, discipline without introspection and achievement without identity. These individuals can survive anything except stillness. Confrontation with self is their wilderness.
Meaning breaks the addiction cycle
Without meaning, people become anxious not because life is hard but because life feels directionless.
Meaning gives suffering shape.
Distraction gives suffering volume.
The modern problem is not pain, the modern problem is emptiness
People aren’t burning out because they work too hard.
They’re burning out because their lives feel spiritually anaemic.
They chase intensity because they cannot tolerate silence.
They chase pleasure because they cannot sit with themselves.
They chase “happiness” because they never learned how to build a life worth being inside.
Meaning is not glamorous. It asks something of you
It demands responsibility, self-confrontation, emotional maturity, discipline, and devotion to something larger than convenience.
It is the opposite of the glossy, empty, curated world so many cling to.
Meaning requires:
choosing courage over ego
choosing depth over distraction
choosing creation over consumption
choosing responsibility over avoidance
choosing love that changes you, not love that flatters you
Meaning asks:
Who will you become when life stops giving you what you want and starts giving you what is true?
A meaningful life is not defined by what you have
It’s defined by who you choose to be.
And the hardest part?
Meaning is not always pleasant.
But it is always honest.
It forces you to face your wounds, your desires, your contradictions, your avoidance, your longing, your failures, your patterns, your defences, your childhood ghosts, and the parts of yourself you’ve curated away.
Meaning is intimate.
Meaning is brutal.
Meaning is the thing that awakens the part of you you’ve been numbing for years.
Happiness is a mood, but meaning is a homecoming.