Nowadays, with increasing awareness of mental health and the normalization of therapy, you hear people talk about the importance of “feeling/regulating your emotions”.
Therapy language seeps into everyday life, and informs how we understand and communicate mental wellbeing (e.g. “I’m dysregulated”, “This is my boundary”, etc.). Furthermore, you might hear more people saying, “everyone should go for therapy”, as if therapy is the ultimate solution to mental health.
But what if I told you “feeling/regulating your emotions” might not result in what you’re hoping to achieve? That therapy processes, concepts, and language might harm yourself and your relationships instead?
Something Different
This particular section, you will come to see, is my process of regulating my emotions through writing in real time.
When I first began writing this article, I was extremely frustrated. I was constantly told that my writing was too “complex”, “long”, and “academic”, and it’s better if I “simplify”, “shorten”, and make it more “accessible”.
I was told that you, my readers, might already be overwhelmed and tired; you wouldn’t have the energy to process something long and complex. You probably want a quick solution.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I also dislike reading long articles. I want a quick solution, too. But in my experience, more often than not, whenever I read articles or content on psychology and mental health, I’m left feeling dissatisfied.
The articles feel overly simplified and generic, like a parrot spewing patronizing platitudes, even if they have good intentions. They lack extremely important nuances and context that practitioners themselves probably know, but likely decided to exclude because they believe it’s too “complex” for the “layman” to know.
Between “let’s make it simpler so that more laymen can understand” and “let’s make this more nuanced for people who find what’s out there too simplified”, we tend to opt for the former in writing mental health content.
But from my conversations with friends, and online sentiments of people discussing mental health, it seems that simplified content on mental health is not meeting people’s needs. Of course, sometimes doing less is more. But sometimes, doing less leads to even less.
There’s growing disillusionment with mental health advice. You hear people say “mindfulness is stupid”, “stop telling me to breathe”, and “they’re all saying the same thing. Do you think I don’t know that?”
As a counsellor, I want to give you quick solutions to alleviate your suffering as soon as possible. I really do. But I cannot, in good faith, just list down what hundreds of other therapy or psychology websites or Instagram pages or TikTok reels are telling you, and call it a day.
Breathe. Exercise. Eat and sleep well. Have a social life. Be mindful. Practice gratitude. Don’t you and I already know that?
When I think about it now, despite mental health practitioners’ genuine desire to help, how arrogant and condescending of us to immediately assume that you won’t understand what we understand (do we even truly understand in the first place?). I apologize for my arrogance and condescension. It seems like we’ve been too concerned with “over-estimating” you that in reality, we might be unfairly “underestimating” many of you.
Sure, to an extent, articles can be overly technical and complex. But also, to an extent, it seems to me that we are gatekeeping information others could actually grasp and actually want, information that is potentially life-changing.
It’s not always a good thing to try and reach “as many people as possible” because we often don’t even have an accurate sense of who those people actually are. There’s some truth to the following: To be everywhere is to be nowhere; to reach everyone is to reach no one.
As a result of trying to reach as many people as possible, which seems to be interpreted as a “layman” who is assumed to have lower capacity for complexity, we oversimplify things, ironically even for the “layman”.
That is why I’m going to write this article largely in my own style, something a little more academic and anthropological, and less brief and scientific. Something different.
Having majored in Anthropology, I gravitate towards illuminating the underlying culture on which our daily experience and worldviews are based. In other words, there is no way to truly change how we think and feel unless you’re conscious of that underlying culture.
In truth, those generic mental health advice are actually very valid and effective solutions. There is a reason why they are cited so often. But they can only be effective when you’re in a proper mindspace—when you possess a particular worldview—to receive those solutions.
You know how when you’re a kid, your parents would scold and advise you. You wouldn’t listen and you didn’t understand what they were saying. You probably thought they were spouting nonsense.
But as you grew up, you realized there was some truth to what they said. Now, at the right timing, you can actually understand their advice because you’re in the proper mindspace to hear it not merely as words but with meaning. You now have a larger worldview to process your parents’ advice.
Think of it like planting seeds. You might have the best seeds, the best technique, and you follow the instructions perfectly. But if the soil isn’t fertile—if it’s too hard and dry or lacks nutrients—then it isn’t ready to receive the seeds, and the seeds cannot grow to their full potential.
You might get better seeds, more water, and different tools. The seeds might sprout briefly, but withers quickly.
That’s because the issue isn’t about the method: it’s the soil that’s receiving.
Your mind and worldview now are the soil, and the mental health techniques and advice are the seeds. My attempt is to make the soil more fertile. If I can do that, I don’t have to teach you new techniques—the old ones will naturally fulfil their potential.
Anthropologists conduct and write ethnographies. They live in a community for a long time—often for years—and write a book on how the local community lives and experiences live. These ethnographies can be extremely technical and difficult to read, but they can also be very readable like stories. It depends on each anthropologist’s style.
I tried my best to shorten this article, but if I continue to do so, I’ll lose the nuances that I believe will bring you the change you’ve been seeking thus far.
Perhaps, this is a skills issue, that I’m not a good enough writer to distill essence. But, with my anthropological and existential leanings, I feel conflicted with the scientific way of writing that, while systematic and succinct, often obscures nuances of the human condition that I believe you need to know.
We need both ways of writing. This is my attempt to give you both. And naturally, that means the article will be longer.
This will be a long read. It will be something different from what you’ve read so far—or at least I hope so. You don’t have to read this in one sitting: take a break and return to it when you’re in the headspace to process. Since it’s long, it’ll stretch you. That might not be a bad thing.
It’s in being stretched that change occurs, just like how muscles have to be stretched, strained, and pushed to grow. If we live in comfort, nothing changes. In fact, you might deteriorate from being too comfortable, just as with pushing too hard. My goal in this article is to find a sweet spot in between, though that’s impossible because each one you are unique.
But I’ll try nonetheless because this is important to you and me. I really, really want this article to be helpful. And as I finish writing this section now, I feel a lot more at peace. Feels damn good to let it out and be authentic with you for once.
Alright, let’s get to it.
How Culture Influences the Way We Experience Emotions
Before I go on to talk about what you’re probably here for—what you can do to actually manage your emotions—it’s important that I first address the culture of therapy. I deeply believe that doing so would further broaden your capacity to deal with your emotions.
Let’s begin with something mainstream media doesn’t openly acknowledge: “Therapy” is not neutral but a particularly western idea and process.
That means whatever you see on mainstream media about pop-psychology, mental health, and emotions are not objectively “right”, the “best”, or “healthiest”, but only seen that way through a western lens. They reflect western culture’s perception of emotions, which may not reflect how other cultures look at emotions.
This is dangerous—especially given how the West has historically viewed the East as inferior and continues to do so—because we risk undermining other cultures’ and individual’s unique but equally valid ways of feeling and expressing their emotions.
So how does western psychology look at emotions? Specifically, it views emotions as a problem to be solved or an untrustworthy aspect of human nature that needs to be tamed.
Mainstream western psychology suggests that there is a “right” way to approach emotions, which includes a universal way to distinguish between “healthy” and “unhealthy” emotions.
There is an implicit value assumption that labels certain emotional states as “pathological”, something akin to a disease or illness.
The American Psychiatric Association produced the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that highly focuses on categorizing “healthy” and “unhealthy” emotional states for therapists to “treat” like a disease, such as depression and anxiety.
However, what is considered in, say, China or other Eastern countries as “healthy” emotional states may look very different from a “healthy” emotional life in the United States or other Western countries.
Dr. Wang Xuefu, a Chinese psychologist who created Zhi Mian (直面; facing forward) Therapy, a Chinese indigenous approach to psychotherapy with an integration of existentialism, found that Chinese people tend to express emotions in more subtle forms.
Those who are unfamiliar with the subtleties mistake the Chinese as people who do not experience or express emotions. I’m sure you’ve heard of this stereotype about Asians, particularly those of the older generation.
Dr. Louis Hoffman, an existential psychologist who actively works to bridge existential therapy and Chinese culture, argues that the stereotypically Western, direct manner of emotional expression is not superior to other cultural variations—they are merely different.
Dr. Laurence Kirmayer, a Canadian psychiatrist who is an expert in culture and mental health, also observed the following:
“A Nigerian man might experience a culturally distinct form of depression by describing a peppery feeling in his head. A rural Chinese farmer might speak only of shoulders or stomachaches. A man in India might talk of seme loss or a sinking heart or feeling hot. A Korean might tell you of “fire illness,” which is experienced as a burning in the gut.”
Kirmayer found that cultures differ in “explanatory models” to understand their emotional states like “depression”. Furthermore, these models and beliefs direct your attention to certain feelings, sensations, and experience, and away from others.
Cultural beliefs about causes of your emotional states tend to be self-fulfilling: you’re likely to focus on evidence that support the cause and ignore others that are contradictory.
Furthermore, Kirmayer observed that while feelings an American doctor might diagnose as “depression” and a mental disorder, other cultures view those feelings as sort of a moral signal, prompting individuals and communities to examine and resolve potential social, spiritual, or moral tension.
Applying a one-size-fits-all concept of “depression” risks obscuring the unique social meanings different cultures give to emotions.
If you enter the academia space, you’ll find several studies on how mental disorders like “depression” are not “real” but constructed realities. For example, in the 1990s, to increase acceptance and sales of antidepressants, big pharmaceutical companies marketed “depression” as the concept of “kokoro no kaze” (a cold of the soul) to Japanese society, masking a critical difference between a cold and depression, which led to a sixfold increase in sales from $14.5 billion yen in 1998 to $87 billion yen in 2006.
In sum, your cultural environment shapes how you experience, express, and cope with your emotions. There is nothing inherent about any emotion that makes it “good/bad” or “healthy/unhealthy”.
If you’ve reached this point, you might still ask: So what? How does this all relate to you?
Think back to when you were feeling certain emotions, be it alone or with others. How did you feel about feeling those emotions?
For example, when you were feeling anxious about, perhaps, not completing a certain task, or having to do something out of your comfort zone, or engaging in a confrontational conversation—how did you feel about feeling anxious?
Did you feel like you’re not supposed to? That it is “bad” to feel anxiety, that anxiety is a “dangerous” emotion, or that there’s something “wrong” with you? Or did you feel “okay” about feeling anxious, that it isn’t a problem, just something uncomfortable?
When you told a friend or family member about your sadness, did they simply respond with a “cheer up” or “things will be okay” or “don’t think about it”? When you have trouble expressing what you’re feeling to someone, did they respond with impatience and agitation, or were they patient and inviting?
Do you see emotions as dangerous and bad, or informative and helpful? Do you see emotions as something to master or control like a wild dog, or a friend who is telling you when something doesn’t align with your beliefs or when you’re not living in the way that you want to?
Where did all these ideas come from?
Here’s one of the most important things you can do in your journey to manage your emotions: Identify your “explanatory model” for your emotions.
Ask yourself the following:
- What emotions do you consider as “good/bad” or “healthy/unhealthy”?
- What emotions do you believe you’re supposed/not supposed to feel?
- If you feel certain emotions, what does it say about you and the people around you?
- Where did you learn these ideas from?
The Mechanism of Emotions
Broadly, there are two layers to an emotional experience: the first layer is the initial feeling of an emotion; the second layer that follows is how you feel about feeling that emotion.
In more technical terms, there are primary emotions—immediate instinctual responses to a stimulus—and secondary emotions, emotions you feel after primary emotions and they are usually learned responses.
Secondary emotions exert huge influence over the trajectory of your emotional experience.
Here’s a quick common example about public speaking you’ve likely experienced. On the day of a major school/work presentation, you wake up and you’re hit with the first burst of anxiety. Then, almost immediately—you won’t even realise it—you judge and interpret the initial anxiety you felt, leading to a second burst of emotion.
Depending on how you judge the first burst of anxiety, its intensity shifts, and the secondary emotion varies.
Many things are going on when you judge your anxiety; this process is shaped by your past experiences with anxiety, which involves the context, other people, and yourself.
Generally, anxiety signals that there is a potential danger in your environment. However, different people have different experiences with dealing with what they see as “threats”.
Perhaps, even though you’re feeling anxious, you might feel very passionate about what you’re presenting. Hence, public speaking isn’t seen only as a threat but also a great opportunity to share something you love. What follows your initial anxiety (primary) is excitement (secondary).
On the other hand, in the past, maybe your anxiety has always led you to stutter and lose your train of thought during presentations, causing you to break down and mess up. Since then, you began to hate and fear anxiety. Now, you think this presentation will just be a repeat of history. What follows your initial anxiety is more anxiety about your anxiety.
Or maybe you’re someone who isn’t confident in your physical appearance. You might have past experiences of being bullied. The threat isn’t so much not doing well for the presentation but other people who you believe will judge you for your appearance. What follows your initial anxiety is embarrassment.
There are unlimited potential variations to such a situation. With a supportive audience, someone who broke down from anxiety before might begin to feel confident because the situation, as well as other people, are not seen as threats anymore. Gaining experience of completing a presentation while feeling anxious gave the person more confidence about their ability to overcome anxiety.
On the other hand, a confident person who has never felt anxious for presentations suddenly didn’t do well for the first time in their life, and begins to feel anxious for their next presentation because they start to doubt their ability. They become their own threat. Anxiety becomes a threat the person is unfamiliar with, which makes them even more anxious.
Your emotional experience depends on how you interpret the situation, the emotion, other people, and yourself, all of which are formed through past experiences.
Do you see yourself as someone capable of overcoming that anxiety or someone at the mercy of it? Are other people seen as a threat, an ally, or just neutral? Is the situation seen as dire, hopeful, or just any other everyday experience?
You could experience multiple primary and secondary emotions in the immediate moment and afterwards. This doesn’t just apply to anxiety, but to any emotion.
Everyone has different relationships with different emotions. Some feel excited about anxiety while others fear feeling anxiety. Some feel amusement about embarrassment while others might feel infuriated about feeling embarrassed. Some might feel liberated about feeling angry while others might feel guilty for being angry.
What Happens When You Don’t Feel Our Feelings
Your present issue with emotions isn’t that emotions are inherently problematic—it is not—but because of your relationship with emotions.
Understandably, many of you, myself included, avoid certain emotions not simply because they are uncomfortable, but because on a deeper level we believe feeling those emotions says something—usually “negative”, “bad”, or “dangerous”—about ourselves, other people, and the situation.
Some of you might avoid feeling an emotion by listening to music and watching shows all day to drown out the scary thoughts and feelings, or you might jam pack your schedule so that you have neither the time nor energy to think and feel.
Some of you might also attempt to numb your pain through alcohol and drugs, or engage in compulsive behaviours like gambling, watching pornography, or shopping.
Finally, you might physically escape a stressful situation by literally leaving the space.
But a part of you knows that you’re just pretending. Sartre calls this bad faith, where human beings pretend to not know, and ignore available choices and actual realities.
While in the short term you might successfully avoid, numb, and escape your emotions, more often than not they resurface in different forms in the long term.
Human consciousness is highly ingenious in scheming, but more often than not enough to trick itself.
You expend a lot of energy to avoid your emotions, which would lead to restlessness and fatigue. You’re more likely to be on the edge and impatient. By disowning your emotions, you disown parts of yourself.
You might think avoidance gives you power over your emotions. But the fact that you’re expending energy to avoid them means they’ve always been in control of you—they were never out of sight even if your eyes were closed.
When you avoid emotions in efforts to reduce their significance, what you’re doing in reality is paradoxically reinforcing their significance. You
Here is a key reason why it’s important to understand your cultural beliefs about your emotions: when you feel pressure to experience your emotions in a manner deemed more “appropriate”, “right”, or “healthier” by someone or another culture, you’re likely to experience negative consequences like repression of emotions, isolation and alienation from yourself and others, and destabilizing your identity.
Why are Emotions Important
Some of you might be consumed by anxiety. Feeling emotions like excitement or joy might be scary because you think, “Even if I’m happy now, this won’t last for long. Bad situations and anxiety will always return, maybe even worse.”
Feeling intensely, whatever emotion, becomes scary. At some point, you figured it might be better to not feel much, in fear of triggering uncomfortable emotions.
People fear that if they were to let go and feel unwanted emotions they’ve been avoiding, emotions like anger, resentment, anxiety, even joy, they might lose themselves.
In reality, when there is an adequate release and expression of pent-up emotion, a natural evolution of the emotion occurs. Otherwise, no matter how hard you avoid them, your emotions’ form, including your life, remain stagnant.
Emotions tell you how you’re oriented towards yourself, others, and the world. They signal your attention to what’s important to you, to something going wrong, or assure you when all is well.
Emotions give colour and texture to life. The ups and downs, highs and lows—it’s in the oscillation between these polar experiences that makes a full and meaningful life.
It’s only possible that joy is joyful because there is a reference to emotions that are not “joyful” like anxiety, anger, or sadness. “Positive”, “comfortable”, and “wanted” emotions exist only because their opposites exist, too.
In feeling both ends, you appreciate the meaning each emotion holds, and you come to understand that you can be joyful because you can be angry, and vice versa.
In seeking to avoid unwanted emotions, you’ll suffer the fading of wanted emotions as well. When you suppress one aspect of your emotional world, you risk crippling everything else.
Suppressed emotionality leads to suppressed living.
What Can You Do
Personal, Physical, Social, and Spiritual Worlds
You might think because it’s called “mental” health that it only pertains to the mind or the psychological. But the human being is both mind and body, and for those who are spiritual, the soul.
From an existential lens, a human being exists in 4 worlds: the Personal/Psychological, Physical, Social, and Spiritual.
These 4 worlds do not operate in isolation but are always linked; changes in one world shifts the balance of the others.
Regardless of how psychologically strong and resilient you think you are, if your body is breaking down, you’re going to be on the edge and cranky.
You might have the best friends, and you eat and sleep well, but if you don’t find your life meaningful, you might still feel down.
There is no perfect balance of the 4 worlds. Every one of you somehow found ways to cope well enough when some of your worlds are compromised, which is just the reality of living life, not a defect or illness.
The point isn’t to find the perfect balance but to find what works for you. A ratio that works for someone might not work for you. The point is to be mindful of the present ratio of your 4 worlds and know what ratio works best for you.
Physical World
For some of you, physical and medical concerns might be the main cause of your psychological distress.
This is why medical doctors and mental health practitioners are adamant about having proper meals, sleep, and exercise, though we also recognize that life gets in the way sometimes.
The cause of your anxiety or depression might be long-standing malnutrition, vitamin deficiency, hormonal issues, or a medical condition. You might consider seeking a medical doctor’s advice and get blood work done.
Your physical world isn’t separate from your psychological state. Both are linked and require each other to function.
Your physical world doesn’t solely pertain to your body but to your physical environment as well. The cleanliness and vibes of your room/home. The amount of natural light that reaches your room/home. The clothes you wear. The objects you own, be it toys or electronics or that vinyl player. All these affect your state of mind about feeling safe and relaxed.
Social World
Human beings are relational beings. There is no other way about it. You’re born into the world, into a cultural context, into an environment filled with objects and other non-human beings.
At your core, you crave connection and acceptance.
When you feel emotional distress, often times what exacerbates it is feeling like nobody cares about you. You feel all alone to deal with the struggles in life.
Hence, when you’re feeling distressed, if possible, seek our relational connection, which could be individual to larger communities and humankind as a whole.
Meet a friend. The meetup doesn’t need to be you pouring your heart out. Just chilling around with friends, being in their presence, might be enough.
Consider volunteer work. In helping communities, you might feel more connected to your fellow human beings.
Or you might join online communities on music, games, sports, or any of your hobbies.
For those who don’t like human beings, you might feel more connected to non-human, living beings like animals and plants, because they can be kinder than humans.
Whoever or whatever it is, seek for connections. As relational beings, we all need some external validation.
Finally, connect with yourself. There are different parts of you. Acquaint yourself with them. Try to understand why certain parts of you are feeling anxious, depressed, disappointment, joy, excitement, anger. Be there for them. Celebrate with them. Chill with them. Learn to be with yourself. After all, sometimes you only have yourself as company, and in those times, you might be a better company than those around you.
Personal/Psychological World
I won’t go into detail about what you can do for mindfulness or meditation. I’ll link some guides here and instead focus on how you do them, and the deeper meaning behind those practices.
I can already hear some of you groaning, “not again with this nonsense”. But there must be something effective about them that they are so often recommended.
I’ll repeat what I said earlier: it isn’t just what you do, but also how you do it that ensures maximum effectiveness.
At the core of mindfulness, its purpose is to change your consciousness and your relationship with thoughts and emotions at the most fundamental level. That means, if practiced properly for enough time, it can lead to the long-term, stable change you’ve been seeking for, not the short-term, quick fixes that inevitably fail.
With fundamental change, it takes time, though there are people who experience rather quick results from practicing mindfulness and mediation.
In our everyday lives, not only do we live on autopilot mode, we’re speeding, too. Living in a culture of productivity, efficiency, and perfectionism, we want quick solutions and a zero discomfort state.
However, in life, experiencing zero discomfort is impossible and not necessarily something healthy.
In reality, what likely troubles you isn’t the discomfort itself, but your personal beliefs about what the discomfort means. Do you see the discomfort as something “bad”? Does feeling discomfort mean you’re not capable of overcoming it, or does it say you’re “defective” and “incapable”?
The moment you feel discomfort, your mind immediately jumps to those beliefs as though they are literal reality, especially given how we live on autopilot mode, speeding through life without slowing down to inspect how our consciousness actually works.
You can change how your mind works, only if you give it time.
Between emotional triggers and reactions lies the space where your mind gives meaning to the triggers. Essentially, mindfulness and mediation attempt to enlarge that space for you to inspect the nature of the trigger and to change its meaning.
By inviting you to slow down, mindfulness allows you to see your thoughts and emotions for what they are, not what you believe them to be.
That means whenever you feel, say, anxiety or sadness, you don’t immediately label the anxiety or sadness as “good/right” or “bad/wrong”, but you experience them as just “anxiety” and “sadness”.
Mindfulness practices aims to develop a new part of your consciousness—the “observing self”—that zooms out and observes your thoughts and emotions instead of being stuck to them.
Right now, you might take your thoughts and emotions literally, as if you are them, like you’re a character in a tv show. But with time, as you develop your “observing self”, you become the audience watching a fictional tv show instead of being a character as if the tv show is reality.
But how you engage in mindfulness is equally, if not more, important as what you do. If you frantically and forcefully shift your attention away from your thoughts and emotions, and the more you want to get rid of them, it’s likely that your discomfort would remain or worsen.
What you’re doing is reinforcing the idea that those thoughts and emotions are dangerous, which would only make them worse.
Gently allow difficult thoughts and emotions to emerge and go at their own time. To gently allow doesn’t mean you have to like them. It just means accepting them for what they are. Not tolerate or endure—allow and accept.
You gently observe your thoughts and emotions, not engage in obsessive surveillance.
At the beginning, this would be a counterintuitive and contradicting process. Mindfulness tells you not to focus on getting rid of your distress, but you’re engaging in mindfulness precisely because you want to alleviate emotional distress.
At the beginning, you’ll be frustrated. You might practice mindfulness forcefully. That’s okay. Just gently try to be gentle again.
It wouldn’t make logical sense now because you’re developing a new part of your consciousness that is very different from your current mind. Keep at it.
Eventually, your focus shifts from wanting to get rid of emotional distress to a genuine curiosity about the nature of your emotions. When emotional distress arises, instead of panicking, you see it as simply a natural process of life, like waking up, brushing your teeth, eating breakfast.
When you reach that point, you would have developed the “observing self” in your consciousness. Mindfulness is no longer a practice you engage in to reduce emotional distress.
Instead, mindfulness is a default psychological state in which you view emotional distress neutrally. You just let it flow through you at its own time while you carry on with life.
You become comfortable with discomfort.
Spiritual World
The spiritual world pertains to your sense of meaning about your life. Meaning not simply that your life makes sense and feels coherent, but meaning in that you feel that your life is worthwhile.
According to Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who was a holocaust survivor and founded Logotherapy, meaning can be found in 3 ways: 1) creating something or accomplishing a task, 2) experiencing something or encountering someone, and 3) by the attitude you take towards unavoidable suffering.
Put another way, meaning can be found in creating something, in living with gratitude and loving someone, and in courage through suffering.
The modern world has stunted your innate childlike creativity. Growing up, many of you were constantly told what is right/good and wrong/bad, how you should live.
At some point, you stop being creative. You just listened to what people tell you. Being creative feels risky and scary.
But it is in creation that we feel alive, because in creating something, we bring something within us alive. Write that song or a poem. Bake a cake. Sing that song. Doodle. Plant that plant. Shoot that video.
The point isn’t to create something good. It’s creation for its own sake. There is something in you that’s yearning to be articulated. Through creation, you are bringing something inside you to life. It’s a joyful endeavor.
Given how much our creative abilities have atrophied, it will take time to rebuild that capacity. But keep at it.
There is something about love and gratitude that transcends the material worries you have about life. It’s in love and gratitude that you come to see beyond yourself, which then allows you to appreciate and serve others, rather than fixate on competition and on yourself.
In loving and gratitude, you dissolve the ego. You see more humanity in others, and in turn, you become more human yourself. And it is in the appreciation of this sense of unity and relationality with your fellow human beings that you experience a sense of meaning.
Finally, in the face of immense suffering, meaning can be found. That is what Frankl observed from his fellow prisoners during their time in the concentration camps.
He found that humans are ready to suffer if suffering has a meaning. That if you have a good enough reason, you can overcome almost any suffering.
Meaning is found shifting your attitude towards courage to suffer. In doing so, you find meaning in overcoming challenges and who you become through suffering.
Importantly, suffering is not necessary to find meaning. My point here is that meaning is possible amidst suffering. If you can avoid suffering, please do so. As Frankl said, “To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic”.
While I have laid out some ways to find meaning, to be sure there is no formula to this. There is no general “meaning of life” out there. There is only the specific meaning of your life at a given moment.
You are not the one asking life what its meaning is. You must recognize that it is actually you who is asked by life about your personal meaning. And only you can answer for our own life.
Sure, it can be daunting to hold such a heavy responsibility. But perhaps it is in living as authentically as you can that you find meaning in your own life.
About the Author
Hello, I’m Gary: A recent Anthropology graduate from Yale-NUS College, and an incoming student pursuing a Masters in Counselling. If I were to describe myself in a sentence — which is impossible, but I’ll try nonetheless — I’m currently someone who’s in a perpetual existential mood!
I invite you to join me on my journey of writing to make sense of that mood, myself, and this crazy, complex world. I’m not following a fixed structure, so I don’t know what I would come out of this conviction — I guess we can only find out as I write!
