Writing in the Guardian, an American psychotherapist laments that he sees many male clients who suffer from what he diagnoses as unresolved grief. He traces it to this cause: “When a man finally reaches the future he has spent years imagining and it fails to satisfy him, disappointment can harden into bitterness.” Curiously, he says he addresses these feelings by “turning towards this grief and exploring it with self-compassion”.
■ That much may be all well and good, but it seems oddly incomplete. Whether it’s really “grief” or not, the sensation of ennui isn’t anything new (Merriam-Webster cites the word itself all the way back to 1732). Surely some people really do need to be taught to show self-compassion, but there’s something much larger missing from the story.
■ If the painful sensation really comes from a sense of underfulfillment, then the solution probably lies in a perspective voiced by Viktor Frankl: “The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.”
■ Lots of people can feel happy, at least in a passing sense, when surrounded by material trappings. (Who can be grumpy while riding a jet ski?) But fulfillment is a different sensation, much bigger and more durable than fleeting happiness, and it comes from doing things that are meaningful and worthwhile.
■ That’s a lesson we should try to teach people as early as possible in life: Not in the sense that they can only be happy by subsuming themselves to the will of a larger group (because that would be untrue), but in the sense that material considerations alone are usually incomplete for creating a really well-rounded sense of satisfaction in life.
■ Everyone does better with a sense of purpose, and it’s really hard to discover a purpose that doesn’t contain at least some element of love or service to others. People could quite literally save a fortune on therapy sessions later by adopting a quest for meaning much sooner.