Man 39;s Search For Meaning Book
Amatista Sheeley
We investigate how perceived meaning influences labor supply. In a laboratory setting, we manipulate the perceived meaning of simple, repetitive tasks and find a strong influence on subjects' labor supply. Despite the fact that the wage and the task are identical across the conditions in each experiment, subjects in the less meaningful conditions exhibit reservation wages that are consistently much higher than the subjects in the more meaningful conditions. The result replicates across different types of tasks. Moreover, in the more meaningful conditions, subjects' productivity influences labor supply more strongly. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Irrationally Yours, Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality,The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, the movie Dishonesty and the card game Irrational Game are my attempt to take my research findings and describe them in non academic terms, so that more people will learn about this type of research, discover the excitement of behavioral economics, and possibly use some of the insights to enrich their own lives.
The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:
The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.
Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.
The first unit contains harrowing details of mental and physical torture suffered by those condemned to concentration camps. Amidst all traumatic experiences, Frankl ably portrays the endurance of man through which he either survived the ordeal or made peace with his circumstances. Intense cruelty of the environment around them made prisoners either volatile or more attentive to beauty of art and nature.
Faith, love and beauty helped these prisoners persevere through the harshest of conditions in which hunger, death, filth and misery were abound. Through many poetic instances of encounters with nature and irony, Frankl illustrates human will and fortitude in face of extreme brutality. He explicates on the importance of free-will and choice in an age where fate and predestination have been given a final say in all matters. He thoroughly charges against the concept of nihilism with the example of his own life and survival.
Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become
The first derivation of the word is that Muselmann is a distortion of the word Muschelmann which implies the image of a man crouched or folded like in a shell. Prisoners in the concentration camp were often too cold and weak to move around. Having given up on living and already dying of malnutrition and overwork, they would hunker on the ground. From afar, they looked like kneeling in prayer-position, assuming a similar posture to that of a Muslim praying.
He underlines the importance of experience being as valuable as achieving some substantial or incorporeal notion. The external world around us lays stress on achievement while our inner world relies on a myriad of experiences through which we fashion our decisions and mould our lives. This conflict can be resolved through therapeutic practices which stress upon the value of experiences in order to help in our search for meaning.
I borrowed the headline from Viktor Frankl, who wrote one of my favourite books. Reading Man's Search for Meaning fueled my curiosity and created many questions about humanity, specifically how it related to the Holocaust. I have since read a few books about it in an emotive and intense attempt to understand and learn something.
I started with that because connection has been at the top of my mind lately. I have been feeling a great desire for connection lately, but I don't want it to be frivolous or fleeting; I want it to mean something.
This past Saturday, my little sister (expecting her first kiddo any day now) and her husband had dinner at our place. During the evening, they asked Jeanne & I whether we'd be guardians for their son should anything happen to them. They said they admire our parenting and the kids we are raising. Not even religious beliefs (I'm not and consider myself a humanist) derailed the conversation or sentiment. Incredibly warm fuzzies were had all around. Maybe "connection" is easier with family, but it's also sometimes hard due to historical issues (irrespective of whether they are relevant). This was such a meaningful conversation, though, and I went to bed with a happy heart.
On Sunday morning, I woke up at 5 am to watch the UFC fight between Sean Strickland and Dricus du Plessis. A key point to note here is that I have never watched a UFC fight, but Dricus du Plessis is South African, and the hype around the fight had even reached me. Dricus won, and this scene from his post-fight celebration is electric.
I'll quickly translate what Dricus said into my own interpretation, too. He said, "Now they know what we know." He alludes to a perception that South Africa - and thus South Africans - are underdogs. But we're built differently (in our opinion), and we can achieve great things. There is a general sense that we - as a "small" country, need to prove ourselves to gain respect. Dricus did that by being the first African to be a UFC champion.
In this context, I am another South African watching a fight on my TV. But seeing how much this means to Dricus and how he connects with a whole nation (or an idea thereof) makes it impossible not to be swept up in this patriotic elation. You can draw the lines as you please, but it is hard not to connect with this shared emotion. I am part of that merely because I was born in South Africa.
I subsequently channelled all of that energy into a 12km run, during which I was absolutely bouncing. This is significant because I had knee surgery in November and only started running again a few weeks ago.
I want to try connecting that sentiment and experience with where I am professionally today, too. I suspect that many of my readers at least first followed me because of my perceived professional success.
After Cogsy didn't achieve the outcome we had aspired to achieve last year (more on this soon), some soul-searching helped me realise that I didn't want to build something from scratch in this season of life. Instead, what was clear to me is that I wanted to do meaningful and impactful work.
At the start of the year, I joined Automattic as "Head of WooNew." My primary focus is leading initiatives for first-time entrepreneurs, including projects related to Woo, which I co-founded back in 2007 (and left 10 years ago).
I'm typing this newsletter from New York, where I am attending a leadership offsite. One of the things that I love most about New York is all of the walking and thinking that I do here. As I walked around town today, it dawned on me that during my years building Woo, I truly felt connected to something much greater than myself or what we were building. We were one cog in a much bigger push to democratise publishing and commerce.
It's also interesting because so much of the world of open source shaped how I think as an entrepreneur and human. It was also something that I was initially quite reluctant to explore or accept. I remember Matt Mullenweg (my new boss) arriving on a boat (one of those startup'y, hackathon-something cruise ships) in Cape Town in 2010/11 and pinging me for a beer. The venue was subpar (way too loud, in my opinion), but our conversation influenced so much of what was to follow for me.
Eleven months after he was liberated from the Nazi concentration camps, Viktor E. Frankl held a series of public lectures in Vienna. The psychiatrist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience, and the importance of embracing life even in the face of great adversity. Published here for the very first time in English, Frankl's words resonate as strongly today as they did in 1946. He offers an insightful exploration of the maxim "Live as if you were living for the second time".
Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl is known as the founder of logotherapy, a mode of psychotherapy based on human's motivation to search for meaning in his life. The author discusses his ideas in the context of other prominent psychotherapies and describes the techniques he uses with his patients to combat the "existential vacuum".
One of the most significant books ever written by a head of state, the Meditations are a collection of philosophical thoughts by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180 ce). Covering issues such as duty, forgiveness, brotherhood, strength in adversity and the best way to approach life and death, the Meditations have inspired thinkers, poets and politicians since their first publication more than 500 years ago. Today, the book stands as one of the great guides and companions - a cornerstone of Western thought.
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