Neither Frankl, nor Mandelbrot, or Mandela have sought out their circumstances. In contrast, the stories of remarkable people teach us that meaning needs to be uncovered. They tell us that meaning needs to be found. Feeling connected to a higher purpose is according to the respondents among their top four core needs.

Our Meaning-DeficiencyĪ survey conducted by the Energy Project among 12,000 employees across a broad range of companies and industries, found that 50 percent of us lack the sense of meaning and significance at work. Yet, few other quests have preoccupied humanity as much as the search for meaning. This, in a high-performance, hyper-productivity-oriented society, where “we” trumps the “I,” can be a highly unwelcome turn of focus. Self takes center stage while Other retires backstage. We replace servitude with self-preservation, obligation with self-respect, accountability with self-assessment, contribution with self-improvement, needs-must with feel-likes and running the rat race with self-actualization. It requires us to withdraw our focus from others to self, from outside to within.

The quest for meaning, in a service-culture, strikes as being haughty and antisocial. The Quest For Meaning in a Service-culture In a world where we are hailed for putting our faith in the political system and leaders before we barely have any faith in ourselves to honor federation before we learn to respect our own individuality to choose poise over finding our passion to pledge loyalty to rules over obeying our own innate instincts to adhere to consensus over following own intuition - the quest for meaning seems like nothing but a selfish act of rebellion. You only need to imagine Seamus’ sense of pride and reaffirmed conviction that servicing another at cost to self is the right thing to do, to appreciate the audacity of meaning. Barak praised him for his “absolute faith in the country and its leaders” and his “devotion to duty and service,” and expressed that young men like Seamus were “all that anyone might hope for in a child.”

He was in a Marine Corps barracks at Camp Pendleton, Calif, heading to Iraq, when he heard his own name mentioned in Barack Obama’s electric keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. In 2004, Seamus Ahern received one of the most honorable recognitions one could ever hope for.

The audacity meaning