Irvin Yalom called meaninglessness the fourth ultimate concern of human existence. Why it can't be solved, and what changes when you stop trying.
Irvin Yalom, the existential psychiatrist, identified four ultimate concerns at the centre of human life: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. This episode is about the fourth, and about why the contemporary "meaning crisis" tends to misread what Yalom actually meant.
The episode works through Tolstoy's collapse at the height of his success, the structure of Yalom's four givens, the difference between Yalom and Viktor Frankl on whether meaning can be sought directly, and what Yalom called the engagement paradox: that the act of searching for meaning is part of what holds it off. It ends where the problem actually lives, with what it means to go on in the presence of the fourth given rather than to solve it.
Drawing on Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy, Tolstoy's A Confession, Frankl's logotherapy, and passing through Camus, Heidegger, and Buber.
This is a narrated essay from Fractured Self, a project on identity, meaning, and the forces that fracture the self under modern conditions. No resolution is offered, because the subject does not have one.
00:00 Tolstoy at fifty
02:31 The four givens
04:45 Meaninglessness, the fourth given
07:29 Frankl and the search for meaning
09:59 The trap of looking for meaning
12:31 Engagement as the response
16:21 Why the engagement answer gets misread
21:04 Living with the fourth given
If this is the kind of thinking that doesn't leave when the tab closes.
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