It's Not Just You. Everything Really Does Feel Kind of Meaningless Right Now.

Sign Up for Session Six of The Peak Notions Book Club. We're discussing Man's Search For Meaning

The book club is a paid subscriber perk. To thank you for your support and patience as I got session six together! Just for today, I’m offering 20% off paid annual subscriptions. A paid subscription gets you access to audio content and bonus writing, the Peak Notions archive containing hundreds of written and audio articles, the weekly app chat and the Book Club sign-up sheet (session six linked below). Thank you for supporting what I do and making Peak Notions a reality.

---

Photo by Pop & Zebra on Unsplash

---

I was this close — truly, this close, to choosing The Gulag Archipelago for our upcoming session of Peak Notions Book Club. And then… I just couldn’t do it. It’s an excellent book but not the right one for us just now. We may be heading jauntily toward summer here in Australia but I returned from Europe at the beginning of this month, where the narrowing days were even then stumbling, breath rattling consumptively and chilblained hands working to chafe heat into one another, toward the damp corridor of winter.

Darkness at four in the afternoon, sodden leaves underfoot and an impending US election (wearying, disillusioning, simultaneously boring and hysterical) do nothing to help the wider crisis of meaning we were all busily in the midst of anyway. Surely you’ve noticed the elevation of both apathy and emotional frenzy to a sort of detached status symbol. As though the only valid reactions to the current climate are draping oneself across and chaise longue and eating grapes (seedless, for convenience) like a lightly powdered aristocrat while the world burns, converting to some weird, too-online version of neoChristianity and building a weapons arsenal in your shed, or throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh paintings and dying your hair pink while confident that ultimately, you’ll be fine — your dad will post bail because you grew up in Chelsea.

We live amid the lionising of narcissism and disaffection, pathological fatigue and the self-indulgent cult of busywork. Amid strained fealty to comforting, credulous, one-dimensional stories about good and evil, the straightforwardness of other people’s motivations and character as contrasted with the richness and complexity of our own. An excessive certainty about both the past and the future which can only emerge, pushing all nuance out and away in front of it, from a culture mired deep in primordial doubt. Too frightening a doubt to gaze at with both eyes open. A doubt that feels as though it might swallow us all. You couldn’t be blamed for holding fast to the impression that no matter how often patterns repeat, we simply cannot seem to learn ourselves a lesson when it’s right before our eyes.

So yes, things are strange at the moment. As we head toward the new year, I wanted the book we read next to be accessibly written, short, and self-evidently to offer you more in meaning and fulfilment than it will cost you in pain (albeit constructive) to finish. I wanted us to read something distinctly philosophical, which gazes at the most frightening qualities within human nature — within ourselves — and finds clear, solid meaning despite, and not because of, the suffering caused by the very worst we can do to one another. As Viktor Frankl points out in our chosen book for session six, suffering has no value in and of itself. It’s valuable only under two necessary conditions — when we can find meaning in it, and when it is unavoidable. Otherwise, it’s just suffering and sometimes, it’s merely masochism.

---

Cover from the book’s second edition, published in 1947

---

Man’s Search For Meaning is exactly right for us to read just now. A wonderful, difficult, inspiring, powerfully optimistic, ultimately life-affirming book. If you are well versed in philosophy, you will recognise the philosophical influence of thinkers like Kant, Husserl, Spinoza, Nietzsche and others in the book. If you’re not, don’t worry — you don’t need to have any background in philosophy at all to appreciate and understand the enormous but entirely practical ideas that Frankl, a psychiatrist, brings to bear here as he accounts his experience at Auschwitz and three other concentration camps across three years during the second world war. In the second half of Man’s Search For Meaning, Frankl introduces the reader to logotherapy — the ‘therapeutic doctrine’ he formulated, a psychotherapy which places the human pursuit of meaning at the centre of life. We can cope with pretty much anything, Frankl suggests, if we can find meaning in it.

We’ll be reading a book that is difficult but powerfully comforting in its clear-sighted defense of human value and autonomy. A book that recounts the most difficult experiences a human being can go through, and which is ultimately hopeful and — most importantly — truthful. This is the only valuable kind of optimism, one not nestled in delusion, self-delusion or detachment but the kind that sees the very worst humanity is capable of and can find meaning in it.

So. That’s what will orient our next session of the Peak Notions Book Club and, I hope, your reading of the book if you are attending or just interested in reading along independently. Meaning. We’ll be stepping out of the topical, the newsy and the anxiety-inducing cycle of doomscrolling headlines on the toilet in order to talk about meaning. What it is, where it can be found, and how much control we have over whether or not we can find it in our own lives.

Subscribers who are interested specifically in the book club have patiently waited for this long overdue sixth session while I was off being out of my depth and attempting to publish and publicise a book, which now really exists in the world. For anyone interested, it can be shipped internationally if you order it via Blackwell’s. Thank you for the patience. There’s also a discount on annual subscriptions to Peak Notions here on Substack just for today if you’ve been considering one.

You don’t need any background in philosophy to come along to this session or to find value in the book. If you do have a philosophy background, the discussion should still be interesting for you!

The book club is my way of thanking paid subscribers who keep Peak Notions afloat, and of building community here. It takes research, work, and admin (which is not my forte oh my goodness!) so for that reason it’s open to paid subscribers only. There are 15 spots available for the sixth Peak Notions Book Club session, which takes place on Zoom at 8pm UK/Irish time on Thursday December 5th. You can get all the details (including the confusing time zone stuff!) and put your name on the list via the sign-up sheet linked below: