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Home » Opinion » Book review
Searching for meaning in the madding crowd
By Wan Lixin |
September 12, 2009, Saturday
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"PRISONERS of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl's Principles at Work" should be recommended for attempting something formidable: How to humanize your work by putting meaning into it.
As the title suggests, Pattakos draws primarily on Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" to illustrate that it is up to you to find meaning in your life and work.
Do all jobs have meaning?
That can be more complicated than Pattakos thinks.
Meaning can be a mere matter of rhetoric, as C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards suggest in their book "The Meaning of Meaning."
Its practical dimensions can be hard to gauge.
For the better half of the past year we have been enduring a lot of noise, dust, and bad smells as a huge army of migrants are busy repaving streets, replacing functional bricks in the exterior with ornamental panels, and whitewashing all buildings, old and new.
The duration, scale and the intensity of this campaign more than justifies our yearning for a respite.
But a couple of days ago I noticed that all the small shops facing a section of Maoming Lu (from Nanjing Lu to Weihai Lu) have red chai (pull down!) painted on their facade.
Apparently what we have tolerated so far is just a prelude to another drama of still greater proportion.
One expatriate foreigner remarked to me recently that this work of migrants no doubt pleases the contractors and their official patrons.
Could these migrants manage to extract meaning from the overwhelming din, dust, smell, and heat?
I am not disparaging their simple manual labor.
We have come to accept complexity as a sign of the cutting edge and progress, but in fact the only work that can be meaningful today is simple work that has a simple purpose.
The value of simple work has long been confirmed by classical scholars.
Thanks to support from Chiang Kai-shek and Li-Fu Chen, scholar Ma Yifu launched a shuyuan (academy of classical learning) in 1939 in Sichuan that was dedicated to the resurrection of the studies in the Confucian canon.
Once Ma set his student Wu Yifeng to temporarily take charge of administration of the establishment, but Wu was reluctant because he was there to be imbued with lofty, esoteric ideas.
Ma admonished him that "ideas and practical affairs are essentially one. When business goes wrong, it often stems from ideology ... Nor can ideas be pursued independently of practical affairs. Ideas have to be wedded to action."
The problems confronting modern humans are the discrepancy between ideas (if any) and life, and the cleavage is more manifest in professions traditionally esteemed.
There are attempts at bridging the gap, which turn out to be exercises in futility.
When labor no longer serves the purpose of sustenance, when human quests are reduced to competition for luxuries (things you do not need), with the all-pervasive LED screens spreading the gospel of prosperity and elucidating the meaning of gold, we are living in a world where true meaning is truly a luxury.
Pattakos tries to convince us that a shift in our consciousness may bring about a fundamental change, so that even routine drudgery can be meaningful.
As the old saying goes, it's not what you do that matters, but how you do it.
"When we clean a hotel room, cleanliness is next to holiness; we are participating in an ancient ritual that honors the sacred nature of a human being," it observes.
Do the hotel room occupants think likewise?
But the author is not far wrong in invoking such epithets as "ritual" and "sacred," for you do not work out meaning by reasoning, or by following a set of guidelines.
Have faith in what you are doing, and that faith can only accrue from the knowledge that what you do has purpose that transcends money.
But most of us are too busy for reflections.
"Our sound-bite society speeds up reality to such an extent that stopping to smell the roses seems archaic, like some sentimental activity from an earlier era," the book reads.
So slow down and spend a few minutes on meditation everyday.
Confucius suggests we meditate on our conduct three times a day.
The book also suggests a sensible approach: pretend that you are writing your own obituary or eulogy.
As the title suggests, Pattakos draws primarily on Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" to illustrate that it is up to you to find meaning in your life and work.
Do all jobs have meaning?
That can be more complicated than Pattakos thinks.
Meaning can be a mere matter of rhetoric, as C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards suggest in their book "The Meaning of Meaning."
Its practical dimensions can be hard to gauge.
For the better half of the past year we have been enduring a lot of noise, dust, and bad smells as a huge army of migrants are busy repaving streets, replacing functional bricks in the exterior with ornamental panels, and whitewashing all buildings, old and new.
The duration, scale and the intensity of this campaign more than justifies our yearning for a respite.
But a couple of days ago I noticed that all the small shops facing a section of Maoming Lu (from Nanjing Lu to Weihai Lu) have red chai (pull down!) painted on their facade.
Apparently what we have tolerated so far is just a prelude to another drama of still greater proportion.
One expatriate foreigner remarked to me recently that this work of migrants no doubt pleases the contractors and their official patrons.
Could these migrants manage to extract meaning from the overwhelming din, dust, smell, and heat?
I am not disparaging their simple manual labor.
We have come to accept complexity as a sign of the cutting edge and progress, but in fact the only work that can be meaningful today is simple work that has a simple purpose.
The value of simple work has long been confirmed by classical scholars.
Thanks to support from Chiang Kai-shek and Li-Fu Chen, scholar Ma Yifu launched a shuyuan (academy of classical learning) in 1939 in Sichuan that was dedicated to the resurrection of the studies in the Confucian canon.
Once Ma set his student Wu Yifeng to temporarily take charge of administration of the establishment, but Wu was reluctant because he was there to be imbued with lofty, esoteric ideas.
Ma admonished him that "ideas and practical affairs are essentially one. When business goes wrong, it often stems from ideology ... Nor can ideas be pursued independently of practical affairs. Ideas have to be wedded to action."
The problems confronting modern humans are the discrepancy between ideas (if any) and life, and the cleavage is more manifest in professions traditionally esteemed.
There are attempts at bridging the gap, which turn out to be exercises in futility.
When labor no longer serves the purpose of sustenance, when human quests are reduced to competition for luxuries (things you do not need), with the all-pervasive LED screens spreading the gospel of prosperity and elucidating the meaning of gold, we are living in a world where true meaning is truly a luxury.
Pattakos tries to convince us that a shift in our consciousness may bring about a fundamental change, so that even routine drudgery can be meaningful.
As the old saying goes, it's not what you do that matters, but how you do it.
"When we clean a hotel room, cleanliness is next to holiness; we are participating in an ancient ritual that honors the sacred nature of a human being," it observes.
Do the hotel room occupants think likewise?
But the author is not far wrong in invoking such epithets as "ritual" and "sacred," for you do not work out meaning by reasoning, or by following a set of guidelines.
Have faith in what you are doing, and that faith can only accrue from the knowledge that what you do has purpose that transcends money.
But most of us are too busy for reflections.
"Our sound-bite society speeds up reality to such an extent that stopping to smell the roses seems archaic, like some sentimental activity from an earlier era," the book reads.
So slow down and spend a few minutes on meditation everyday.
Confucius suggests we meditate on our conduct three times a day.
The book also suggests a sensible approach: pretend that you are writing your own obituary or eulogy.
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