I Learned Meaning Before I Learn Pleasure

There is a famous Viktor Frankl quote:
“When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, he distracts himself with pleasure.”

Franks argues that the lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits, rather than addressing the underlying existential void. Perhaps for many, maybe even for most people, this is a big issue, but there is another group that suffers from the opposite problem. 

Frankel’s inverse law: when a man can’t find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning. If ease, grace, joy, and playfulness don’t come easily to you, one solution is to just ignore moment to moment happiness entirely, and always pursue hard things; you become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test.

Why I Write (And Why I Can’t Stop)

Why writing?
I’ve written before about regret , realizations , and stories . I’ve even mentioned the catalysts. but beneath all of that, there has always been one reason driving me toward self reflection since childhood: the pursuit of meaning. And at the center of that pursuit sits confusion, confusion about myself.

I struggled to understand my feelings.
I struggled to accept genuine compliments.
Good things landed on me without finding a place to stay.

The External World Was Easier

Writing is an instrument for making sense of both worlds.

By the external world, I mean the universe, the earth we live on, the natural questions that pops uninvited in a person’s mind. I write observations, beliefs, conclusions, small attempts to interpret the complexity surrounding me.

By the internal world, I mean myself.
Writing makes my thoughts and emotions visible to me. It gives shape to what would otherwise remain vague, silent, and unexamined.

Writing Is Not Optional

I write to make sense.
I write to study myself.
I write because I want to see what I think.

Those close to me, friends, family, have often said:
“You don’t need to overanalyze everything. Just live your life.”

They meant what they said, but. they already accepted me as I was. they saw how much time I spent alone with myself and wanted to break that cycle. they tried to help me cheer up, to forget, to be distracted. to save me from drowning in my own thoughts.

But I can’t just live my life.

I don’t write to look intellectual.
I don’t write to romanticize pain.
I don’t write as a hobby.

Throughout my life, I made steady progress in understanding the external world. I never stepped outside the Middle East, yet I taught myself English at an early age. I read every book I could find at home. I learned to code in high school. At fifteen, I explored comparative religion. I consumed logic and philosophy, fell back into computation, touched history and theology.

Each effort paid off in small gradients, one step at a time, until I reached a strange point: I felt I had learned too much, too early.

I am not satisfied with my understanding of the world. never I’m. but compared to my progress in understanding the external world with my understanding of the internal one,I’m lagged far behind.

The Internal World

The internal world asks different questions:
Who am I?
Why do my patterns repeat?
What do I love?
What do I hate?

While external questions chase truth, often out of curiosity. internal world questions are themed with urgency, with confusion, with a need for relief, with the pressure to explain myself to myself, I never found these questions pleasant. every attempt to answer them felt like failure. That failure slowed my exploration inward.

Recently, I wrote about how much of this confusion comes from contradiction. I communicate well, yet struggle to form friendships. I feel emotionally numb most of the time. my energy never arrives when I need it. I say I want to stay close to those I love, yet I disappear from their lives.

Only recently did I realize that my answer to “Who am I?” was overlapping with my relationships. If relationships did not matter, I could define myself easily, by what I love, what I do, my mission. , maybe overlapping my purpose, that part is not vague. My relationships are.

The confusion within them made it difficult to define myself at all.

Meaning as a Substitute for Joy

Before encountering Frankl’s inverse law, I had already been circling the truth:
I write because I find it hard to enjoy myself.

Happiness has never been easy to pursue. I lack a stable framework for pleasure. Interactions rarely reward me with dopamine. so I kept myself busy searching for meaning.

I once read:

Healing will make you angry.
If it hasn’t yet, you probably haven’t gone deep enough.
There is a rage beneath survival, a rage that grows when you realize how much of your life was shaped by someone else’s dysfunction, how much of your personality was built to survive chaos, how many of your choices were never choices at all, only coping mechanisms disguised as decisions.

Getting to know my myself at this depth is not comfortable, at all, in fact it is quite the opposite; its a feeling of discomfort I experience in my chest. getting to know myself scares me. I wish I could just ignore it. I wish I could pretend the remedy is not waiting for me, untouched, demanding courage I don’t yet have. I’m afraid it will activate some wounds. what is interesting is, I always fooled for a long time, I believed that if I kept adding things to my life, if I just kept making myself busy I will alright, as long as I’m distracted I’ll be ok, I told myself, I would survive. I even helped my friends by turning them into stoics.I used to believe this is the only way out.

But I was wrong.

I wasn’t just repressing emotions. I was repressing problems. Some consciously ignored. Others subconsciously avoided. many feelings disappeared easily. I let them go without effort. But others ones I believed were gone were merely locked away. one unplanned moment, one message, one trigger, and they returned. some traced all the way back to childhood.

They were never gone.
They were waiting.

The truth is, I need help.
But I can’t imagine who I would be if I were happy.

I am frightened to heal, the comfort I built from tolerating myself, my flaws, my fear, would have to shatter again. After years of being driven by fear and negative motivators, what would replace them? Would it work? Would I still recognize myself?

And the most important questions question, the one that refuses to leave: was all this suffering purposeful? Does it mean something?

I try to ignore it. It only leads to more thinking. But it keeps knocking, relentlessly.

When a tender affection has rooted itself in us over many years, the idea of exchanging it feels like a cheapening of life. We guard our affections and our constancy as we guard other treasures.

This constant reshaping of my beliefs and identity is exhausting. I want to rest.
I am far beyond discovering small truths about myself. I am deep inside it now, and the this time the exchange of my feelings has never been harder.

Harvest

For now, I will ignore some things, until I confirm that ignoring no longer works.
It is a comfort zone I can’t afford to stay in.

This year feels different.
For the first time, I am connecting the dots.
For the first time, I am beginning to understand myself.