Dear Fellow Traveler,
It can be challenging to make sense of the human experience. Life is complex, and so, too, is the project of human development.
The American existential psychologist Rollo May (1909—1994) asked, “What are the major inner problems of people in our day?” Through his own clinical work and psychiatric network, May described the chief problem of people (in the mid-twentieth century) as emptiness.
In his book, Man’s Search for Himself, May explained,
Many people do not know what they want; they often do not have a clear idea of what they feel. When they talk about their lack of autonomy or lament their inability to make decisions—difficulties that are present in all decades—it soon becomes evident that their underlying problem is that they have no definite experience of their own desires or wants.
Although they can generally talk fluently about what they should want—“To complete their college degrees successfully, to get a job, to fall in love and marry and raise a family”—it’s soon evident, even to them, explains May, that they are describing what others (parents, professors, employers, etc.) expect of them rather than what they themselves want.
We cannot live in this condition of “emptiness” for long.
