Viktor Frankl's Existential Vacuum | Day 32 of 100
Why Neither Busyness Nor Rest Creates the Meaning We're After
In the previous post, we covered Frankl's three pathways to meaning. In this essay: his insight into why most of us feel either bored or overwhelmed, and how to escape what he called the ‘existential vacuum.’
I was having coffee with a buddy recently when he told me he had “sixteen live projects” going on at once spread across his entrepreneurial pursuits, fitness, civic obligations, personal development, and relationships.
"This is a season of sprinting" he said. He was looking at me with a weary-but-proud face, wearing that busy badge of courage we wear when we're overwhelmed and trying to justify it.
A few months later we got together for a swim. As we floated on our backs in the springs I asked how the 16 projects were going. He chuckled and admitted he had abandoned all but two because he needed some rest and was starting to feel like a soulless machine. He laughed again when sharing that he’d probably overcorrected when he cleared his plate of all those projects - because he'd also put on ten pounds and hadn’t cleaned his house in a month.
“But,” he added with a wry smile, his eyes closed against the sun, “I’m starting to feel bored and useless. I think I’m about to bring my killer instinct back online and recommit to a faster pace.”
The Well-Worn Path
Most of us live in one of two states: we’re either bored or overwhelmed.
When we live in this tension between boredom and overwhelm, guess what tends to show up? Anxiety, stress, depression, confusion, and aimlessness. When we experience any or all of those maladies, rarely do we think to ourselves, my life feels so meaningful right now!
For many of us, life has become a well-worn path back and forth across the boredom-overwhelm spectrum. You’ve likely walked it yourself - a season of boredom sets in, and with it, the sense that your life is lacking meaning. In response, you sign up for a handful of new commitments, take on extra responsibilities at work, volunteer for something - anything - that promises momentum. The initial relief (distraction) quickly turns into overwhelm.
Then, you do what most people do when they feel overwhelmed: you begin cutting back. You cancel obligations, declare email bankruptcy, and create wide-open space. You imagine this reprieve will restore you - and the first few days might feel like relief (avoidance), but soon enough you realize you are not reading poetry or cultivating practices to recover from the sprint - you’re numbing yourself. You're scrolling, watching Dawson’s Creek, and wearing sweatpants too many days of the week.
Back and forth we go, thinking that the problem is doing too much, then doing too little, all the while forgetting to ask ourselves why neither extreme creates the meaning we long for.
The Existential Vacuum
Viktor Frankl had an answer.
He called this cycle the existential vacuum and used it as a way to explain two primary reasons we feel lost in our lives and default to either doing too much or too little:
The Burden of Consciousness
I think about our white lab, Lily at dinner time. When 6:30 approaches, she starts to snort around and nudge us with her nose. If it gets any later than 6:30 and she hasn’t been fed, she'll stand in front of you and bark until the kibble is provided. Every night it's the same - she feels hungry, she wants the food, she gets the food, she poops, and she goes to sleep. Pretty simple.
Me on the other hand - well, when I sit down to the same chicken and vegetables I've had three nights in a row, I start wondering:
Is this what my life is now? Should I be eating less meat? What does it say about me that I don’t like beets? I'd rather pizza, but I've been eating too much pizza lately. Do I lack discipline? Am I going to die early?
Lily gets dinner.
I get an existential crisis.
Human beings are unique in our ability to feel the weight of our existence. This awareness is both our gift and our burden - because when we can feel the weight of our existence, it feels, well…weighty. We made a trade when we became conscious: in exchange for an expanded mind, we lost the shelter of instinct and were thrust into the wide open meadow of awareness.
In our evolved state, our brains aren't only a tool for survival, they also allow us to think about survival, to remember past events, to imagine future events, and to make inferences about what people think about us, or whether or not we're where we should be in life.
This is where the vacuum begins. Consciousness gave us the freedom to choose, but with that freedom came uncertainty, and most of us would rather fill the silence of that uncertainty with either distraction or busyness (boredom or overwhelm) than face the weight of our existence.
The Collapse of Structures
Picture your great-grandmother waking up on a Sunday morning. She probably already knows what she’s doing - just like everyone else in her life. No scrolling, no mental tug-of-war about whether she should rest, socialize, or tackle a house project. She’s going to church just like everyone else and knows what she’s going to wear, what songs she’s going to sing, and who is coming over for family dinner afterward.
Now, picture you waking up on Sunday: your calendar is blank, your options are infinite, and yet the quiet hum of anxiety becomes audible as the Sunday Scaries creep in. You should rest, but you should also be productive, right? You could finally get the house clean, but you could also book that flight you’ve been putting off. Maybe you could hang out with a friend, but some of your friends are available and some aren’t - you forget who is doing what because everyone is doing their own thing. Instead of feeling liberating, the abundance of freedom begins to feel suffocating.
This disorientation is at the heart of the existential vacuum. When instinct no longer guides us and tradition no longer contains us, we are left alone with freedom - and freedom without direction easily collapses into either restless activity or numbing withdrawal.
Frankl described the plight this way (emphasis added):
No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism).
What he’s describing is a loop we’re all caught in: freed from instinct, bound for a time by tradition, and then loosed from tradition in the name of personal freedom.
Each stage solved one problem but created another:
Consciousness: First, we became aware and instincts no longer ran the show. Survival alone was no longer enough, and awareness added a weight to existence that animals never experience: the need to choose, to act, to make meaning.
Tradition: In response, we leaned on stories, rituals, and traditions. These offered structure and certainty. Kind of like a map for life that promised safety if followed. For a while, it worked; tradition told us what to value, how to act, and what to avoid. But only as long as we trusted the map…
Freedom: Then came freedom. The old maps and old containers no longer worked; we discovered we could question, ignore, or rewrite the rules. With freedom came both exhilaration and terror - because now we were saddled with the responsibility of choosing not just actions, but values, purpose, and direction.
Vacuum: That responsibility has become a burden. Many of us feel the existential vacuum - the gnawing sense that life has no inherent meaning and it might be our fault. Without an external guide, meaning must be found - or made - by us, and us alone.
The idea of the vacuum directly connects to our oscillation from boredom to overwhelm. The boredom/overwhelm spectrum is today’s iteration of the storyline we humans have lived out since the beginning: we pine for freedom, then buckle under its weight. All the while, we’re missing what we’ve been looking for all along.
(Accidental) Meaning
Even in the midst of our scrambling for freedom or sulking about what it requires of us, life gifts us with flashes of meaning. You’ve had them - laughing until your stomach hurts for the first time in years with a new friend, smelling the top of a baby’s head, watching a storm roll in and realizing for a moment that being small is its own kind of relief.
These moments just happen sometimes - and because we don’t know how to explain them, we often chalk them up to happy happenstance or think the gods of meaning decided to gift us a beautiful moment. But Frankl would argue the opposite - he’d say these moments are proof that meaning is available everywhere, all the time.
We often participate in meaning without knowing we’re doing it. We create, we connect, we choose a stance toward difficulty, and only later realize that we stumbled into significance. These are what I call moments of accidental meaning - and I don’t think they are random - I think they are evidence. They show us that life is constantly inviting us to participate, even when we are too distracted or too exhausted to notice.
Our task, then, is not to wait around for another accidental moment of meaning in the midst of our mundane life, but to bring consciousness to the process by realizing the moments that felt like gifts weren’t accidents at all, but reminders that meaning has always been present, waiting for us to wake up and see it.
Choosing Meaning
Frankl gives us a path forward; he insisted that meaning is a deliberate act of participation. He identified three paths: creating something, experiencing love or beauty, and choosing our attitude when life takes something from us. (which we covered extensively in the last post)
In my own work, I’ve reframed these as service, connection, and transformation - three ingredients that can be practiced daily, in small and ordinary ways, as antidotes to the vacuum.
Our default, when confronted with the silence of the vacuum, is to fight the fear it produces. We either outrun it by stacking commitments until we collapse, or we hide from it by numbing ourselves with distraction.
But Frankl’s invitation is different: to stop fighting the silence and instead step into it with awareness.
He believed life is always asking us a question, and our task is not to demand meaning on our own terms but to respond with how we live, how we love, and how we endure. As Frankl put it:
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life.
That is the way out of the vacuum. Not by escaping it, but by entering it fully awake with the confidence you have the tools to make meaning out of the very circumstances you’re presently in.