Three Ways to Build a More Meaningful Life: Why All Three Matter

← Previous: Why Meaning Matters More Than Happiness

The previous post in this series introduced Viktor Frankl's central argument: that meaning, rather than pleasure or success, is the primary organizing force in a well-lived human life. Compelling as it is, that argument still leaves the most practical question open. If meaning is what's needed, how does one create it?

Frankl's answer was specific and unusually comprehensive. He identified three distinct pathways through which meaning becomes available, which he called the three categories of values, and argued that at least one pathway is universally accessible. Regardless of circumstances or what has been lost or taken, at least one of these routes remains open (Frankl, 1959). That claim warrants careful examination, because it is considerably more demanding and considerably more hopeful than it first appears.

The First Pathway: Creative Values

The most familiar pathway to meaning is through creative values, the contributions you give to the world through your work, relationships, contributions, and creative engagement. This is the meaning that comes from building, making, helping, and leaving something behind that wasn't there before.

For the most accomplished professionals, this pathway is the most developed and the most actively engaged. Careers built on real competence and contribution draw substantially from creative values, the meaning that comes from doing something well, and the satisfaction of solving a problem or truly helping a person.

The limitation of creative values as the sole pathway to meaning becomes evident when circumstances interrupt the capacity to produce or contribute. Illness, loss, forced retirement, and the end of a career that has been the primary source of identity can all temporarily or permanently close the creative values pathway. When creative values are the only pathway, their interruption often produces a depth of crisis disproportionate to what the circumstances might seem to warrant from the outside.

The Second Pathway: Experiential Values

The second pathway is through experiential values, what you receive from the world through genuine encounters with beauty, truth, nature, and other people. This meaning comes not from what you produce but from what you allow yourself to be affected by: a piece of music fully heard, a landscape truly attended to, or a conversation in which two people are truly present to each other.

For high-achieving people who have organized their lives around output and contribution, experiential values are often the most underdeveloped pathway. The capacity to receive, to be affected by something without converting that affect into productivity, often atrophies under sustained achievement orientation. Rest, beauty, and pure experience become things that happen between productive activities rather than sources of meaning in their own right.

Frankl's framework insists that they are sources of meaning, not mere substitutes for the meaning that comes from contribution, but pathways in their own right. The person who can be truly moved by what the world offers, including its beauty and its truth, has access to a form of meaning that is not contingent on their own output and therefore not vulnerable to the interruptions that output-dependent meaning inevitably faces.

The Third Pathway: Attitudinal Values

The third pathway is the most demanding and, in Frankl's view, the most specifically human: attitudinal values, the meaning that emerges from the stance one takes toward unavoidable suffering. Not the suffering itself, which Frankl never romanticized, but the attitude toward it when it cannot be avoided or removed.

This is not an argument that suffering is good or that it should be sought. Frankl was explicit that suffering that can be alleviated should be. The attitudinal values pathway applies specifically to suffering that cannot be avoided, such as irreversible loss, an unchangeable diagnosis, or a circumstance with no remedy. In those conditions, Frankl argued, the human capacity to choose one's response and to face what cannot be changed with dignity, courage, or grace is itself a form of meaning-making, one no external circumstance can take away.

This concept connects directly to the territory of post-traumatic growth explored in an earlier post on this blog: the finding that some people, after significant adversity, develop a substantially expanded relationship to life rather than merely returning to baseline. What PTG research describes empirically, Frankl's framework describes philosophically: the human capacity to find or create meaning, even amid suffering.

Why All Three Matter

Frankl's framework is most useful not as an argument for any single pathway but as a map of three distinct routes that can be developed with varying degrees of emphasis, depending on circumstances. The person who has developed only creative values is vulnerable when output is interrupted. The person who has developed only experiential values may struggle to find meaning in the active engagement of work. The person who understands attitudinal values has a resource available even when the other two pathways are closed.

For accomplished professionals navigating the territory this blog has explored, Frankl's three pathways offer a practical diagnostic for the gap between external success and internal fulfillment and for the question of whether the life being lived is genuinely chosen. Which of these is most developed in your current life? Which is most underdeveloped? And what would it mean to invest more deliberately in the pathway that has been most neglected?

The next post in this series addresses what happens when all three pathways have been significantly closed, the condition Frankl called the existential vacuum, and why it is particularly common among people whose external lives appear most successful.

→ Continue: Why Success Can Feel Empty

← Previous: Why Meaning Matters More Than Happiness

If this framework is useful

The Self-Coaching Mini-Workbook includes prompts to help you examine which of these pathways is most alive in your current life and which might be worth developing more deliberately.

→ Download the free Self-Coaching Mini-Workbook at beginnoticing.com

If you're ready to explore this further, the Your Next Step clarity call is a free 30-minute conversation about where you are and what might come next. Visit stepstochat.com

References

Frankl, V. E. (1946/1959). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press.

Frankl, V. E. (1969). The will to meaning: Foundations and applications of logotherapy. New American Library.

Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3), 455–471.