by Rachel Robison-Greene
A student came to my office last week to discuss her future. This student is extremely bright and creative, and I think the sky is the limit for her. She shared with me that Gen Z students struggle to feel that the future is genuinely open for them. Their perception is that jobs that feel meaningful are being slashed by government or stolen by AI. As a result, she reported, members of Gen Z may just need to find meaning in their hobbies and interests outside of work and pursue jobs that allow them to fully check out at the end of the day with no additional tasks to get in the way of the pursuits they care about.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this conversation since. It left me feeling disappointed in the generations that put our young people in this position. None of the decisions that led to this point were genuinely democratic. The people didn’t get to decide whether AI would be developed or what jobs it would perform. It was thrust upon us all, but young people are affected the most. They feel a strong pressure to integrate the technology into their lives, all while it steals both their potential jobs and encourages them to offload their critical thinking skills. This is happening at the same time that surveillance capitalism on social media and elsewhere turns people into products. In light of all of this, how could young people fail to feel objectified and commodified? How could they fail to feel that they are valuable only for their outputs? In my own case, when I think about meaning in life, I’m picturing something qualitative. I want my career and pursuits to be valuable for their own sake. I want to think that the labor in which I engage is objectively meaningful. Growing up in a world in which people are treated as replaceable by machines, it is easy to think of meaning subjectively and in terms of quantity—we enjoy as much as we can whenever we can.
This response to the modern human condition looks a lot like the one offered by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. It happens many times within life that we recognize the extent to which we are cogs in a machine performing the same rudimentary functions without reflection. He says,
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
Camus reflects on the absurdity of the human condition—we desperately want objective meaning out of a universe that isn’t capable of caring about what we want. The answer, he thinks, is for this awakening to lead one to become an “absurd hero.” The absurd hero recognizes the relationship in which they stand to the universe. There is nothing “out there” prescribing a life path or promising meaning. The absurd hero makes their life their own by authentically maximizing the things they enjoy while never losing sight of the absurdity of it all.
Camus’ approach has its drawbacks. One might find it liberating and depressing in equal measure. Embracing one’s identity as an absurd hero means that one lets go of the illusion that anything really matters. To quote Dostoyevsky, “If there is no God, everything is permitted.”
This is not how I want to advise my student. Perhaps she can read Camus and sit with it. She might reflect on whether Gen Z should transform itself into an army of absurd heroes. For my part, I might advise her in a different direction. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl moves from similar starting points to a conclusion more grounded in the objectivity of human dignity. He begins with a discussion of his experiences as a prisoner in a concentration camp. He argues, guided by the grimmest of experience, that even when things are at their very worst, human beings can and must find meaning in the suffering. He says,
An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment, and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior; namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.
Frankl describes moments when the humanity of the prisoners in the camps transcended the hopelessness of their circumstances. He remembers, in his own case, when the mere thought of his wife created mental distance from the painful labor in which he was engaged,
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song my so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which men can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Similarly, he describes finding awe in the beauty of nature even in the grips of exhaustion and starvation,
One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to rush out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be.”
He describes the manifestation of humanity through creative expression,
During the half-hour lunch interval when soup (which the contractors paid for and on which they did not spend much) was ladled out at our work site, we were allowed to assemble in an unfinished engine room. On entering, everyone got a ladleful of the watery soup. While we sipped it greedily, a prisoner climbed onto a tub and sang Italian arias. We enjoyed the songs, and he was guaranteed a double helping of soup, “straight from the bottom”—that meant with peas!
I reflect on all of this not to compare Gen Z to concentration camp prisoners nor to suggest to them that they simply look at pretty sunset or sing an Italian aria when they are feeling down on their prospects. It may be, however, that members of a species that can love, create, and appreciate beauty ought not to relegate themselves to lives of quantity rather than quality. I don’t want my students to give that up without a fight. Their right to live qualitatively meaningful live is grounded in their human dignity. As Frankl puts it,
In view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life’s meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially. That unconditional meaning, however, is paralleled by the unconditional value of each and every person. It is that which warrants the indelible quality of the dignity of man.
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