Will Enhancing Life’s Meaning Diminish Substance Abuse?

The existentialist psychologist Viktor Frankl has famously argued that absence of meaning in life leads people to boredom, which they try to mitigate with alcohol and drugs. If Frankl is right, an important way to diminish substance abuse is to find ways of increasing meaning in life. Likewise, programs geared at freeing people from substance abuse should, among other strategies, focus on enhancing meaning in participants’ lives. Otherwise, after some time there would be a relapse, as people would still need something to fill in what Frankl called their “existential vacuum.”

Some also argue that the spread of drugs in the last several decades has to do with the diminished sense of meaning in Western societies, and that the high proportion of substance abuse among teenagers and young adults has to do with the prevalence of feelings of meaninglessness in these age groups.

Various researchers tried to examine whether there is empirical evidence for Frankl’s claims about the relationship between substance abuse and lack of sufficient meaning. In a recent study, Matthew Csabonyi and Lisa J. Phillips from The University of Melbourne tried to find a correlation between the degree of sensed meaning in life and the degree of substance abuse. They found that people who reported lower sensed meaning in life indeed also reported higher substance abuse.

However, when Csabonyi and Phillips examined whether there is a positive correlation between searching for meaning in life and higher substance abuse they found no such correlation. This sounds surprising, since searchers for meaning in life (henceforth just “searchers”) probably lack it; otherwise they would not be searching for it. Hence, we would expect searchers to show, again, higher degrees of substance abuse, while this is not the case. This second finding, then, does not confirm Frankl’s hypothesis.

Csabonyi and Phillips are not sure how to explain the latter finding. One possible explanation is that searchers for meaning are those who already know that drugs or alcohol will not solve their problem. Unlike others who lack meaning in life, searchers know what they are looking for, and also know that they will not find it in drugs or alcohol.

Another possible explanation Csabonyi and Phillips present is that many searchers already have some meaning in their lives; they just seek for more. Since they already have some meaning in their lives, they are less prone to substance abuse.

Further, searching for meaning differs from just feeling that there is no meaning. Searchers seem to have the hope, and sometimes the conviction, that there is meaning; they have just not found it yet.

Thus, results concerning searchers for meaning may not undermine Frankl’s thesis. However, Csabonyi and Phillips emphasize that the topic calls for more research and thought. This is probably true. I suggest that Frankl’s claim, that meaninglessness causes substance abuse, would not be proven even if we relied only on the positive correlation between lower rates of meaningfulness and higher rates of substance abuse. These findings only show a positive correlation, not causality. It may be, of course, that Frankl is right that a sense of lack of meaning causes people to try to fill a “vacuum” by substance abuse. But it seems just as plausible that in some cases the opposite causal relation holds, so that substance abuse causes meaninglessness. Some people may fall into substance abuse because of, say, curiosity, peer pressure, or a sense that it is "cool," develop an addiction, and then much of what is meaningful in their lives (e.g., career, personal relations, hopes for the future, self-respect) withers, which leads to sensing life as meaningless.

It is also possible that, as in other cases of correlation, neither meaninglessness nor substance abuse cause each other but a third factor causes both. For example, suffering from sexual abuse, neglect, failure, rejection, or other afflictions may push people both to sense life as meaningless and to substance abuse. More work, then, needs to be done on this topic.