I read Lee Si-hyung and Park Sang-mi’s What Is the Meaning of My Life? (Korean title 내 삶의 의미는 무엇인가, Special Seojae). The title sounds like a late-night question you are slightly embarrassed to say out loud. That is the point. The book is not trying to be original. It is a Korean introduction to Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, written by a psychiatrist who translated Man’s Search for Meaning and a counselor who used the same ideas to climb out of a depression that had taken her close to the edge.
Lee met Frankl’s work during the Korean War, later studied at Yale, and sat with Frankl in Vienna in the early 1990s. Park studied in Germany and now teaches meaning-centered counseling; she is also frank about having needed it herself. One voice explains the theory and the Korean clinic. The other turns it into questions you can actually sit with. Together they keep returning to a line Frankl liked to borrow from Nietzsche: if you know why you are living, you can bear almost any how.
The publisher calls this a self-healing guide and a prescription for depression. That is too much. It is a clear popular book about one school of therapy. It will not replace a doctor, and it will not hand you a slogan that fixes a life. What it can do is rename the hollow feeling a lot of adults carry when nothing is obviously wrong and nothing feels worth the trouble.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
What the book actually argues
The argument is Frankl’s, restated for people who already know Freud by name and have never been told there was a third school after him and Adler. Pleasure is not enough. Success is not enough. A life can be full of both and still feel empty. Frankl called that an existential vacuum. Lee and Park treat it as ordinary, not exotic: the Sunday afternoon that will not fill, the job that pays and does not matter, the quiet question What is any of this for?
Meaning, in this tradition, is not invented in a burst of inspiration. It is found, usually in one of three places. You make something — work, care, study, a duty you did not drop. You meet something — a person, a landscape, a piece of art that briefly makes the rest of the noise fall away. Or you take a stance toward a pain you cannot remove. The last one is the hardest to hear and the one Frankl insisted on, because some suffering does not get solved. What remains, even then, is the freedom to decide how you stand in front of it.
That last claim is easy to cheapen. The book is better when it stays close to cases: a patient, a prison classroom, a person who could not say why they should get up, and then could name one unfinished responsibility. Meaning here is local. It is not “find your passion.” It is “what is still asked of you, in this room, with this life.”
Park’s practical half is less about theory and more about getting the question out of the air and onto paper. Rank what you actually value, not what you post. Write the story of a mistake you can still repair. Write the sentence someone once said that kept you upright. Write the old pain that later became usable. The “logo-hint” questions in counseling do the same work out loud: they keep asking until a value shows its order.
The misconceptions it breaks first
If I feel empty, something is medically or morally wrong with me. If I get happier, meaning will follow. If I suffer, the suffering itself is meaningless. The book pushes back on all three.
Emptiness, in Frankl’s terms, can be a signal that the usual rewards have run out, not proof that you are broken. Plenty of functioning adults feel it. Treating it only as a mood to medicate, or only as a character flaw, misses the question underneath.
Happiness is a poor assignment. Chase it directly and it slips. Meaning can sit beside difficulty; sometimes it only becomes visible there. The authors are not against feeling better. They are against waiting to feel better before you are allowed to ask what your life is for.
The third mistake is the most tempting when things are bad. Pain can erase a plan, a body, a future you wanted. It does not automatically erase the chance to take a position toward what is left. That is not a demand to be noble. It is a narrower claim: even when you cannot choose the event, you are not finished choosing.
They also refuse the idea that meaning is one grand destiny waiting to be uncovered, after which the rest of the years will behave. A life can have more than one meaning, and the meaning can change when the situation changes. What you owed a child is not what you owe a late career, or an illness, or a quieter room.
Why an adult should read this
A lot of Korean self-help answers emptiness with more effort: another goal, another morning routine, another performance of gratitude. This book is useful because it changes the question. The problem is not always that you are lazy or ungrateful. Sometimes you have no why that can survive an ordinary Tuesday.
It is also useful as a door back to Frankl. If you have never read Man’s Search for Meaning, this will get the three values and the “why” into your head in Korean clinical language. If you have read Frankl, you will recognize almost every load-bearing idea. The extra is the local weather: hwabyung, family duty, the particular shame of not being able to say why you should keep going in a country that already tells you to endure.
Read it as a primer, not as scripture. Some pages lean on uplift. Some cases resolve more neatly than life does. The worthwhile remainder is still dry enough to use. Meaning is something you do and something you receive, and when you cannot do or receive much, it can still be a way of standing.
What remains after reading
What stays with me is smaller than “I have found the meaning of life.” It is this: the empty feeling may be asking a real question, and the answer is probably already near your hands — a piece of work, a person, a pain you can meet without pretending it is good.
The next step does not have to be a new self. Take one hour and write three lists. What are you still responsible for? What have you actually loved, not admired from a distance? What difficulty will not leave, and what stance would make you less ashamed of how you met it? If one line on those lists can get you through the next hard afternoon, the book has done its job. Not when you closed it. When the question stopped being theatrical and became specific.