Daniel had done everything right.
He'd set up information boundaries so he wasn't drowning in the news cycle. He'd learned the physiological sigh — that double inhale through the nose, long exhale through the mouth — the one the neuroscientists say actually calms your nervous system. He'd even started setting his phone down at 9pm. By any reasonable measure, he was coping.
But every morning, he lay in bed staring at the ceiling asking the same question: What's the point?
Not despair — nothing so dramatic. Just hollow. Functional but hollow. And increasingly, a quiet, unsettling question: Is this what resilience looks like? Just… endless coping?
His sister Elena had burned through her outrage months earlier. "I used to believe we could make a difference," she told him. "Now I'm not sure why I bother." He understood. He didn't say what he was thinking: Me neither.
Daniel is one of the people I write about in Staying Strong in Unsteady Times. He's composite — a mix of clients, colleagues, and a version of myself I've known well. And he represents something I hear constantly right now: a particular kind of exhaustion that the usual tools don't touch.
Because Daniel's problem wasn't a coping problem. It was a meaning problem.
Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps. He watched people around him die, saw men and women stripped of everything — family, possessions, dignity, safety. And out of that experience, he developed a simple, devastating idea: meaning isn't a luxury we add when life gets comfortable. It's the engine that keeps us going when life gets impossible.
"Those who have a 'why' to live," Frankl wrote, "can bear almost any 'how.'"
Daniel had the "how" covered. He was executing the coping strategies. But he'd lost track of the why — and without it, even good functioning feels hollow.
I've paid attention to this pattern for a long time. I was 14 when JFK was assassinated. I volunteered for Robert Kennedy's campaign in 1968, and was working that campaign when he was killed. What I noticed then — watching the adults around me — was that the ones who stayed steady weren't the ones with the best coping strategies. They were the ones who still believed their actions connected to something that mattered.
That's different from optimism. It doesn't require certainty. It just requires a thread back to purpose.
Frankl described three pathways to meaning: through the work we do and create; through love and the beauty we experience; and through how we face suffering we cannot escape. At least one of those pathways is available in any moment. The question is whether you're using it — or just white-knuckling through the day.
If you feel like Daniel — if you've got your strategies in place and still feel strangely hollow — that's not a failure of resilience. That's information. Your nervous system is telling you something important is missing.
The good news: meaning isn't something you wait to receive. It's something you orient toward. Even small moves count.
You're not broken. The situation is.
📖 Staying Strong in Unsteady Times — amazon.com/dp/B0GY49XSVZ