IJSP Number 5, 2023

98 all, a life of competition – curriculum vitae – is not a human life (in the most proper sense of the word), it is just a (rat) race through one’s own biography (as Karen Horney pointed out [11]). 3. THE RACE AND THE MAZE In such a race, in which we find ourselves pretty much as Forest Gump [12], who was told by his childhood friend Jenny to run, we should, once arrived at one ocean and then at the other (and back again, as the grown-up Forest did), we realise that to continue to run would be just a repetition which cannot bring anything new to our personal development. It does not do to run from one ocean to the other (on the surface of the earth, on the surface of things, or on “the thin ice of modern life”) endlessly and just to keep running because everyone else follows or wants something from us (as were the followers of Forest Gump in the film). After the big turmoil of young age and the rat race of young adulthood, we should go home (as Forest Gump himself did, probably acknowledging that everything else was just de lana caprina , i.e. concerning trivialities) and settle our life into a more peaceful and relaxed manner. Everything we do, need, want, realize or dream, or expect to achieve is imbedded in a larger context, that is life itself. There is no greater achievement, after all, than to live (as we can hear it from the Austrian rock band Opus, on Live is life [13]). Not the ranking or the social status, nor the promotions or the paychecks or the fat bonuses are important or vital, because they represent, after all, but merely fragments or parts of life itself – understood as our greater and all-encompassing totality. Why do we have, more recently, a shift from V. Frankl’s noogenic neuroses to a more socially coloured psychosis? As Frankl pointed out, we are not suffering any longer of some physical, or sexual or other psychological frustration, but we certainly long for a meaningful life. The consequence is that, around us we see a lot of existential frustration although we live in the best, the more abundant and comfortable of societies. At the question of the meaning of life, as the most fundamental question in the existential repertoire, there are hardly any reasonable answers on the individual level. It is not that there are no answers, but that they are constantly issued from an increasingly social direction. Today the answers to all our concerns regarding the meaning come directly from the internet via the social pressure. As such there is no more place and space for the meaning of my life because everything noetic was superseded and biased by the anonymity of the constant pressure coming from society (the real one and, increasingly, the virtual one). Nowadays, society and its constant pressure is the new “millennial” Superego, the introjected parent figure; a parent substitute so strong because it is backed up by millions of voices telling us what to do, what to choose or what to want. The individual and his or her freedom of choice is completely submerged in a digitalized ocean of suggestions, nudges, and subliminal influences (and influencers) coming