Before trying to change your life, it may be worth looking good at the one you already have. There will always be another book, podcast, retreat or person promising you a fresh start. And sometimes we need one, but most of adult life is made up of things we have to continue: children, relationships, careers, friendships, bodies and commitments. Learning how to continue with them well may be more important than knowing how to begin again.
Much of nowadays self-help begins with a surprisingly powerful thought: the life you have is a problem, and the solution is a different version of you. Researchers studying self-help culture have pointed out that women are repeatedly positioned as people who should work on themselves, improve themselves and become “better” versions of themselves. There is a huge industry built around helping women improve themselves. Some of it is genuinely useful, although it can also leave us feeling that we are never good enough.
More recent criticism goes further, arguing that self-help discourse can turn external problems like relationships, workplaces, inequality and social expectations into interpersonal and give an illusion that it’s all your attitude and personal responsibility. Type almost any problem into ChatGTP or spend ten minutes on Instagram and somebody will have a solution for you. Change your morning routine. Change your mindset. Change your career. Fix your nervous system. Introduce your boundaries. Heal your childhood trauma. Sort out your hormones. Become more confident. Become more productive. Become less productive and more present. Just 20 min of scrolling, an your complicated life starts looking like a project that needs fixing.
Of course, sometimes change is exactly what is needed. People stay too long in bad relationships, unbearable workplaces and mental states. Sometimes you really do need to leave, move somewhere new, set boundaries or start again. What I am referring here is the addictive promise of starting over as a solution to almost all of your problems.
There is a reason new beginnings feel so good. Researchers have described what they call the fresh start effect. After some milestones: a birthday, a new year, a new week, a new semester, people become more likely to pursue goals. The psychological border between “then” and “now” helps us to separate ourselves from our previous imperfections. That is why January feels full of possibility. Monday does too. So does moving house, cutting your hair after a breakup or trying on a new running shoes. Starting is psychologically exciting because it contains imagination, when maintaining/continuing is boring.
Nobody posts: Day 1,847 of continuing to be married.
Nobody announces on LinkedIn: Thrilled to share that I have decided to remain in approximately the same profession, but do it even better.
Nobody launches a twelve-week coaching programme called: Continue with the life you have.
We use certain moments to mentally separate ourselves from the person we were before and convince ourselves that this time things will be different. Keeping a relationship healthy means having the same awkward conversations more than once. Staying close to an adult child means adjusting to the fact that they do not need you in the same way anymore. Becoming genuinely good at your work involves years of doing it after the excitement has disappeared. Friendship means staying in touch when there is no crisis and nothing particularly interesting to report. Living through menopause means dealing with a body that is changing whether or not you feel ready for it.
Psychological research suggests that maintaining changes is much harder than initiating them, most of us know the feeling when the new energy wears off and something we were so excited does not motivates us anymore.
This is why “START YOUR NEW LIFE” sells better than: KEEP LIVING YOUR EXISTING LIFE, BUT MORE BETTER. Yet the second part is often where the real changes happens.
This is Why We Should Learn About Viktor Frankl and Logotherapy
Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 and trained as a neurologist and psychiatrist. Even as a teenager, he was thinking about what makes life meaningful, and during the 1920s and 1930s he gradually developed the ideas that would later become logotherapy. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Frankl’s life became increasingly restricted because he was Jewish. He had a chance to leave for the United States, although that would have meant leaving his elderly parents behind. He decided to stay.
In 1942, Frankl, his wife Tilly and his parents were deported to Theresienstadt, a nazi ghetto in the Czech Republic. His father died there. Frankl worked with prisoners who were struggling psychologically and became involved in suicide-prevention work. In 1944, he and his wife were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His mother was murdered. His wife was later transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she died.
When Viktor Frankl entered the camps, he had with him the manuscript of a book he had been working on. It was taken away from him and he manage to reconstruct parts of it on scraps of paper. He had lost almost every part of the life he had known, and yet he was still connected to work he believed mattered. Writing did not change the conditions around him. It gave him something to hold on to beyond the immediate moment.
Same way as love did. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes being marched with other prisoners to forced labour early one freezing morning. They were exhausted, badly clothed and being shouted at by the guards. As he walked, his thoughts went to his wife Tilly. He began speaking to her in his mind. He asked her questions and imagined her answering him. For a while, the conversation became so vivid that his physical surroundings seemed to move into the background. He had no idea where she was by then. There was no mail between the camps, and he did not know whether she was still alive.
His love for her did not seem to depend on knowing. He could still picture her expression, think about what she might say and experience the relationship internally. He later wrote that this was when he understood love as one of the deepest sources of human meaning, describing the “salvation of man” as being “through love and in love”.
Frankl only learned after liberation that Tilly had died in Bergen-Belsen. During that morning in the camp, he genuinely did not know whether the woman he was speaking to in his imagination was alive somewhere else or already dead. I think this part of Frankl’s story is very relevant now because we tend to think of relationships through access. We feel secure when somebody calls, replies, comes home, chooses us or needs us. When those things change, we easily assume the relationship has somehow lost its value.
Frankl’s experience was obviously unimaginably more extreme than an adult child moving abroad, the end of a relationship or the loneliness of an empty house, but the psychological idea underneath it is similar: Loving someone is part of our own inner life. That does not mean we should romanticise absence or tell lonely people that memories should be enough. Frankl himself deeply wanted his wife to be alive. His point was about discovering that love had meaning even when he could no longer control the presence of the person he loved. Years later, this became part of his wider understanding that meaning can come through love, work, experience and the way we respond to circumstances that are beyond our control.
This became central to logotherapy. Frankl believed that people find meaning through what they contribute, through the people they love and through the way they respond to things they genuinely cannot change. He never argued that suffering should be accepted simply because suffering exists. If something can be changed, then changing it may be exactly what is needed. His ideas become relevant when we are dealing with parts of life that cannot simply be changed. That is where many of the difficult parts of life sit.
Parenting Adult Children Instead of Getting the Old Relationship Back
When children are young, motherhood is full of practical responsibility. You know where they are, who their friends are, whether they have eaten, how they slept and what is happening in their lives. Years later, the same child may be living in another city or another country. They may tell their partner something important before they tell you. They may make decisions you would never have made. They may not call as often as you would like.
For many mothers, this feels like loss.
So you start wondering how to get the old closeness back. But there is another question worth asking: what does being a mother mean now? Your child no longer needs the same kind of mothering. The relationship needs to grow up as well. Being close now means listening without immediately giving advice. It may mean allowing them to make decisions you do not agree with. It may mean accepting that you are still deeply important while knowing far less about their daily life than you once did. You have to learn how to stay close without being involved in everything.
That can be difficult because motherhood has probably shaped your identity for years. When the role changes, it can feel as though part of you has disappeared. Frankl’s way of thinking would encourage us to look at what the relationship is asking of us now. The question becomes less about getting the old version back and more about learning how to love someone in the stage of life they are actually in.
Do not Confuse a Difficult Life With a Meaningless One After Divorce or During Single Motherhood
We often talk about divorce as though it should lead to reinvention. Women are advised to rediscover themselves, rebuild their confidence, travel, date, change their appearance and start a new chapter. Sometimes that feels freeing but sometimes you are simply tired and sad. You can know that ending a marriage was the right decision and still grieve the life you thought you were going to have. You can miss the idea of family life without missing the relationship itself. You can enjoy living alone and still hate having to deal with every problem by yourself.
For single mothers, the reality can be even harder. Exhaustion is not always a mindset problem. Sometimes you are exhausted because there is simply too much to do and not enough support. Money, childcare, work and the practical reality of raising children alone matter.
Meaning in this situation may look very primitive. It may be keeping the home steady. Going to work. Making dinner. Keeping your children feeling safe. Asking somebody for help. Refusing to go back to an unhealthy relationship simply because being alone is uncomfortable. A meaningful life is often built out of things that look completely unimpressive from the outside.
Career Changes Bring Another Version of the Same Issue.
By your forties or fifties, you may have been doing roughly the same type of work for twenty years. You may be good at it and still start wondering whether you should do something completely different. Somebody has launched a business. Someone else has changed careers at 50. Another person has moved to Portugal and now appears to be running a company from a terrace overlooking the sea. Suddenly your perfectly respectable job begins to look rather dull.
In times like this it is worth asking whether you have lost meaning in your work or simply lost energy. Those are quite different things. Frankl believed that meaning can come through what we create and contribute. That can make career dissatisfaction worth looking at more carefully. What part of your work still matters to you? Who benefits from what you do? What skills have you become so used to that you no longer notice their value? Would changing the conditions of your work make a difference before you change the career itself?
You may still decide to leave, but you will feel more certain if your decision will come from understanding what matters to you rather than from the feeling that everybody else seems to be moving forwards.
Women Grow Older in a Culture that Values Youth Very Heavily
Midlife creates another difficult mix of real physical change and cultural pressure. We are surrounded by messages about maintaining our skin, weight, energy, sexuality and appearance for as long as possible. So when the body changes, it can feel as though something has gone wrong.
The body is changing. The story we attach to those changes is shaped by the world around us. That does not mean loving every hot flush during menopause. It means refusing to allow a cultural preference for female youth to define the value of your older self. Your body has not betrayed you by continuing through time. You are allowed simply to become older.
Meaning here may come from changing perspective from “How do I become who I was?”, to “Who does this stage of life ask me to become?”. You do not have to pretend to enjoy every part of getting older. But you also do not have to waste energy trying to become your younger self again.
In loneliness: stop treating an empty space as proof that your life is empty
Loneliness is perhaps the hardest example because there is a tendency to treat that as another personal-development problem. Women who live alone are often told to learn to enjoy their own company, practise self-love, find hobbies and become completely comfortable on their own. Some of those things can help. But loneliness and meaninglessness are not identical. So instead of asking: “How do I stop feeling lonely?” try to see where you might be needed?
None of this magically removes loneliness. It gives life more places where connection can grow.
Frankl was liberated in 1945 and returned to Vienna. He learned that his wife, mother and brother had died. He eventually went back to work, rewrote his manuscript, treated patients, lectured, remarried and became a father. His life continued for decades after the war.
Less Of Change Your Life in 30 Days, More Living It for the Other 335.
Maybe that is the part of logotherapy we can actually use in our own much more comfortable lives. Meaning does not always come from making a dramatic change. Sometimes it comes from taking another look at what is already here and deciding what deserves our attention.
We have become very good at asking what needs to change. Frankl offers another sequence of questions:
What is still valuable here?
What is really within my control?
What cannot be changed and needs a different attitude?
Who or what needs something from me?
What meaning can I still create from the day that just started?
What is my life asking of me now?
For a mother of an adult child, it may mean learning a new kind of closeness. After divorce, it may mean creating a stable life before trying to create an exciting one. In a career, it may mean finding purpose again before handing in your notice. During menopause, it may mean learning to live in a changing body without treating ageing as a personal failure. During loneliness, it may mean reaching towards people and things that matter even while you still wish there were someone sitting beside you.
Stay.
Do your work properly.
Invite somebody for coffee.
Look after the body you have instead of mourning the one you had.
Finish what you started.
Not everything uncomfortable needs replacing.
Before searching for the next new beginning, there may be one question worth asking: Do I really need another life, or have I stopped seeing the meaning in this one?
