Quo Vadis?: The Existential Challenges of Leaders

By Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

Written at a time of global pandemic, when we have been forced to confront age-old existential questions—Why are we here? Where are we going?—perhaps for the first time, Quo Vadis? is extraordinarily relevant to leaders, managers and anyone who wants to bring meaning and authenticity into their work and life. Manfred Kets de Vries argues that we need to address these fundamental and disturbing questions if we are to live fully and meaningfully. Too many people wake up on a Monday morning and do the same things they have done every Monday. They go to work and function on autopilot without questioning their purpose. But how can we make sure our lives are rich and fulfilling? How do we know we’re on the right track?

 

This is a book about death and the fear of death, about angst and absurdity; but it is also about endurance, honesty, well-being, responsibility, living with hard truths, creating meaning—and happiness.

Quo Vadis? makes us look full on at the things we prefer not to see. It is a short book that pulls no punches but is far from bleak. Instead, Kets de Vries shows that our life is enriched, and our ability to make meaning and find happiness is increased, when we acknowledge the inevitable price we have to pay for knowing our own mind and understanding our inevitable end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030666996

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

M. F. R. Kets de VriesQuo Vadis?The Palgrave Kets de Vries Libraryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66699-6_1

1. The Oldest Question

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries¹  

(1)

Europe Campus, INSEAD, FONTAINEBLEAU, France

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

Email: [e-mail]

If we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

The meaning of life is that it ends.

—Franz Kafka

Working longer and longer hours trying to get his latest start-up up and running, Ted was at rock bottom, questioning the fundamentals of his existence, something to which he had never given much thought. What am I doing with my life? Does it have any purpose? Is there anything I can look forward to? These questions were brought on by his feeling of increasing isolation. Although the company he was leading was growing rapidly, he hadn’t felt connected to his co-founders and co-workers for quite some time. His involvement in yet another start-up was bringing him very little satisfaction. Until now he had been too busy with his work and related activities to wonder about the meaning of life. But now he felt lost. The time for reflection due to the pandemic had been a catalyst. Presently, since his children had left home, the hustle and bustle seemed pointless. For some time now, he had been feeling aimless, wondering what he was doing with his life. Somehow, life made less and less sense to him; it even seemed tedious. It had been a long time since he had felt happy. It didn’t help that his relationship with his wife was not good. Their marriage had become superficial and lifeless. For too many years, they had both been busy scheduling what needed to be done to make the household work, taking the children to school or to sports events, shopping for household necessities, planning the occasional dinner party. Was that what marriage was all about? Shouldn’t it be much more? He and his wife now behaved like two old acquaintances who were boarding together. They had very little in common. And sex had been non-existent for a very long time. Ted was in bad physical shape as well, having piled on weight over the past 12 months.

As Ted took stock of his life, he realized that the very foundations of his existence were being shaken. He had been depressed before, but the way he felt now was way beyond what he had experienced on other occasions. It felt like his life had been turned upside down and lost its center. His sense of being isolated in the world had become all-encompassing. He wondered whether he was in the middle of some kind of existential crisis—whatever that meant.

What was happening to him? Should he stop doing what he was doing? But if he lost the defining structure of work, wouldn’t he get even more depressed? Ted had lost sight of what he was living for. He found himself thinking more and more about death, with the increasing realization that he wasn’t able to face his own mortality.

In the past, the repression of uncomfortable thoughts had always been one of Ted’s strengths but now he couldn’t push these negative thoughts out of his mind. Obviously, his defenses were no longer working—the nightmares and panic attacks he had begun to have were clear warning signs. But however hard he tried to push these dark thoughts away, the attacks kept returning. The last one had been particularly scary—he could hear his heart pounding, his chest hurt, and he had difficulty breathing.

Ironically enough, never having been religious, Ted had started to envy religious people. At least their faith—their belief that there was a God who looked after them—brought them some comfort. He felt he had nothing to help him with his despair. Everything had seemed so much simpler in the past. Now it seemed as if there was Record might be a more illustrative term running through his head, constantly repeating questions: Why am I doing what I’m doing? Is it all work until I drop dead? If I die right now, what difference have I made to the world? Has my time on Earth really been worthwhile? Have I been chasing the wrong things all my life?

Ted felt that he had nobody to turn to, nobody to whom he could talk about his present angst. He was increasingly estranged from his wife, who was far too busy with her own career. So were his children. He had no other family. He was an only child, his parents had died when he was in his early twenties, and he had very few friends. Obsessed with his work, he had done very little to maintain these relationships.

Ted felt his life was no longer his own but was being controlled by external forces. Sometimes, it felt as though things were being done to him. Work had turned into a boring and joyless routine. Getting out of bed in the morning seemed pointless. Every day seemed very much like any other. He was just going through the motions. He thought increasingly about suicide.

What was happening to Ted? Why was such an energetic and driven man feeling so exhausted and purposeless? His dissatisfaction with his work and his failing marriage no doubt contributed to some extent to his unhappiness. Two of the major pillars of human life—love and work—had begun to crumble. His habitual set of defenses against intrusive thoughts about life and death had become ineffective. But more profoundly, Ted was suffering from existential malaise—a fundamental rupture of all his assumptions and actions that made him wonder whether his life had any real meaning, purpose, or value. Generally speaking, this tragic view of life emerges when we have difficulty accepting the finiteness of our existence, the inescapable fact of our death. We’ll meet Ted again in Chap. 4.

The Meaning of Life

What is the meaning of life? This question is as old as the span of time Homo sapiens has been on Earth. The search for life’s meaning is the uniting characteristic of our species and is perhaps the most important part of being human. Ours is the only species to question whether our life, and anything we do with our life, matters, or has any sort of importance. It might be better to ask, what meaning do we give to our life? Whatever our perspective, dealing with this question is essential to be able to function effectively as a human being.

When I meet people who tell me they live a life that has no or very little meaning, I have noticed that—apart from being confused—they are also generally troubled by various psychological symptoms. Some people may even be suicidal. Given the seriousness of this mental condition, it is unsurprising that throughout the history of humankind, the question of the meaning of life has attracted theologians, philosophers, psychologists, evolutionists, and cosmologists. Homo sapiens, consciously or unconsciously, has always been on a quest for an answer to this question, an attempt to understand the lessons life tries to teach during our temporary existence on Earth.

Of course, Ted is far from being alone with his existential angst. The tragedy of the human condition is a story of how to deal with the terror of death—what kinds of conscious and unconscious defense mechanisms we use to cope with what we know is coming, given that death will always remain a mystery to us. And it is this mystery that creates death anxiety and makes us question life’s purpose.

Many of us are quite successful in pushing our feelings of unease into the background. We are experts at using our defenses. Whenever possible, we prefer not to think of death, or at least to pay little conscious attention to its inevitable reality. Perhaps that’s the way we are programmed, from an evolutionary perspective. Just as children are frightened of the dark, we fear the prospect of death. We prefer not to think about it. But despite our heroic efforts not to see what we don’t want to see, many people experience a generalized feeling of insignificance in the greater scheme of things on a daily basis. It is this recognition of the human condition that makes for the tragic quality of our lives, because ours is also the only species that has to live with the understanding and consciousness of our death.

Due the development of the frontal lobes of our brain—a critical moment in the evolutionary development of our species—we have always been curious about why things are the way they are. This knowledge of the fact of death motivates us to ask the big questions: Why are we here? Why does life end? And why should it happen?

Given the mystery of death, Homo sapiens has been impelled to become a meaning maker. We desperately want our life to make sense. And given our concern about what’s to come, we are even willing to give meaning to meaningless activities. Resourceful as we are, we have infinite ways of finding meaning, and infinite potential sources of meaning. In other words, by resorting to innumerable mental acrobatics, we are able to find meaning in every scenario, in every event, in every occurrence, and in every context. Not only do we desire to understand the meaning of life, but even more than that, we want to find out whether our own life could have a deeper meaning. And on top of everything else, we are prepared to do anything but admit that life itself might be