What Life Should Mean to You

Adler argues that life's meaning is not a fixed truth to be discovered but a practical achievement: the only meanings that survive testing are those others can share and validate, and these always involve contribution and cooperation. What the book rejects is the notion of a private, personal meaning — 'a private meaning is in fact no meaning at all.' It also rejects the Freudian framework of instinctual drives as the key to human motivation. Instead, Adler evaluates every life by its response to three unavoidable tasks: occupation, social relations, and love. The measure of a successful response is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, social interest.

The book introduces Adler's 'three life tasks' as the diagnostic framework of individual psychology: the task of occupation (finding useful work), the task of society (friendship and community), and the task of love (intimate partnership and its continuation through family). Every individual's 'meaning of life' is revealed in how they respond to these three problems. A person whose love-life is incomplete, who makes no effort in their profession, and who finds contact with others painful has constructed a private meaning organized around self-protection. The three tasks provide a concrete, testable alternative to abstract philosophical questions about life's purpose.

Freud located meaning in unconscious instinctual conflict and the repression of sexual drives; Jung located it in archetypal patterns and individuation. Adler rejects both: meaning is not buried in the psyche or inherited from a collective unconscious but created in the individual's response to social tasks. Where Freud's method was archaeological and Jung's was mythological, Adler's is pragmatic and social. The book's most distinctive move is its denial that a private meaning can be valid: meaning requires communication, and communication requires others. This makes Adler's theory of meaning inherently ethical and communal in a way neither Freud nor Jung's systems are.

What Life Should Mean to You was Adler's most popular book in the English-speaking world and remains the most accessible entry point to his thought. Contemporary reviewers noted its direct, conversational address and practical orientation. Later reception has been mixed: Adlerian psychology declined as Freudian and behavioral paradigms dominated, but the book's themes — cooperation, social interest, the three tasks — anticipated positive psychology and modern work on meaning and well-being. Critics have faulted the book's lack of controlled evidence and its aphoristic style, but its influence on popular psychology and self-help literature is difficult to overstate.

The book was first published in 1931 by Little, Brown and Company, edited by Alan Porter. It was published in London by George Allen & Unwin the same year. A German edition, Wozu leben wir?, did not appear until 1979, translated by Elisabeth and Wolfgang Schmidbauer. Modern reprints vary widely in quality: Amazon reviewers report that cheap print-on-demand editions contain numerous typographical and grammatical errors, including missing pages. The 1958 Capricorn Books edition and the Oneworld Publications editions are generally considered more reliable. No fully critical scholarly edition exists.

The most common misreading is that Adler is offering a formula for happiness or success — that if you just cooperate and show social interest, everything will work out. In fact, Adler's argument is more diagnostic than prescriptive: he is explaining why certain lives fail, not promising that contribution guarantees fulfillment. Readers also mistake his claim that 'private meanings are no meaning' for a demand for conformity. Adler is not saying everyone must agree; he is saying that a meaning that cannot be shared and tested by others has no claim to validity. The book is a psychological argument, not a self-help manual.