Abstract:

The aim of the paper is to point out to the facts that accompany all of us throughout our lives, and thus significantly influence the quality of our lives. We focus on the area that is relevant to the basic human motive “to experience one’s life as meaningful”. The extent to which a man is successful when looking for a sense of his/her own existence gets reflected on his/her overall health, his/her effort to achieve a certain goal and his/her action.

We present some findings from our recent research study focused on revealing the level of (subjectively) experienced meaningfulness of one’s own life obtained on a sample of Czech elementary school teachers and students of pedagogical studies. One of the aims of the realized study resided in the strive for finding out the connection (relationship) between experiencing the meaningfulness of life and age and sex of the probants. The set of interest included 120 persons in total (60 men and 60 women, out of which half were the teachers and the other half were the students). Our focus on the job of a teacher was motivated by the fact that the character of the teachers’ psyche functioning and the integrity of a teacher’s personality are extremely important in their influence on the young generation.

The level of experiencing the meaningfulness of one’s personal life was quantified (assessed) by means of two psychological methods – the Logo Test by E. Lukas and the Existential Scale designed by the authors A. Längle, Ch. Orgler and M. Kundi.

We assumed that the variables of our interest in this paper, i.e. “age” and “sex/gender” are significant for the quality of experiencing of an authentic existence. The data obtained and their statistical analysis have proven this assumption to be true for the “age” variable. More specifically, the higher was the age of the respondents, the higher (stronger) was the quality of their life meaningfulness experiencing. In other words, the teachers from practice have shown a significantly stronger meaningfulness of their lives (in its experiencing) when compared to students. This was tested on the 1% level of significance. Hence, it can be concluded that younger people are more likely to be threatened by noogenous difficulties. The significance of the differences between men and women was only “outlined” in the data analysis (suggested as a trend), being significant only with 10-% level of significance. Hence, this factor can be regarded insignificant.

Experiencing one’s personal life as completely filled with its sense can be regarded as a core of every human action. It is a fundamental condition for the resilience of a personality and for his/her mental health. Every-day reflection of the reality of life and self-reflection enable the unique experiencing the active participation in one’s own life, perception of the life’s values, possibilities, challenges and experiencing the responsibility for solving every-day situations. The absence of such sense experiencing, on the contrary, leads to feeling the internal emptiness, anxiety, discontentment, spleen or boredom, which leads to resignation and to the passive withstand of the circumstances. Alternatively, it can also lead to the development of pragmatism and de-humanization of the life values.

Keywords:

Sense of life, quality of life, integrity of a personality, mental health, personality of a teacher.