Merton’s journey throughout this book can appeal to a wide audience because it is a journey most people undertake at some point. His life poses repeatedly, sometimes despairingly, and often with wonder: What is the purpose of life? Merton’s search for meaning leads him down many paths, some which meander from what he eventually identifies as his purpose and others which catapult him forward, and by tracking this search for meaning, Merton creates a core theme that can resonate with readers, regardless of religious background.

In some of his lower points, while indulging in vices and engaging behaviors that didn’t serve him as a young adult, he “sees himself as “a true child of the modern world completely tangled up in petty and useless concerns with myself, and almost incapable of even considering or understanding anything that was really important to my own true interests” (181). He recognizes how self-centered his ideology was, and ironically, because his life orbited his most base interests and not his core values, he lacked self-awareness while being all too concerned with himself. This contempt for modern values is something echoed in other times when he hits new lows:

I imagined that I was free.