(Wo)men’s Search for Meaning
Learn how the book Man’s Search for Meaning applies to everyday life. Discover how your life is influenced by circumstance, yet the freedom of choice is still yours. Read about how you can and will endure more than you think. Realize the darkest of times forces you to look closely at the smallest moments. And how the hardship leads to growth.
Buckle up, this is going to be a long one!
Let me introduce you to A Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl and take you on an exploration into what we can learn from it.
I can’t possibly begin to give this book justice in a simple blog post. There is a lot to unpack, and it’s already lengthy. The topics, the layers, the depth of this brilliant work are something you have to experience for yourself (link at the bottom!). I also did not want to turn this into a straight-up book review. But what I do want to accomplish with this is to show you that finding meaning in your life, in every situation is possible. And that you can achieve this even in the most desolate of days.
So why this book?
I was forced to read this masterpiece for philosophy when I was obtaining my bachelor’s degree. I was in my young twenties, and the last thing I wanted to do was read a dry, boring book that I willingly paid someone else to force me to do. Worse yet, I had to read it and answer weekly questions while I was on vacation in Croatia. I was dreading it.
But I ended up being consumed by it.
So much so, that I still talk about it every few months, and I’m well into my thirties. And the more I listen to podcasts aimed at growth and development, the more I realize how life-changing it is for countless people. How does this one human being find the will to keep living while imprisoned in not one, but four different concentration camps? It blew my mind. He could find the purpose, the meaning in every situation he suffered through. The situations didn’t get better, they got much worse. Losing family members, not knowing where his wife was, having his manuscript and life’s work destroyed, being stripped of everything including his name. Yet, he still went on. He found humor, kindness, and purpose through all of it. This being an extreme example, I wanted to find ways to relate this to today. How we can learn from his perseverance and perspective.
The darkest of times force you to look closely at the smallest moments.
The small moments of our day-to-day lives get hidden and buried from the necessity of more pressing issues. Work demands and home responsibilities are the biggest departments where our time is spent. We rarely have a spare minute to really embrace the little moments we share throughout the day in our interactions. A hug from a child, a thank you from a stranger, a phone call from someone we haven’t talked to in a while. Instead, we skim past these moments because we are too busy looking ahead at what else we need to do. What else is on that task list, checklist, grocery list, you name it. But when you are forced to slow down, you will see it and you will appreciate it. If you lost your job and it was no longer commanding your attention, that phone call could be just what you needed. Let’s learn from this. Let’s take time to purposely slow down, and appreciate what we often glance over. It might be just what saves you when you need it most, and you don’t even know it.
Your life is influenced by circumstance, but the freedom to choose is still yours.
“It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.” -Viktor E. Frankl
You can find purpose and meaning in every situation. Frankl was faced with constant beatings, starvation, atrocious living conditions, and threatened with death over and over again. But through it all, he realized that man can and will survive if they have a strong reason to live. If they have a purpose, a meaning that motivates them to keep on living through their circumstances. It’s a choice you have the freedom to make, a choice that you get to decide. You may be influenced by a situation, but you are still in control of how you handle it, what it does to you, and how you come out of it. The choice is yours. Will it drown you or drive you?
You can and will endure more than you think.
“If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.” -Viktor E. Frankl
You will find that what you think your breaking point is, isn’t really it. That you can and will endure much more than you believe you are capable of. That when you are faced with a situation that seems impossible, you will shatter through it. Frankl and his fellow prisoners were stripped of everything from their names to every last hair on their bodies. And yet Frankl still found a way to endure. Because he was still free to choose how he reacted, how he let his situation affect him. He chose not to let it break him entirely. This is an extreme situation and my very shallow review of a tragic story, but I want to solidify the point that you can and will endure more than you think.
Think of this basic scenario that I’m sure most of us have experienced. On more than one occasion, I bet you believed you couldn’t give more to your workout. That your “I can’t” was really “I won’t”. We believe the lie we tell ourselves in our mind and then our body follows suit. The reality of it is that what you think is your breaking point is actually just you giving up. It’s you not wanting to be uncomfortable so you justify quitting. Your mind made the decision to impose an arbitrary limit and your body listened. But what would have happened if you shattered past what you thought was that breaking point and endured being uncomfortable to push yourself? I bet you would have dug down deep and realized that you can and you will endure past what you believed yourself capable of.
A quick but important sidebar: When I use the term “suffering”, I’m referring to the simplistic definition of “the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship”. I am in no way comparing, downplaying, or taking lightly the suffering on a global scale and what humanity faced in history, faces today, and will face tomorrow. And nor should you. Everyone suffers and you should not feel guilty about your hardships or make another person feel guilty because you think their suffering isn’t big enough. You are suffering from an inflated sense of self-importance if you think you have that right. I suggest you make that the first thing you work on shattering. You’re welcome.
Now with that out of the way, we move on…
Suffering is a part of living. It will change you. Don’t be mistaken, it will take pieces of you. But you are strong enough that you won’t let your suffering destroy you. You will not break, you will bend. It will chip away pieces of you in the process, but it’s chipping away to reveal something better on the other side of suffering. Remember what Friedrich Nietzsche said: he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. Find your why, and you will certainly figure out how to endure. There is beauty in the breakdown, and there is something magical on the other side of what you think is your breaking point.
Hardship turns into experience, experience turns into growth.
Because he continued on, because he found meaning in his suffering, he not only stayed alive but found a deeper understanding of human psychology. His hardship turned into experience, and he used the experience to grow and continue his work to change lives. He lived three years in those concentration camps. Let me repeat that, THREE YEARS. And he managed to grow through the suffering. His experience is a lesson to all of us that we got this. We have the ability within us already to overcome any obstacle. We just need to utilize it properly. That if we challenge ourselves to find purpose and meaning in life, we can survive anything.
The suffering can be temporary. In our day-to-day lives, we have the power. We decide how our hardships affect us. We decide what to learn from these experiences. And we decide how and if we will grow from them. Sometimes all it takes is a change in perspective, a clearer focus, a shift in thinking to get there. But it doesn’t stop there. You have an obligation to share it with the world. You can be the light in the dark for someone else. You can help someone else find their why, so they can figure out the how.
::MIC DROP::
This book is deep.
It will inspire your philosophical soul, tug at your empathetic heartstrings, and have you Googling more about Logotherapy.
Do yourself a favor and get a copy!
Until next week,
References
https://www.supersummary.com/mans-search-for-meaning/summary/
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/man-s-search-for-meaning/summary
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3389674-trotzdem-ja-zum-leben-sagen-ein-psychologe-erlebt-das-konzentrationslag
