meaningfuel

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I first purchased this book before I visited Krakow and ultimately Auschwitz in 2017.

I was looking to read something that gave an individual voice to a place notorious for the incomprehensible scale of its own inhumanity.

While it details the suffering of Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist and others, it serves and provides a much greater purpose.

He writes about the suffering of jews and other minorities in concentration camps throughout World War Two. By his own admission, we can never truly comprehend it unless we’ve shared a similar experience.

The writing is graphic, harrowing and at times insufferable. It is not an easily digested read. The inhumanity feels alien to us as he said it would.

He pushes deeper and writes about the purpose and meaning of suffering. When so many people would say there can be no way to interpret such harrowing experiences, he introduces ‘logotherapy’; his fundamental argument that the central purpose to one’s life is to search for meaning.

To Frankl, this internal strife for purpose was the difference between some men surviving and others perishing in Nazi death camps.

Suffering is a certainty in life, we are completely at it’s mercy. Our only element of control is how we understand our pain and our attitude to it. This he argues, is how we endure and ultimately move forward.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

It is of course tragic that such helpful lessons in understanding our purpose in life have had to emerge from incomprehensible pain. But that is ultimately Frankl’s point.

Do not be intimidated by the notion that the author is a celebrated psychiatrist.

He is first and foremost a human being who survived a world built to enslave, starve, dehumanise and ultimately murder him. He was armed with nothing but his own consciousness.

The book is very short by modern standards and is written to be understood but much of its content mean it can never be loved.

To anybody struggling, lost without purpose, this book encourages you to embrace and understand the pain. To overcome.

Therein is perhaps your purpose in life.