My 7 Takeaways from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How

Let me start with something that might seem unrelated at first. One of the reasons why I think we must engage in intense physical exercise is that our lives have become too comfortable. Yes, war, disasters, and poverty are still around. But for most of humanity, food, water, shelter, and clothing are no longer lacking. We no longer struggle to satisfy our basic needs. These days, the urban dwellers, particularly the types that frequent office spaces have the kind of lives where the toughest thing they encounter during the day is getting the wrong type of coffee or being told off by a boss for missing a deadline. The problem is when confronted with true adversity — such as a serious threat to life, or the loss of a loved one, most of us in today’s world simply fall apart.

If you recognize yourself in this not very pleasing description, there are two things you can do. First, introduce little hardship in your life. My choice is Brazilian jiu-jitsu. There are other reasons to practice this particular martial art — see my article on the subject — but this is as good a reason as any.

The other thing you can do is familiarize yourself with the lives of those who have gone through incredible hardship, so you get a bit of a perspective. You can read about the lives of well-known personalities, such as Nelson Mandela who spent 27 years in prison, or the Uruguayan rugby team that had to survive after their plane crashed in the Andes. There are quite a few such stories of surviving war, natural disasters, and fluke accidents. But one of the most impactful stories of this kind is that of Victor Frankl, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps.

Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist. In 1942, he was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp. There, he lost his father to starvation and disease. In 1944, he was among those transported to Auschwitz where he remained until the end of the war. In Auschwitz, Frankl’s mother and brother were killed in the gas chambers. His wife died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen camp. He spent three years in four different concentration camps and it was only when he was freed in 1945 that he learned that all his family members, except his sister, had died.

Frankl not only survived such terrible experiences, but helped others survive, and went on to establish his school of psychotherapy, known as logotherapy. Truly, as Marcus Aurelius said, what stands in the way, becomes the way. Frankl passed away in 1997, after a successful career as a psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer. His book Man’s Search for Meaning is the story of Frankl’s struggle to survive the concentration camps. It has been translated into more than 50 languages and has sold over 16 million copies. In this article, I offer you my main takeaways from this book.

1. How to deal with hardship. Unfortunately, life will bring you some misery sooner or later. As Marcus Aurelius said in Meditations, life is “more like the wrestler’s art than the dancer’s.” Frankl’s life offers a practical example of how to deal with adversity. It doesn’t get any tougher than what he had to go through. Frankl’s main message is that forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you. Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way. How a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life.

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

2. How to find meaning. Frankl expands on this quite a bit and notes that meaning does not just fall on you. You don’t just find it. He suggests a shift in perspective. When pondering our meaning, Frankl says, we often ask ourselves the question of meaning. The problem of meaning is far easier solved when we reverse the question as if it’s being asked of us instead. “We need to stop thinking about the meaning of life and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life, daily and hourly.” Frankl disagreed with both Freud (who suggested life was about a quest for pleasure) and Adler (who thought it was about a quest for power). For Frankl, it is a quest for meaning. But it is a QUEST. You ask the right questions. You take the right actions. You take responsibility to find the right answers to the problems life puts in front of you.

Here is an article I wrote some time ago — Do not Overthink the Meaning of Life. In this article, I argue that rather than finding meaning, we need to focus on creating meaning. I borrow quite a bit from Frankl’s thoughts on the matter to reinforce the point that the big picture is overrated, it is the accumulation of days and weeks that adds up to meaning.

According to Frankl, there are three possible sources of meaning, in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by how we respond to it. So a) create, craft, make something, do work; b) experience love towards something or someone, or c) take a strong attitude toward unavoidable suffering. Frankl goes on to discuss why it is important to nourish one’s inner freedom, embrace the value of beauty in nature, art, poetry, and literature, and feel love for family and friends. He encouraged activities, relationships, and hobbies and noted that even simple pleasures can also give meaning to life.

The convergence of points 1 and 2 is perhaps the main point of Man’s Search for Meaning. That life holds meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.

3. Life goals. Don’t aim at success or happiness. Frankl offers that success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must happen and it only happens as a result of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. You have to let it happen by not caring about it. Try to be good. Try to get good at what you do, whatever it is. This is where Frankl shares his views about having a job. Jobless people are not miserable just because they lack it, but because it is equated with being useless. With having meaningless life. So if you have a job, get good at it. If you don’t, find one. While you are struggling to do that, volunteer. Fill the time you have with maybe unpaid, but meaningful activity.

“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” — Victor Frankl

4. On Love. Frankl embraces love as one of the keys to a meaningful life. In this sense, he goes beyond what stoics’ stand is on this. For Frankl, love goes far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not the object of love is present, whether or not the object of love is still alive at all, ceases to be of importance. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. When it comes to love, Frankl’s idealism can be too much for some, but it is hard to object to the message itself.

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.” — Victor Frankl

5. On Hope. Frankl describes how people died in the camps less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for. Frankl was of the opinion that we could find hope even in the darkest of places as long as we were able to define the meaning in our lives. Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote at the very beginning of this article says it all — He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How. Again, it comes across as very idealistic, but Frankl lived this.

The other extreme people chose sometimes was to develop unrealistic hopes. Frankl described an inmate who convinced himself that he would be freed on a certain date. Up to that moment, this hope helped him survive. But once that date passed, although they were very close to being free, the man died. So, dreams and hopes are all well and good but make sure to manage your expectations a bit.

6. Interesting perspective on envying the young. “Instead of possibilities of future, I have the realities of my past, not only the reality of work done, of love loved but of sufferings bravely suffered”. Frankl’s perspective is oddly similar to an approach I arrived at independently when discussing how hard it is to compete with the younger generation. After I thought about it and tried to remember my own life in my twenties, I just shrugged and said, I don’t see why it is hard. Bring it on, the youngsters, I’m sure it is harder for them than it is for us. And in fact, if you think about it, it is hard to be young. The path ahead of you is far longer than the path behind you. So many options, so many choices, it is easy to be lost. It is hard to be decisive, hard to make the right choice, the right bet in life. Frankl goes even further and says that young people should envy old people. “The old people have the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized — and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.”

7. Critique. Couple of things I would be remiss not to mention:

• I had an uneasy feeling about Man’s Search for Meaning is about turning an experience of a concentration camp into almost a modern-day self-help book. I could not shrug the feeling that there was a bit of salesmanship going on to promote logotherapy — Frankl’s brand of psychotherapy.
• Here is another interesting fact. Frankl spent only a few days in Auschwitz. He was mostly in Kaufering and Theresienstadt. Of course, a concentration camp is a concentration camp. But it is a bit odd that Frankl only mentions Auschwitz in the book. That said, he does say: “Most of the events described here did not take place in the large and famous camps but in the small ones”.

But, as stoics say, there is no perfect man. And that is ok. What we do get from this book though are lessons in resilience, patience, and focus. The message of the book is what matters. Man’s Search for Meaning is a powerful example of how to deal with adversity and in that sense,