“In the mood for some light reading, huh?” my wife asked.
I chuckled, glancing at the book in my hands: Man’s Search for Meaning. Nazi death camps. Torture. Existentialism. Nothing better to calm the senses before bed.
For those unacquainted, the author, Viktor Frankl, was an Austrian psychiatrist who endured Nazi concentration camps for three years. After the camps, where he lost his wife, father, mother, and brother, he practiced psychiatry for the rest of his life, writing about his philosophy throughout.
By the mid-1900s, he was concerned that many people didn’t have a purpose, that nihilism had taken their souls (boy, how he’d react if he saw our social media feeds). His observation—one he witnessed in the camps and after—was that people were disappointed with what life had given them. His contention was this: “… it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
We make meaning from our circumstance; circumstance doesn’t make our meaning. Responsibility, Frankl believed, was how we earned our meaning. Once we had meaning, we could endure anything… which to me, sounds a lot more useful (and fun) than pretending our actions don’t matter.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
(P.S. Why should we take the leap of faith toward a life we love? If I’m betting on anything in this world, it’s that my cat has the answer, one I went searching for in an essay I wrote this week.)
