Life-Changing Lessons from Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning

#3 You Can Find Meaning in Work That Feeds Your Soul

Have you ever wondered what the meaning of life is? The pursuit of knowledge, money and power, or maybe its satisfying instinctual pleasures?

Frankl considers meaning the fundamental quest of life. Man’s Search for Meaning narrates the experiences of Viktor E. Frankl — an Austrian psychologist credited with the founding of Logotherapy and a holocaust survivor — in Nazi concertation camps during World War II and describes his discovery of the meaning of pain and suffering from the perspective of a logotherapist.

The book is considered by many a must-read.

It is unrealistic to expect a life full of satisfying and thrilling experiences. Most of the time, it’s not, and the most difficult thing is finding meaning when life sucks.

Sometimes life requires us to grab opportunities and make the best we can of them. Sometimes we are required to bare our cross and bare it bravely. We are required to accept fate. This is the fundamental message in Man’s Search for Meaning.

#1 Only You Can Determine the Meaning of Your Life

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life, he can only respond by being responsible.”

Only you can answer the question of what your life means. Meaning is not a universal standard designated to every soul living in a never-ending spiral of nihilism. Only you can define your life’s meaning.

When our lives lack meaning, hedonism plagues us, and we live for pleasure and nothing else. Whether it’s through excessive alcohol consumption, sex, overeating, and a plethora of other meaningless pleasures that only make us slaves to instinctual desires. This is evident in the book on some prisoners whose will to keep pushing failed them.

No amount of threats would petrify them into resuming the demeaning work at the concertation camps. They had given up; they couldn’t find meaning amid suffering and fell into hedonism. Lying all day in bed (if we call it that) smoking was a revolt against tyranny and life itself.

Viktor writes that often this was the label of a dead man, meaninglessness. Find the meaning of your life, or you will be a slave to your meaningless hedonistic desires.

#2 You Are in Control of Your Inner Discourse

In Auschwitz, everything was taken away from the prisoners, their families, their wealth (if any), their dignity and even their humanity, but their inner discourse remained intact.

Ancient philosophy insists that external entities cannot influence a man’s morals and character unless he allows it. We see the same stoicism in most prisoners in the concertation camps. Even with the horrors of the Nazi monsters, some prisoners remained kind, noble, generous, and loving. They never let pain corrupt them as it does to so many.

Pain and suffering are part of the human experience. Jordan Peterson calls it, ‘The prerequisite for existence.’ It cannot be avoided or controlled. What matters in the face of adversity is our reaction to it.

#3 You Can Find Meaning in Work That Feeds Your Soul

For many of us, the work that feeds us every day is writing. Our thoughts, troubles and worries and simply an expression of beauty give us meaning. For Viktor, a manuscript of a book he had written was the only thing he requested not to be taken from him, but the guards dismissed his request, and he never saw his manuscript again.

Rewriting his book was one of the few things that kept him going. He took notes on small pieces of paper, so he could one day rewrite his book. He imagined himself standing in a lecture hall teaching all the life-changing lessons he had learned in the concertation camps.

A vision that came true. Viktor knew that only he could write that manuscript. Like Viktor, you have your unique work, which only you can do. Something that is uniquely your own.

What task is waiting for me? Answer this question truthfully, and you will find meaning.