The Real Meaning of Life Lies in Whatever Life Gives You, Says Viktor Frankl

A simple purpose protects you from suffering.

Viktor Frankl was so lucky he survived Auschwitz and three other concentration camps. This 30-something Jewish doctor also lost his parents and wife in one.

But the atrocities of war still didn’t break him. In fact, his experience might have inspired him to revolutionize psychiatry and embrace life until the age of 92.

Nowadays we know him as the father of logotherapy. It is a cognitive therapy that helps you deal with the hardships by clinging to the meaning you give to your life. It’s not something you discover in your soul, but in how you interpret events around you. This very attitude helped Frankl survive the Holocaust.

He firmly believed you can turn your suffering into an accomplishment with a few psychological techniques. One of them is paradoxical intention.

Paradoxical Intention: Cure Your Angst by Laughing at Your Neurotic Fear

This technique works best against obsessions and anticipatory anxiety.

It makes you want to do what you are most afraid of. If you’re scared of blushing when around others, then try to blush as red as you can. If you’re afraid you won’t be able to fall asleep, try not to sleep at all!

The point is to engage in your unease and see you’re still alive after it. Try to intentionally do and even exaggerate it. Be ironic, ridicule your anxiety, laugh at your paralyzing fear. This way you’ll decrease how serious your situation is. Paradoxical intention helps you stop expecting the worst, so you won’t get even more anxious about it.

Another technique is to be positive when everything is falling apart.

Tragic Optimism: Acknowledge You Are Suffering but Also Find Meaning and Hope in It

With Frankl’s logotherapy, you look for a reason to be happy. It’s what helped our great-grandparents survive poverty and wars, and what most young people are missing today.

Now 20-somethings have enough to live by but nothing to live for. The no-future generation feels their life is meaningless, so they succumb to immediate pleasure. But you can’t find lasting happiness in drugs, sex with strangers, and heaps of money either.

According to Frankl, the meaning of life isn’t universal and never-changing. You come to your purpose in whatever life gives you. This Austrian found it in a psychology manuscript he intended to publish before he got dragged to Auschwitz. The idea of it gave him hope in the concentration camps.

To turn your suffering into achievement, accept reality as it is. Then take action when you can and look forward to something bright every day. Having a purpose saves you.

Stay Away from Existential Vacuum: Meaninglessness Ruins Your Life

Nowadays a big part of who you are is how good you are at your job. When you don’t have one, unemployment neurosis comes banging at your door.

You believe there’s no meaning left, and so you feel desperate and hopeless. Frankl called this emptiness — an existential vacuum. But it takes very little to turn a distressed man into an optimist. The psychologist realized that even when young people volunteered and got no money, they were still happier than when they did nothing.

Existential vacuum brings you to either depression, aggression, or alcoholism.

Luckily, there’s a cure for them all. When you find the meaning in something you do, you find zeal. You stop drinking and diffuse your anger. And you don’t go around molesting others if you take on a task bigger than yourself or share a purpose with someone else. The meaning is always there to lift you up.

Three Ways to Find the Meaning of Life

People we admire aren’t the most accomplished ones but those who go through turbulence with their heads held high. All of them have one thing in common: They have something to live for.

Here are three ways you can find that “something” based on Frankl’s teaching:

1. Work with a purpose

As we said, Frankl didn’t give up on life in the camps because he wanted to complete the manuscript he had started before deportation.

You can make a piece of furniture, write a master’s thesis, or give your things to charity. The whole point is to create some work or do a deed and make it all worthwhile.

2. Love

While he was digging soil in the cold, Frankl imagined his absent wife talking to him. In his mind’s eye, she was smiling and that gave him the reason to live and the determination to see her again.

The power of real connection exceeds all the money and sex with strangers. Experience something or encounter somebody. Try to truly understand someone and form a meaningful relationship.

3. Courage to deal with difficulty

Frankl realized that those who were dying in Auschwitz weren’t the sickest. They were people who got so depressed they refused to dig the frozen ground. They could not handle their everyday reality anymore.

Even if you are powerless and face tragedy, you can rise above yourself with the meaning. They can take everything away from you, but they can’t take how you’ll react to the circumstances.

The Meaning Always Saves You

According to Frankl, the meaning is so powerful that young people should envy the old: Yes, the elderly don’t have too many opportunities in front of them but they have so much more.

They have potentialities they’ve actualized and the meanings they’ve fulfilled. And nothing, not even numerous ages behind them can remove those actualizations. They are fulfilled.

Your mind can also find your actualizations and protect you from the cruelest reality:

• If you are paralyzed with fear, try to mock it. The more you see its funny side, the more you’ll find freedom from it.
• Accept the suffering and while it lasts, look forward to something better.
• Try to find the meaning in your current environment so you don’t get sucked into an existential vacuum.
• Go after purpose, love, and courage. Those who are truly happy, see their difficulty as a growth experience:

“I broke my neck but it didn’t break me.” — Viktor Frankl

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