Man’s Search for Meaning

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl

Finding meaning in my life has been a focus since my diagnosis. I sought out this take on the subject by a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor; here are my responses and recollections from the book.

Confronted with even the most brutal suffering, people are able to choose their own response to it. This choice, the effort to choose your own way to be in the face of suffering, is one way to give your life meaning. There are some alternatives: achieving meaning through accomplishments or experiences or through devotion to the love of others. The will to seek pleasure and the will to seek power are both short lived and disappointing aims, never to be truly fulfilled. The will to meaning, when pursued, becomes the purpose of life, a journey that is complete at the moment of death.

Life is suffering, there is no life without suffering. When suffering can be avoided, the moral choice is to avoid it. When it cannot, the moral choice is to bear it in the best way we can. There is no unavoidable suffering that cannot be viewed through the lens of the opportunity to transform oneself for the better.

The conventional view of the passing of time is that we are saying goodbye to opportunities to choose new experiences for ourselves, that aging is a process of loss. An opposing view is that the future consists of potentialities that we must choose between whereas the past consists of actualities that we have chosen, have experienced and this past is safe, it cannot be taken away. It is a form of richness.

Since my diagnosis, I have sought out books (or maybe they have sought me out) that have helped me to adjust and cope. I’ve tried to summarise what I took from reading that book at that time.