“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”
I picked up this audiobook after watching a recommendation by Jenn Im - 6 books to make you smarter.
The book was written in the 50s. Many of the concepts in this book are familiar, as they have been distilled into numerous books and cultural references.
Viktor Frankl was a World War II concentration camp survivor.
He used the experiences and observations in the concentration camp to refine and develop Logotherapy - a therapeutic means to find personal meaning in life. This book isn’t meant to be a detailed study of Logotherapy. Instead, it introduces the reader to why the search for meaning in one's life makes sense when dealing with various Psychological Neuroses.
The book is divided into two parts -
- In the first part, Frankl describes the various psychological states that a prisoner goes through in a concentration camp - from incarceration to liberation.
- In the second part, he outlines multiple high-level concepts that form the basis of Logotherapy.
The concepts that stood out to me as takeaways are -
- Apathy
- Apathy Reinforcement
- An Appreciation of Food and Nature
- Passage of Time
- Case Studies in the Search for Meaning
Apathy
“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
When Viktor Frankl enters life in the concentration camp, he and his fellow prisoners go through several initial stages of adjustment. Life in the camp became increasingly challenging - lack of food, gas chamber if ill, typhus outbreaks. The hope of freedom became increasingly remote.
It is at this point that some prisoners reach a stage of Apathy. They lost all interest in survival.
Extreme apathy occurred when a prisoner refused to move from their bed of straw and lit their last cigarette. This prisoner was expected to die within the next 48 hours.
However, Frankl also shares examples of prisoners who rose above apathy when they had something to look forward to after being liberated - a home, a family, a beloved. Thus, Apathy was not universal. Some prisoners held on to their ideals and shared their bread.
Apathy Reinforcement
Frankl notes that a prisoner continues to remain apathetic even after liberation.
They don’t feel any emotional uplift or happiness. The initial moments of walking outside the camp and encountering wildlife and a field of flowers were met with indifference.
Frankl attributes this to years of negative reinforcement.
Appreciation for Food and Nature
Food
When the prisoners were alone - they would ask each other about their favorite food and how they would cook it when liberated. Such talk about food was done with fondness.
Nature
Prisoners would have an elevated appreciation of nature. Even amid grueling work detail, they would often draw the attention of a fellow prisoner towards a beautiful view of nature or a beautiful sunset.
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| Landscape with a Woodland Pool - Albrecht Durer |
Passage of Time
I cannot do any more justice than the following quote that describes how a person who has found meaning reacts to the passage of time.
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?
No, thank you,' he will think. 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
Case Studies in the Search for Meaning
“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.”
There is no easy way to provide an abstract answer to the meaning of life. The author describes the question as akin to asking a chess player for the winning moves before the game has finished. The answer is different for every person.
Frankl shared two cases that stood out to me
- The mother who tried to commit suicide with her crippled son
- The Rabbi who felt despondent with life because he was childless after losing all his children in a concentration camp, and despite remarrying
In both these cases, Frankl pointed out aspects of the subjects’ lives that caused them to reconsider and redefine their meaning of life.