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Life, Meaning and Responsibility

During World War II, millions of people were taken to concentration camps. One of them was Viktor Frankl. He survived and he saw it all: people hauled in trains, families separated. Those who were deemed “weak” were killed. Everything was taken from them: possessions, families, clothes, even their identity and humanity.

Frankl wrote about his experiences in this book. He was a psychiatrist by trade, and this book comes with that perspective. One of his observations was on what prisoners went through. Being a prisoner himself, he observed that a prisoner generally goes through three psychological phases. Upon admission, a prisoner feels shock. On his day-to-day existence, he starts to feel apathy and helplessness. If or when set free, he feels guilt and that things are unreal.

Frankl also observed a difference between those who kept going and those who didn’t. These were people who were strong enough physically but are unaware of their fate. He argued that it may have been that the people who survived had meaning in their lives. Frankl himself kept living with the memory of his wife, even though he did not know if she was still alive. He wrote that he talked to her every day. Her memory provided meaning to his existence.

At a later section, Frankl notes that people can derive meaning from three things: (I) from doing good work, (II) appreciation and love, (III) and facing a fate he cannot change.

In the preface to the 1984 edition, Viktor Frankl wrote, “I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair”. Our day-to-day living seems pale in comparison to the horrors that people of that time went through. And yet how easy is it to fall into, as Thoreau writes, lives of quiet desperation. But maybe we feel this way because we assume life owes us something. And to quote Frankl: “We had to teach the despairing men that, it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly.”