Man's Search For Meaning

Viktor Frankl was wont to only half-jokingly extol American audiences to complement the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast with a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. It would be a much better use for the island of Alcatraz, would it not? I recently finished reading his best known work, Man's Search for Meaning, and found it to be as insightful as advertised. Frankl was a Viennese psychologist before his society decided that he did not have value and sent him off to a concentration camp. There he saw in enhanced relief the ideas he'd been developing about man's need for purpose to survive. His first day in the camp the manuscript of his book he was writing was taken from him, and his need to write that book was one of the things which gave his life enough meaning to make survival worthwhile.

Of course most of the people who died in concentration camps during World War II did not die because their lives had no meaning to them, but because their lives had no meaning to the society in which they lived. Frankl speaks to this somewhat, but in this book he mainly focuses on those who were not killed outright but forced to live an awful and uncertain existence. The concentration camp setting is merely an easily understandable metaphor for horrible circumstances which can exist in any persons' life, which is why the lessons of this book are so valuable. Loved ones die, jobs are lost, markets crash, accidents happen, etc. and they can all be psychologically disruptive if one loses something upon which one pinned their raison d'être. If one's wife is their purpose for life and tomorrow she dies, then one no longer has anything to live for.

I chose to read this book this week because I recently experienced a tragic loss: my free range flock of 26 chickens was reduced to 8 in a single afternoon by a predator. One of the things that gets me out of bed every morning is my farm chores - the animals that depend on me and provide me with food and fertilizer in return. Yes, I have children, a wife, a job, goals, and a whole host of other things to live for, but I've invested a lot of time and effort in raising and caring for these chickens. Maxwell invested money buying egg cartons and was selling the extra eggs for money. I had breeding plans for the Spring which are not really possible anymore. Getting me out of the bed in the dark of the morning was also something that the chickens gave me. Yes, I know it sounds a bit trite saying that reading Frankl's book about surviving the Holocaust helped me cope intellectually with the loss of a dozen and a half birds, but I don't think he would have found it so. Frankl, when asked to encapsulate the meaning of his own life in a single sentence, wrote "The meaning of my life is to help others find the meaning of theirs".