Book Summary: Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl
About the Author: Victor Frankl (1905-1997) was an Austrian neurologist-psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps in WWII.
About the Book: After the tragic ordeal, Frankl goes on to write Man’s Search for Meaning, which takes his experiences at the Nazi concentration camps and combines them with his life’s work as a psychiatrist. The ideas he sets forth in Man’s Search for Meaning provide timeless and universal insights you may find useful.
Brief Summary: Frankl’s book covers his personal experiences in the concentration camps, why be believes some prisoners lived and others died (despite each having similar access to resources), what your one inalienable freedom is, the risk of mental health struggles in a futuristic world where robots and AI run things, and he takes aim at one of life’s BIG questions, “What gives us meaning?”
Outline
While the book has 3 sections (if you include the post script), I’ve broken it out further into the 5 key themes with excerpts taken from the book:
On Concentration Camps
"The odds of surviving any camp were roughly one in twenty-eight."
Approximately six million Jews died from the Holocaust.
“If you want to stay alive, look fit for work. So shave, stand, and walk smartly, and look fit for work.”
Regarding enduring the seemingly unendurable, he quotes Dostoevsky (himself having suffered through Siberian labor camps), “Yes, man can get used to anything, just don’t ask us how.”
“Prisoners dreamt mostly of bread, cake, cigarettes, and a warm bath.”
“I remember drawing up a kind of balance sheet of pleasures one day and finding that in many, many past weeks I had experienced only two pleasurable moments.”
“The meager pleasures of camp life allowed a sort of freedom from suffering. Meager pleasures like a cigarette, peas in an otherwise liquid soup, and a delousing before bed. In a 3 week period, it was common to only have 2 such pleasurable moments.”
On Suffering and Hope
“The most depressing part for prisoners was thinking about the uncertainty surrounding how long they would be in camps. Because of this, man wasn’t able to aim for the ultimate goal in life and ceased living for the future. Man who had lost faith in his future was doomed, and he let himself decline and become the subject of mental and physical decay.”
“Man lives by looking towards his future. And this is his rescue in his most difficult moments of existence.”
“Getting men to recognize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. “
“He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”— Nietzsche
This quote appeared in one form or another several times. Hope for one’s future may help one bear seemingly insurmountable challenges and burdens of life.
According to Frankl, prisoners who decided on a ”why” to live (God, friends, family, life-work, better future) were less likely to succumb to an internal surrender, which quickly turned into death.
“To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic, rather than heroic.”
Frankl argues there is real suffering and manufactured suffering.
For example, one may be haunted by thoughts like “I’ll be a failure”, “They’ll laugh at me”, “I’m not smart enough” or “I'll be humiliated”. But it turns out these negative thoughts come up way more often in the mind, than in reality.
Similar notions (not taken from Frankl’s book):
“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice.” — Amos Tversky
“There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality“— Seneca
On Our One Inalienable Right
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
A core idea: This internal “ground”, i.e. one’s choice in attitude towards a given situation, may never be surrendered. According to Frankl, an internal surrender quickly turned into death for many prisoners.
“Man’s unique opportunity lies in the unique way he bears his burdens.”
Frankl argues we may always choose how we wish to respond to any given situation, and that no one else may rob us of this.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation – just think of an incurable disease or inoperable cancer – we are challenged to change ourselves.”
The essence of this idea echoes throughout history in varying forms.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world”. — Ghandi
“If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.” — Maya Angelou
In summary, new points of view should be considered in trying times.
On Where to Find Meaning
Work/Deeds
This may be freely chosen work, doing a deed, or accomplishing things one finds important.
“The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.”
For example, organizing a community trash pick-up, learning an instrument, cooking a new meal, learning to code, acting in a play, volunteering at the local shelter, giving blood.
Loving Someone or Loving Experiences
We may love and spend time with God, family, friends, or community.
We may love truth, goodness, nature, solving problems, culture, beauty, art, etc.
Attitude We Choose Towards Unavoidable Suffering
We always retain the ability to choose how to respond to a given situation, and this is the last freedom if we ever find seemingly everything else taken from us.
On Technology Advancement, Unemployment, and Well-Being
“And these problems are growing increasingly crucial, for progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker. The pity of it is that many of these will not know what to do with all their newly acquired free time.“
“I called it unemployment neurosis. And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold identification: 1) being jobless was equated with being useless, and 2) being useless was equated to having a meaningless life.”
According to Frankl, in a futuristic society where our needs are fulfilled by artificial intelligence paired with robots, at least one risk is unhappiness in those who would otherwise feel purpose or meaning in work or good deeds. That world could be plagued by more unhappiness than we’d initially suspect.
For example, if my 20 year-old, single-self didn’t have to learn or work because of highly advanced tech, this younger version probably couldn’t help spending way more time “with friends” playing fun (addictive) video games like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo II, or Everquest. With no weekday grind standing in his way and with little “demanded” of him, he’d just want to seek out fun.
While a futuristic world like this could come off as more fun, it remains unproven we’d obtain any life satisfaction from it—ah, there’s the rub! Because any part of us that looks back at our life and wishes to hold a high opinion of ourselves may object to a sole life of leisure.
“I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, homeostasis, i.e. a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”
Is it better to float with the tide, or to swim towards a goal?
“Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing them, end them?…” — Shakespeare
Summary
Victor Frankl, drawing on his tragic experiences from the Nazi concentration and psychiatry, offers insights that you may find helpful or allow you to cope in trying times.
Hope for the future was a reason that people survived longer in the concentration camps.
Your last freedom, which no one can take from you, is how you choose to respond to a given situation. And your “response” may solely be an internal one.
Three ways for you to find meaning: Loving work or good deeds, loving others and/or loving experiences, and the attitude you take towards unavoidable suffering.
In a futuristic world run by robots and artificial intelligence (allowing humankind to live a life of leisure), Frankl is skeptical that it wouldn’t be plagued by low life satisfaction. There seems to be a part of you that wants to have a high opinion of the life you lived, which might be at odds with a world where robots do all the work.