Man's Search for Meaning

"it's real similar — like the thicker version of that. Gulag Archipelago light would be Man's Search for Meaning."

"Incredibly inspiring."

"Frankl's exploration of finding meaning amidst suffering aligns with Lex Fridman's deep dives into human consciousness, resilience, and the philosophical underpinnings of existence, often discussed on his podcast. It's an expected read for someone exploring the human condition alongside AI's future."

"Yes. It’s an interesting contrast to Delbo. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He spent very little time in Auschwitz; in fact, he was in Theresienstadt, the supposed ‘model ghetto’ for the Red Cross inspection. Then he was deported to Auschwitz where he spent only a short period of time because he was selected for labour. He spent most of the rest of the war in a sub-camp of Dachau in Bavaria. It’s a highly contentious account because he is held to have been somewhat complicit. To what extent is not at all clear, but he certainly made compromises and survived through both his medical expertise and the privileged positions that he was able to hold. What’s interesting about his account, which I found absolutely fascinating, is the way he explores the importance of meaning in life as the key to survival. Before the war, he had been an academic specialist in suicide. His main practice had been helping people who were contemplating and at risk of committing suicide, trying to work with them to find ways of giving their life meaning, so they didn’t kill themselves. And he’d been quite successful in some of the techniques he used. One of the ways in which he found meaning while a prisoner was observing how other people reacted and responded to the conditions, and the ways some were more psychologically resilient than others. Delbo, by comparison, makes it quite clear that better physical conditions and luck made all the difference between surviving or not, dying from typhus or dysentery or not. She emphasizes that aspect a lot, as well as the mutual support within her resistance group. Frankl looks more at the inner life and how the use of your mind can give meaning to life and give you a ray of hope in the darkness. He talks about, for example, the way in which he holds mental conversations with his young wife, who would have just turned 24 on the day after his arrival in Auschwitz. She didn’t survive, but through the rest of the war he didn’t know that. He had imagined conversations with her and mentally he took himself to another place. He took pleasure in what he could, like a ray of sunshine coming through the clouds, or thinking about light in the darkness and then suddenly seeing a farm house’s lights turn on as they were returning from work. He’s looking at how the inner life could assist in survival, which I think is extraordinarily interesting, although it’s not a sufficient explanation by any means. There’s a memoir called Prisoners of Fear by another survivor from Vienna, Ella Lingens-Reiner, who was a medical doctor imprisoned for trying to save Jews. She talks very much about just being in a more privileged position: not having her hair shaved, not having a number tattooed on her arm, not being so fully dehumanized, having slightly better rations, being respected for her intellectual and technical expertise as a medical doctor. She comments on how Eastern European Jews who had lived very hard lives as peasants were able to withstand the ordeal better than Western European Jews who’d had bourgeois existences and didn’t have the same kind of survival skills. There are many, many other things going on, but I find Victor Frankl’s account very fascinating. Frankl doesn’t talk about that so much as his critics do. His critics point out that he had managed not to be deported until quite late, and when he was in Theresienstadt, he had certain privileges. But he’s not actually as interested in that aspect as he is in the inner life. It’s about how meaning can give you psychological sustenance. If I compare it to some of the non-published interview testimonies, there are several survivors who talk about what gave them faith in humanity being as important as the physical support they received. People say when they were on the death march, lying starving and dying on the back of the railway wagon or on a truck passing through Prague, Czechs threw them pieces of bread from a bridge above where they were stationary. One of them says that, at first, he felt humiliated at being seen so emaciated and dejected and in rags. He thought the people leaning over and talking were just jeering at them. Then, a moment later, these people came back and threw down some bread, and he suddenly realized the people had been discussing how they could help, had gone back to get some bread and then thrown it over to them. This little gesture of moral support made an enormous difference to his sense of a common humanity out there. It gave him a belief that he would be welcomed back into the land of the living. There’s another story of a guy who subsequently became a psychoanalyst in the States. He described himself as a non-religious Jew; he was of Jewish descent, but totally secular in outlook. Yet when it came to Yom Kippur, he decided to fast along with the religious Jews because, even though they were starving, it was a kind of act of defiance to refuse the Nazi imposition of a dehumanized category on them. They weren’t just animals—they could still choose to observe religious rituals from their forefathers. This endowed the world with a significance that was not the one bestowed upon it by the Nazis. I think that was very psychologically important, and it’s something that Frankl’s account points to."

"Frankl’s time in concentration camps in occupied Europe was enlightening for him, in the sense that he came to understand something very important about human motivation and what gives life meaning. One of the things he noticed amongst his fellow camp inmates was that those who were most likely to survive were not the biggest and strongest or those who could best scramble for bread, but those who had what he called a “will to meaning”. In other words, they had a project in their lives, a future goal which kept them going. He quotes Nietzsche , who said that “he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how”. That was really the core of what Frankl discovered. For instance, he met a man who, before he was captured, was in the middle of writing a scientific textbook. What kept this man alive all those years in the camp was the fact that he hadn’t yet finished. Because he was the only person who could write this textbook, he wanted to stay alive to complete it. So Frankl is telling us that if you’ve got a great project in life, it can drive you and keep you going through all the pains and sorrows and joys of everyday living. Frankl in fact founded a school of therapy called logotherapy, which he felt could be applied to everybody in their lives. I’ve noticed while teaching in The School of Life that there’s a great hunger among people for finding a vocation or project that can drive their lives. People understand that having some greater goal can give life meaning. You also find this in the work of the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the psychology of “flow”. And of course you find it in Aristotle, who said that to live without a goal in life is a mark of much folly. That’s right. I think there are two great lessons here for the art of living. One is that meaning comes from nurturing relationships, whether it’s with lovers, family or strangers. You can cook yourself the most wonderful gourmet meal night after night, but unless you’re sharing it with someone it’s not going to give you much enjoyment after a while. A second lesson is to practice the art of giving. Pursuing self-interest is a natural part of us, but it isn’t enough. To step outside the boundaries of your own ego by giving to others is incredibly fulfilling. Certainly when I’ve interviewed people about their lives, particularly elderly people, it’s those who have given a lot to others – whether to local communities or by dedicating themselves to some great cause like women’s rights or climate change – who have felt the most satisfied in life. The art of living is as much about changing how we think of life as about changing what we do. Let’s take a very simple example, like being stressed out about time. This is a very common malady in everyday life. But just changing the way that we think about time can liberate ourselves from our high stress, high velocity lifestyle. To think ourselves more into the present. To change our metaphors, for example, talking about our leisure time as “time on” instead of “time off”, to give it more value. It’s about changing the way we think at quite a deep level. Equally, one of the reasons why I emphasise the importance of empathy is because stepping into someone’s shoes and seeing life through their eyes can change our world view, change what we think is important in life, what we think are our priorities and what we think about our options. Much as I like Frankl, I think that conception of love is simplistic. I am an adherent of the Ancient Greek way of thinking about love – that we need to become more sophisticated by thinking about and nurturing the many different varieties of love. Today we have one word for love. We use that same word to sign an email – “lots of love” – yet we whisper “I love you” over a romantic meal. The Ancient Greeks were much more complex in the art of loving. They had one word, eros , for sexual love and sexual passion. They had another word, philia , for deep comradely friendship. Another word, pragma , was about the mature love between long-married couples – about giving love as well as receiving it, and compromise. There was agape , their concept of selfless love, which is where we got our word “charity”, from caritas which was the Latin translation of agape . And there was philautia , which is self-love – the idea that we need to nurture a healthy self-love. And the sixth kind is ludos , playful love. I think that nurturing these varieties of love is the way to lead a much more complex and deep emotional life. The idea of “all we need is love” – whether it’s Frankl or the Beatles or [psychiatrist] M Scott Peck – it’s not enough, it’s too simplistic an analysis. We need to be much more sophisticated in the art of loving, and that’s why we need to look to the past. I love this quote from Goethe: “He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living from hand to mouth.” So we need to go right back to Ancient Greece to find the wisdom for how to live today."

"I chose this book because it’s an incredibly powerful and moving example of what existentialist thought can actually be for in real life, what good it can do, how it can help people. Viktor Frankl was a concentration camp survivor and a psychotherapist and psychologist. Just after the war he wrote a book which has been translated as Man’s Search for Meaning . (The original title translates as Saying Yes to Life Anyway: A Psychologist Survives the Concentration Camp .) In it, he tells the story of his experience and how you can maintain your inner freedom and your human identity in the face of a situation that is designed to completely destroy and demolish all human dignity. It’s almost impossible to do, and he doesn’t say ‘This is the recipe for how I did it’ — he just explores the ways in which fragments of purpose and of meaning in human life kept him going. He also writes about his experience after the end of the war, when he started to write about psychology and existentialist psychology, which he was one of the founders of. That was equally difficult, finding meaning in a world after all meaning has been destroyed, and all human dignity has been dismantled. In dealing with patients who present with various kinds of depression or a sense of meaninglessness, Frankl concludes that it’s all about looking at the ways in which people construct meaning and purpose in their lives. Again, this reverses the usual way of understanding human existence. We are not just sets of symptoms and conditions. We are thrown into a situation — which might be an absolutely unendurable, impossible situation — but we always have the freedom to make of it what we will, according to our own choices, to impose our own meaning on it. There’s definitely an element of Stoicism in existentialism, particularly in Sartre, and also in Viktor Frankl’s work. The difference is that there is more emphasis on the need for human beings to find a meaning and an individual purpose in what they do. It’s not just a matter of enduring or retreating into an inner realm in which you’re free. In fact, it’s not really about the inner realm at all, because the way you find meaning is not within, but through a purpose in the world, something that’s outside you, something that is greater than you. It could be by creating something, and it could be — and very often is — connections to other human beings, whether it’s comrades, friends, family or the people you come up against in life. And if all else fails — as it tended to in the concentration camps — and all the usual sources of meaning fall apart, there is always the chance of finding a meaning in the suffering itself. This is something that’s very hard to talk about in the abstract, but that was the conclusion that he came to. That’s very true. That view of existentialism as “Life is terrible and we just have to resign ourselves to it” is a real misrepresentation. Sartre would have said, “No, we can change the circumstances of our lives.” He believed we could do it through revolution, through Marxism, through politics — and potentially through ethics as well, though that is something he never finished working out completely. With Viktor Frankl there’s a sense that we need this philosophy to help us to live. Existentialist philosophy doesn’t bring despair and angst into our lives, it gives us a way of making sense, it’s a way of discovering our own inner freedom. There’s a lot more that’s positive in existentialism than it’s ever given credit for, because it really is about how you live your life, and how you exist, given what you’re presented with."

"I think he’s one of the most significant thinkers of our era. Again he helps put a stake in ground zero: that the inner life is what determines the quality of life. To be forced to live in the Nazi concentration camps. To have his wife and family members ripped from his arms. To see and live in those conditions . . . He realised that when people in the most frail conditions had something taken away from them—something that mattered to them, like a cigarette or a shirt—they literally would die. They were that fatigued, that depleted. But the moment of insight for him was: ‘Hold on a minute. They can’t take away my ability to think a certain way, and to feel a certain way.’ So he had this incredible awareness about the power of purpose, of orientating life in a meaningful way. No matter what the conditions are, even the most deplorable conditions that we’ve seen in modern times, we still have the basic right to organise our inner world. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Then he goes on to suggest ways to do that. And his insights about youth, some 40 years ago, are still exactly applicable to youth today. The millennial generation has a bad rap for a lot of reasons, but they are reminding us to organise our life more purposefully. To live with greater intent. And the way they’re going about it is stirring up the older generations. They are going to be the most important generation we have for survival of the planet, because they’re in touch with it in a deeper way. When I think about what’s happening now, I snap back to Victor Frankl’s insights—that’s it not about money and fame and recognition. Those are fine and wonderful in themselves, but they’re fleeting; they are temporary, not enduring. Our children are now saying, ‘Hey, listen. We’ve got to take care of our planet. We’ve got to organise our lives to have a deeper meaning rather than just working hard.’ So there’s great similarity between what Frankl saw for a purposeful life then and what’s considered a purposeful life now. I think Frankl’s book is a reminder of the fragility of life, and the limited time we have to explore our potential. If we don’t organise our life in a purposeful way to explore what we are capable of, we become some version that is less than. And the trade winds of the world will push us away from our potential. Our world is not designed for flourishing. It is hard, and challenging, and difficult. We’ve got real environmental pressures and social pressures to be something special, but at the surface—not at the core. So no, I don’t think it’s about work/life balance. I think that that is a mythical ridgeline that does not exist. We have a limited time to explore purpose and meaning. And we have to do it now. “The work/life balance is a mythical ridgeline that does not exist” In an artificial way, it sometimes helps people to say: ‘If you only had a handful of years or months, what would you do? How would you live?’ Because we’ve got this body of life behind us—say 20 or 30 or 40 years, whatever it is. We then think that we’re going to get another 30, 40 years, and build on it. But we don’t know that. The unpredictable, unfolding unknown is exactly that. The framework of our past is not a great predictor of our future. Victor Frankl reminds us of that. He says, let me tell you and show you how I and my friends lived in the concentration camps. And if I can do it there, and suffer at that level, so can you. Let’s see. This was a toss-up between Over the Edge of the World , a book highlighting Magellan’s discoveries. And one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s 92 books. I don’t know if you’re familiar? They’re incredible. And Jon Kabat-Zinn. But why don’t we go with Bruce Lee?"

"I probably first read this book about twenty years ago. Viktor Frankl passed away in the 1990s. That’s probably when it came to my attention and I read it. Walk into any bookstore and somewhere there’s a shelf that’s labelled ‘self-help.’ In my view, you can just ignore the whole shelf and read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning . It’s the only book that a person really needs to read in that vein of: ‘how should I think about things like success and failure, fear and doubt, external achievement and internal need?’ All of those questions about how to live and, ‘what is it all for?’, are vital for the young generation to get to grips with. First of all, for those who don’t know Viktor Frankl, his is an inspiring story. Frankl was born in the early 20th century. He studied psychology and when he was in university, he started a programme to study why people in high school committed suicide – the stresses that they had. He then set up a programme to provide psychological counselling. This would have been in Austria. In the schools using his programme not a single student committed suicide. He was clearly going to go on to a career as a successful psychologist and psychoanalyst. He had met and studied under Sigmund Freud at some point. Then, of course, World War II happened. He was Jewish. Frankl ultimately spends six months or a year in concentration camps. He applied the same psychology that he had been studying and developing to help people in the concentration camps. “Our lives are given meaning by the decisions we make” Man’s Search for Meaning , is about his experience in the concentration camps. How do we find meaning in suffering, in even the most brutal suffering imaginable? In that crucible of the most difficult learning environment imaginable, he really came out with a couple of gems of wisdom that everyone should read and understand. I read it when I was just in that transition from high school to university. I was making that transition into adulthood and having to make choices about what mattered in my life. I re-read this book about once a year, usually over Christmas. Frankl had this simple equation, he said D=S-M. The equation was: despair equals suffering without meaning. He meant it in terms of suicide and death, but basically, if you’re suffering and you can’t find any meaning in it then you experience ultimate despair. The power of the human spirit is that we can find meaning in suffering. We can turn despair into hope and possibility. That really is the main message of the book. He has this beautiful philosophy about life which is that we can always find meaning in our lives, under any conditions. Our lives are given meaning by the decisions we make. Viktor Frankl is probably the most economical form – not of self-help, but of self-health – of mental and spiritual maintenance. There is a whole industry that presumes to give us a quick fix to be mentally and spiritually healthy. I think all you need to do is read this book. I guess one of the growing difficulties for young people is the tyranny of choice. It seems that you graduate from high school or university, whenever, and even the line between being a student and starting a career is completely blurred. You’ve got seven-year-olds who run profitable YouTube channels showing how to play with the latest Barbie doll. It can be terrifying. They talk about things like the fear of missing out. There is just so much in front of us now. There are no rules about what can be expected of you at any particular stage of life. I think it’s very easy to become paralysed with the awesome freedom of growing up in this connected digital moment. I don’t know if it’s going to be more or less difficult than previous challenges have been, but there’s going to be a new struggle to make sense of what we should focus on. Where should I focus my best energies? “It’s not about being popular, it’s about being your best self” I think some of the wisdom is old, but it’s probably going to have to be learned all over again. This whole thing about celebrity versus greatness. It seems that how many ‘followers’ you have is part of your self-worth. I think it was Victor Hugo who said, “popularity is the very crumbs of greatness.” It’s not about being popular, it’s about being your best self. Mining something inside yourself that celebrates your individuality. I think the incoming generation of young people is going to have that whole conversation all over again, and come back to that same wisdom. None of us goes through life without experiencing loss and suffering. It’s in those moments of loss and suffering, say, the death of a family member that we invariably become very focussed and appreciative of how important that person was to us. How important that love was to us. How important love is in our lives. That was very much a message in Man’s Search for Meaning . He talked about how, when four or five of these guys were crawling through the stones, and they were all thinking about their loved ones – and in that moment they really understood the truth of this ancient wisdom that love is the most important thing. Suffering is part of what reminds us of that. That’s the role of suffering in life. It connects us to some of the best parts of being alive in the same way that death connects us to how precious it is to live. If we were all immortal there’s a risk that we wouldn’t have the energy to do anything at all – there would be no urgency. Just appreciating this, as we go through life and experience challenges and sufferings, that we can also choose what meaning we make out of the times that seem dark and depressing. That’s an essential skill for our own mental and spiritual health – to recognise that we all have the capacity to choose meaning."

"Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna in the 1930s and then got carted off to Auschwitz with all his family. He was the only one that survived. Halfway through this enormous trauma, he decided he was receiving an incredible insight into human responses to stress. Rather than waiting for some Nazi guard to kill him, he was going to use what was happening to him to comment on the human condition, and it completely transformed his view of his circumstances. He was watching some of his fellow inmates go under and give up, and eventually die. He was watching others that didn’t die. Why did they not die? What made them behave in a way that helped them survive? He came up with the idea that it’s not what happens to you that matters, it’s how you respond. He’s got this quote “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.” You can choose how you respond to something, even being in Auschwitz. It’s massively powerful. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The idea is that suffering gives you perspective, and that your suffering will stop the second you get perspective on it, the second it has meaning. He realized, in Auschwitz, that his suffering had meaning because he was going to write about it. His suffering stopped at that point. He uses another example, of a man who is grieving for his wife. He just couldn’t live without his dead wife. Frankl met with this man and said to him: “Actually the fact she died first means you’ve spared her grief. Your suffering has meaning, because it spared her grief.” That was an enormous help to him. The idea that suffering has a purpose is incredibly enlightening. It also fits well with James’s notion of insight."

"The Holocaust didn't start with gas chambers, it started with dehumanizing language and divisive rhetoric."

"Books I love talking about with anyone — Viktor Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning.""

""Man's Search for Meaning," by Viktor E. Frankl, given to me by my father."