Freedom

📕 Man’s Search for Meaning:

I find myself going back to Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." It made me think about Freedom in a different way. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychologist. He founded logotherapy, and he talks about it in the book. Viktor Frankl believed that the most fundamental human motivation is the search for meaning.

🥵 Suffering:

The biggest theme of this book is finding meaning through suffering. Viktor Frankl was no stranger to suffering. He was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp during the second world war. The book contains first-hand gory details of how poorly human life was treated. What stood out to me is that even in the worst conditions, some people found something to hold on to. It could be a memory of a loved one or it could be the wish for the war to end so that they could get out of the concentration camp and live normal lives. They choose what they were suffering for, and by choosing they were able to extract meaning even in the face of unimaginable suffering. This ability to decide one's attitude regardless of the outside world is the main idea that I took away:

"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." -- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning.

😀 Finding meaning:

In Viktor Frankl's theory, there are three ways to find meaning in life. 1) Accomplishment; to work hard and be rewarded for it (the reward does not have to be external), 2) To love someone completely, and 3) Through suffering

A common notion is that freedom means you get to do whatever you want. I don't think it is that simple. Doing whatever we want makes us a slave to our own impulses. I believe that it is much more worthwhile to choose a cause that you're willing to suffer for. In the case of accomplishment, results and success could be the happy consequences of doing something hard, instead of the main goal. After all, we are entitled to our labor and not the fruits of our labor.

One of the examples used in the book is of an older gentleman who is suffering due to the death of his significant other. What would be the best way to help him? Remember that suffering is one of the ways to find meaning, but you need to suffer for a cause. Suffering for the sake of suffering is a synonym for hell. Viktor Frankl asked this patient to imagine the alternative. What if he had died and his wife was going through this? That has not happened, but the price of that not happening is that he has to go through the rest of his life without her. This gives meaning to the patient's suffering and makes it a little bit easier to go through life.