In 1944, Viktor Frankl was thrown into a Nazi labor concentration camp. He was separated from all of his family and his 65-year-old mother was immediately murdered in a gas chamber. His wife later died, too.
Anybody who has done any type of research on the holocaust and concentration camps knows how brutal the circumstances were. Several million people were documented prisoners in at least one of the many Nazi camps. It is estimated that at least six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust; including several million who lost their lives in the concentration camps.
When the war concluded, Frankl was in the minority of people, as he was able to survive. He went on to publish many written works, most notably Man’s Search For Meaning.
Here are three life lessons that I learned from reading and studying Viktor Frankl:
We can always decide
In the camps, Frankl and his fellow prisoners had nothing. They were stripped of quite literally everything that they owned. But there was one thing that they still retained. And that was their own ability to choose how to act and how to think.
“We who lived through concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” said Frankl
Even when times were the bleakest, Frankl retained his ability to choose. And in the camp, he chose to have a positive outlook on life. He chose to believe that his life had meaning.
In your own life, remember this. Whenever you feel like complaining or letting external factors weigh you down, you must realize that you always control how you respond.
At every moment, we are responsible
Think about the life that you want. Now think about the decisions that you make. Are these two aligned? Are you making decisions that are in accordance with the life that you want to live? If not, you need to take responsibility for that and reflect on why you are doing what you are doing.
“If we delve into the nature of human responsibility, we recoil: there is something terrible about the responsibility of a human being — and at the same time something glorious! It is terrible to know that at every moment I bear responsibility for the next; that every decision, from the smallest to the largest, is a decision “for all of eternity”; that in every moment I can actualize the possibility of a moment, of that particular moment, or forfeit it. Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities — and I can only choose one of them to actualize it. But in making the choice, I have condemned all the others and sentenced them to “never being,” and even this if for all eternity!”
Viktor Frankl — Yes To Life
Where you are today — the things that you have, the people that surround you, the knowledge that you have accumulated — is in some way a reflection of past decisions. Of course, there are things in life that we can’t control, but for the most part, you are where you are today because of the thousands of small choices that you have made.
Find meaningful suffering
In life, many people are searching for a pain-free world, a world where all of their problems are solved, a world where they are always happy. Of course, this is an alternate reality that doesn’t exist. Suffering is a part of life. The key to fulfillment is to find things that you are willing to suffer for. Frankl made the distinction between ‘meaningful suffering’ and ‘meaning-less suffering.’
“And in spite of everything, no human suffering can be compared to anyone else’s because it is part of the nature of suffering that it is the suffering of a particular person, that it is his or her own suffering… Therefore, it would be pointless to speak of differences in the magnitude of suffering; but a difference that truly matters is that between meaningful and meaning-less suffering,” wrote Frankl.
Nothing in life is given. If you want great achievements, then you must be willing to suffer. Frankl made it clear that it isn’t about how much you suffer, it is about what you suffer for.
I have found Viktor Frankl’s work incredibly inspiring and profound. His thoughts on the meaning of life have definitely shifted my perspective in a major way. If you ever find yourself questioning what the purpose of life is, Frankl’s writing is required reading.