Man's Search For Meaning

by Viktor Frankl

Reading the circumstances people had to go through these camps reminds me of something i saw in the punisher (marvel) series -> “Torture is not pain, pain is something you can get used to, you can adjust to it. In Fact humans can pretty much adjust to anything just as long as there’s routine. Human mind craves routine and needs it for survival. It’s when you take that away when things go haywire. Ie when you take away the concept of day/night - food/water - no patterns. Torture is not pain, its time, it's the realization that there is no life post the moment you are stuck in, and your brain can’t rationalize it”. I wonder what this “why” to live for as mentioned by Victor is that can be strong enough to survive this “how”.

It is not the physical pain that hurts the most, it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.

“A man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.”

Viktor states that we can live life in 2 ways, run after the comforts throughout all of our lives so or keep the materialistic comforts to the minimum and try to explore the other aspects of life like spirituality and helping others.And i do believe that in the end, none of these things would matter since we don’t take any of it with us in the afterlife but I also do not completely agree that “our good deeds will be with us in the afterlife as well”, that is because no one really knows what really goes on after we die, the way we chose to live will only amount to our legacy in the end, what we leave behind and how the people left behind will remember us.

Victor very rightly states that If you have a “why” to live for, you will survive any “how”.

To find this “why”, one needs to look for what motivates him, to even go through hardships and suffering for it.

“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”