He who has a “Why” to live for can bear almost any “How”. - Nietzsche
As we sit in quarantine for the first time in our lives, many are fearful of what lies ahead. Forced to watch hysterical reporters predict the apocalypse as our 401k plans collapse with the market, we wait for the other shoe to drop.
Suicide rates are at their highest since WWII when the stress of war and shortages took their toll. Today, many are drowning in debt from overspending and under-saving. We’re overweight, over-medicated, and in over our heads. The boredom that results from a barren life has surpassed stress as a psychiatric trigger. With little hope in sight, we brace for the future.
Life includes suffering, a chronic disease that touches all of us at one time or another. Many suffer in silence, from debilitating pain, anxiety, and alienation. A lack of purpose plays a role in depression and ongoing addiction. Negativity undermines hopefulness and confidence. As we lose more and more control over our future, we sink deeper into despair.
Charles Darwin said that only the strongest survive. He brought us natural selection, after all, noting that those better at adapting to their environment tend to survive and thrive. Darwin advocated for disease, famine, and war, to naturally rid the world of inferiors. He beat Hitler to the punch by fanning the flames of racism and made genocide fashionable. But Hitler had plans of his own.
The Holocaust was an unnatural selection, a man-made slaughter of nearly 6 million Jews. Today’s author, Viktor Frankl, endured three years in four different concentration camps while losing his pregnant wife, and both parents to Hitler’s depravity. Viktor Frankl knew suffering.
In Victor Frankl’s “1959 book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Frankl, a psychiatrist, observed his fellow prisoners and noticed that those who lasted the longest were those who could see the future. One of the most influential books chosen in reader surveys, Man’s Search for Meaning is a positive book about survival that focuses not on the way people died, but the incredible way they lived under the cruelest of conditions. Those who died first, died without hope, having lost their will to live. Even when we have no control over our circumstances, Frankl thought, we still have the freedom to choose how we will react. That was the difference, in some cases, between life and death.
Frankl believed that our greatest task is to find meaning in life. The state of one’s mind is crucial, for even though our circumstances may stay the same, our attitude can improve our prospects. Instead of looking at the past, we should focus our energies on the possibilities of the future. Only through our inner strength and conscience, can we begin to raise ourselves above our difficulties. A positive perspective enables a person to endure life’s disappointments and begin to thrive. Struggling and striving for a worthwhile goal can be extremely affirming as we work for a cause greater than ourselves. Creating a significant life is the best cure in these uncertain times.
We live in the greatest country in the world, at a time of boundless wealth, even as we face considerable challenges. How we decide to enter the next chapter will make all the difference. As Frankl concluded, “The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that after all he has suffered; there is nothing he needs to fear anymore – except God”.
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