There's a lot of people who believe that life is meaningless. "There's no meaning to any of this, nothing matters, it's all empty and meaningless. " The idea that we're passive victims of our genes and our environment.
"And the arguments over nature versus nurture, from a scientific point of view the meaning of life is the propagation of DNA. " Implied in this is the idea that we aren't really free, and it often leads to a kind of nihilism. The sense that our lives are random and meaningless.
We even see it in popular culture in memes and in movies. But is it true? The best answer I've ever seen to this is in the book "Man Search for Meaning" by Dr Viktor Frankl.
In it, Frankl describes his own horrifying experiences as a Jewish Holocaust survivor in the Second World War. His incredible story begins in 1939 where he worked as a psychiatrist and became the head of neurology at Rothschilds Hospital in Vienna. But when the Nazis shut down the Hospital, Frankl, his wife, and his family were all sent to concentration camps, where almost everything you can imagine was taken from him.
It was here that he spent three long and brutal years as a prisoner, forced to work in labor camps in the most terrible conditions, and having so little food that over time the prisoners slowly starved. And when they became too weak to keep working they were sent to the gas chambers; their lives extinguished in the most horrific way imaginable. But Frankl tells us that even here, even in the most hopeless situation, life still had meaning.
Life always has a meaning. How could that be? What did he learn from surviving the Holocaust?
And how can we apply that to our lives in the modern world? That is what we'll explore in this video. Dr Frankl developed an approach to psychology called Logotherapy.
"Logos" is Greek for meaning and "Therapy" means healing. And so the goal of Logotherapy is to heal ourselves by finding the hidden meaning in our lives. Frankl believed that the main thing that drives us is the search for meaning.
He pointed to the famous Nietzsche quote: "as long as a person has a why to live they can bear almost any how. " Frankl found that it wasn't necessarily the strongest people who survived in the camps, it was those who had meaning, and even when they suffered tremendous pain, they were less damaged by the terrible things that happened to them. They could access an inner world of spiritual freedom.
Frankl called this the "self-transcendence of human existence," and he described four main ways we can find meaning in our lives. The first is synchronicity. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung talked about it in his work "Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle.
" According to Jung, synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence that happens when an event in the outside world matches up with an inner state of the mind in a way that has meaning. Jung said that what defines synchronicity is the sense of the "numinous. " It's the feeling of amazement and spiritual transcendence that comes from witnessing something that lifts us outside of ourselves, giving us a glimpse of the divine.
His most famous example was a patient who was telling Jung about a dream she'd had about a beetle, and at exactly that moment a beetle flew into the room. Synchronicity is a powerful source of meaning. Frankl doesn't actually use the word "synchronicity" in his book but he describes two amazing and very meaningful coincidences that happened to him while he was a prisoner in the camps.
The first happened when he arrived on the first day, where he was separated from his wife and family. He didn't know it yet but he would never see any of them again. The guards told him to hand over everything he had and they took his clothes.
After he was stripped he was given the rags of another inmate who'd already died. When Frankl put on the rags, he found inside his pocket, a single page torn from a Hebrew prayer book, and on that page was the most important Jewish prayer: the Shema Yisrael. This was powerful and very meaningful to Frankl and he took it as a sign to draw on the strength of his spirituality.
The second meaningful coincidence happened one day when Frankl was forced to work in a trench at the camp. His mind went to thoughts of his wife. Something inside of him told him to talk to her silently in his mind.
Suddenly he felt the presence of a powerful spirit and in the distance he saw a farmhouse which stood in the horizon as if it was painted there underneath the morning sky. He was overcome with an incredible feeling that if he just stretched out his hand, he'd be able to reach out and hold on to his wife's. He was overcome with the feeling that she was here with him and then at exactly that moment, a bird flew down and perched at his feet, and for what felt like ages, it stood there watching and looking at him.
There are skeptics who would dismiss these experiences but it was exactly these moments that kept Frankl alive and gave him a profound sense of meaning. The second way we can find meaning is by doing work that feeds the soul and brings fulfillment. When Frankl first arrived at the concentration camps the most precious thing he had was a manuscript that he'd written that was ready to be published.
He asked one of the guards if he could keep this one thing if he gave up everything else. The guard looked at him with a mix of pity and surprise. Frankl hadn't yet understood how horrible things were about to become.
The guards took his manuscript and he would never get it back. But frankel never lost hope. One of the things that kept him going was the dream that after he was freed, he would write his manuscript again.
He scribbled notes on tiny pieces of paper so that one day he could rewrite his book. He also had a vision of himself standing at a podium and giving a lecture on all the things he learned from surviving the concentration camps. This vision was one of the biggest things that kept him going, but more importantly, he knew that this manuscript was something only he could write.
In much the same way, you too have your own unique work; something only you can do. Life is preparing you at each moment to do something that's uniquely your own. Ask yourself: what is the task that's waiting for you?
The third way we find meaning is through the people we love. Frankl describes how the love he had for his wife and his hope of seeing her again gave him the strength to carry on. He recalls a moment when he was marching through the snow in the camp.
He thought about his wife and suddenly he had a powerful flash of insight. For the first time in his life he saw the truth as it was told by so many poets; the final wisdom of so many thinkers. It became so clear to him that love is the ultimate and highest goal that we can aspire to, that it's only through love that humanity can be saved.
He wrote that "I now understand how a man who has nothing left in this world could still know bliss. " Because it's through the enduring power of love that we find true fulfillment. In that moment Frankl didn't know if his wife was still alive but he knew one thing: love is something that goes beyond the physical presence of those who've touched our lives.
It finds its deepest meaning in our spiritual being; our divine selves. Whether or not that person is here with us physically, whether or not they're even still alive, no longer feels relevant; love transcends it all. Frankl later learned that his wife was killed in the gas chambers shortly after being brought to camp.
But he writes that "even if I'd known then that my wife had died, the connection I had with her in my heart was still just as vivid and just as strong as ever. " It's in this way that love can overcome great distances and even death. Ask yourself: how can you express meaning and purpose through the people you love in your life?
The fourth way we find meaning is by facing our suffering. Frankl tells us that even when we're in a situation that feels completely hopeless, where there's no opportunity for work, where we've lost the ones we love most, even then life continues to be meaningful. Everyone he knew in the concentration camps had lost everything they held dear.
Their homes. Their families. Their freedom.
And yet even in these horrific conditions, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Frankl explained that after being a prisoner of the camp he experienced the beauty of art and nature like never before. On what felt like an especially miserable day he remembers how a prisoner pointed to a magnificent view of a sunset that shone through the tall trees outside of the camp.
He remembers how the sky felt so alive with lightened clouds of ever-changing color. And after a moment of moving silence one prisoner said "how beautiful the world could still be. " But the unspeakable cruelty and suffering in the camps was often too much to bear.
Most never made it out alive. For those who lost hope, they could no longer see any reason to keep living. Frankel noticed a familiar pattern: one morning a prisoner would wake up but then he just laid there; nothing could convince him to get up.
Almost always the prisoner would take a cigarette that he'd been saving and instead of trying to trade it for an extra piece of bread he smoked it just to feel a tiny bit of pleasure, knowing that his last moments were upon him. Once that hope was lost it almost never came back. Frankel saw that prisoners lost their lives most often from a lack of meaning rather than from a lack of food or medicine.
In 1945, Frankl was saved and the survivors of the concentration camps set free. Frankl rewrote his manuscript and he went back to work as a psychiatrist, this time his book was informed by the painful experiences he lived through during the Holocaust. He made it his mission to help those who'd lost all sense of meaning in their lives.
Frankl tells the story of an old man who came to him with severe depression. Much like Frankl, this patient was also a Holocaust survivor. His wife had also died in the gas chambers.
He loved her more than anything and now that she was gone, he couldn't see any purpose in living on without her. Frankl asked the patient "what would have happened if you died first, and your wife had to live on without you? " The patient had never thought of that before.
"For her this would have been horrible, she would have suffered terribly. " Frankl replied: "You see, she's been spared the suffering that you're feeling now, and it was you who spared it for her. One of you had to pass away first; the price is that you have to live on carrying her memory with you.
" Hearing this totally changed the patient's perspective. He couldn't change what happened to his wife but he could change his understanding of it, and now that he saw the meaning in his suffering, it gave him the strength to carry on. "Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning," and by accepting the challenge to suffer bravely life has a meaning up to the very last moment.
But many people have argued that the Holocaust shows us that human nature is fundamentally evil. The psychologist Sigmund Freud once said that if you make people hungry enough, their animal instincts would take over and any individual differences between them would "blur into a uniform expression of one unstilled urge. " But frankl resisted this kind of cynicism.
As a professor in neurology and psychiatry, he knew very well the influence that biology and the environment had on the psyche, but even he didn't agree with the idea that we were trapped by these things. His experience in the concentration camps showed him that people didn't blur into a single animal urge, it was exactly the opposite: it revealed who they really were. In this horrifying situation their individual uniqueness became clear.
Frankl says that even among the concentration camp guards who were specifically chosen to be aggressive and brutal there were some guards who were incredibly kind. One guard spent money out of his own pocket to buy medicines for his prisoners, another guard gave Frankl a piece of bread that he'd saved from his own breakfast ration. He handed it to Frankl with such kindness and such warmth that it moved him to tears; it made him feel human again.
And there's even the infamous example of Dr J. He, also known as "the mass murderer of Steinhoff. " He was an SS officer who did terrible experiments on prisoners, and ran many of the gas chambers during the Holocaust.
He was widely feared as one of the most cruel and sadistic of the SS officers after the end of the second world war he escaped to South America where he was captured and became a prisoner himself, until he died at the age of 40 from bladder cancer. But an Austrian diplomat who was jailed along with DrJ He described him as a completely different person. This same man that they once called the "mass murderer of Steinhoff" gave comfort to everyone in the prison.
He was extraordinarily kind and self-sacrificing. The diplomat said that "he was the best friend i ever had during my long years in prison. " If this man, the mass murder of Steinhoff, found a way to transform himself and find redemption, how can we ever dare to predict how anyone's life will turn out?
We always have a choice. Within all of us is the dual nature of good and evil, light and dark. We can't deny the fact that humans invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz, but we are also the humans who within the camp tried to heal the sick and give comfort to the dying.
Sacrificing themselves and giving up their last piece of bread so another could live on. Every human being has the freedom to change at any moment. We might be influenced by biology or by society, but what makes us human is the ability to rise above these things to grow beyond them.
Because in the end we are divine and spiritual beings. We have the power to determine who we are, and "it's this last of all human freedoms that can never be taken away. " Thanks so much for watching all the way to the end.
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