Man's Search for Meaning

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I read this book when we were squarely in the middle of COVID lock-down, when in my abundance of free time I decided to pick a book off the bestsellers list. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was trending and for good reason — it’s incredible how many parallels there were between the experience of prisoners in a concentration camp and my much more comfortable experience in quarantine.

Relevant to COVID, Frankl wrote of the “provisional existence of unknown limit” – another way of saying there was to know how long the imprisonment would last. The uncertainty was a major source of psychological distress, and warped their sense of time such each day felt impossibly long, yet months would fly by. That exact experience felt all to familiar to my time in quarantine, and it was a strange but unexpectedly comforting connection to make. It was absolutely normal to see time bend willy nilly in the face of such routine, monotonous uncertainty.

But what truly resonated with me was the concept of logotherapy. In a single word, Frankl gave me a name for a vague idea I’d been striving to live by. I immediately followed up with more research on the topic, and this is what I found:

Logotherapy has 3 pillars:

Humans have freedom of will. We have the freedom to choose our attitudes and actions, even in difficult circumstances.
The will to meaning is our primary motivation. Humans are drawn to find something, or someone, worthwhile to live and work for.
Life has ultimate meaning (meaning of life). Meaning is discovered through a connectedness with something beyond and greater than oneself.

Frankl witnessed how, even in the most horrific conditions, those who held onto a “why” – a reason to live, a person to return to, a belief to uphold – often found the strength to endure. This anecdote stood out to me with great clarity:

Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Logotherapy isn’t about ignoring pain, but about finding significance within it, transforming suffering into a testament to human dignity.

I have since used this lesson many times over in my personal and professional life. Whenever I need to make a tough but necessary decision, or whenever I feel unsure of the path I’m taking, I think about and write down the “why.” Personally, I have found that it grounds me and gives me renewed resolve to continue down. Professionally, I find that teams are often craving the “why” behind their actions, and if I can show them how their day-to-day links back to the ultimate, strategic “why,” they are ever more motivated and bought in to the work.

Man’s Search for Meaning was a harrowing, dark, yet empowering read that offered me a framework for finding purpose and resilience, even when the world felt chaotic and uncertain. It’s a book I’ll continue to carry in my heart. I’d strongly recommend to anyone who is feeling anxious or malcontent with their current state of life.