Member-only story
How To Live Meaningfully According to a Psychologist Who Survived Auschwitz
“The Meaningful Life is to Live Life Meaningfully”. This saying initially carries with it a concise profundity. And yet, upon further consideration, it fails to tell us very much about what it is to live meaningfully. How are we to encounter those things that fill our hearts with purpose, that direct our gaze towards what we will find most important and valuable in our lives? Especially nowadays, the average individual may find themselves disillusioned, awakened by feelings of purposelessness, anhedonia and hopelessness.
Although far from descriptive (which may not necessarily be a bad thing), one individual, who arose from the depths of Nazi concentration camps and spent his years studying the very notion of meaning, may offer an answer. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist, survived both Dachau and Auschwitz and, after the war, wrote extensively about his personal encounters with ‘man’s search for meaning’ that was so evident in the camps. Despite the fact that all hope was necessarily lost in such situations, Frankl observed that individuals found meaning in three ways: the creative, the experiential, and the attitudinal.
