In reckoning with my feelings of doom, I wrote a post in which I drew upon Viktor Frankl’s popular book Man’s Search for Meaning. Here’s an excerpt from that post that discusses why hope is not cheap, but necessary for day-to-day life:
Frankl, a psychologist and holocaust survivor, wrote about his experience in the concentration camps. He observed two types of inmates—some prisoners collapsed in despair, while others were able to persevere in the harsh conditions:
“Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp’s degenerating influences.
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They [were] few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances.
A depressed person honestly believes there’s no hope that things will improve. Consequently, they collapse into a vegetative state of despair. It follows, therefore, that hope is literally the prerequisite for action.
So if I didn’t implicitly believe there’s a tomorrow worth living, then I wouldn’t have written this post.
I concluded that post with this:
If a storm disturbs the rock garden of a Zen monk, the next day he goes to work to restore its beauty.
In reckoning with my feelings of doom, I wrote a post in which I drew upon Viktor Frankl’s popular book Man’s Search for Meaning. Here’s an excerpt from that post that discusses why hope is not cheap, but necessary for day-to-day life:
I concluded that post with this: