Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

This one is on my favourite books list. I will share only my favourite passages; otherwise, I would have to copy and paste the whole book, but that would be illegal.

Viktor Frankl was born on March 26, 1905 and died on September 2, 1997, in Vienna, Austria. He earned a medical degree from the University of Vienna Medical School in 1930. He spent three years in four different Nazi concentration camps between 1942 and 1945, experiencing the loss of his family and the profound suffering that would later form the basis of his Logotherapy.
By the time of his death, his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, had been published in 24 languages.

To quickly brief you about logotherapy, one of the core principles is that a person's main concern is not to achieve pleasure or avoid suffering but rather to find meaning in their life. And that's what makes this book very "meaningful" to me, because I felt stuck in that game of pain and pleasure without any sense of deep meaning in my life.

Pain and Laugh

Human pain is like the behaviour of gases. Just as a certain amount of gas, when pressurised, will fill any empty space regardless of its size, pain—whether great or small—will always fill a person's entire soul and consciousness. 

The will to find humor and the attempt to see things from a slightly comical perspective are, if you will, tricks. But they are tricks that teach us the art of living. The ability to practice this art, even in the middle of a concentration camp, stems from the contrasts that life there is full of. And these contrasts, in turn, give a certain relativity to all suffering. 

Future and striving

Whoever can no longer believe in the future, in their own future, in a concentration camp is lost. With the future, they also lose their spiritual support, they let themselves fall inwardly, and they collapse physically as well as spiritually.

Human life and meaning

Human life always has meaning, under all circumstances, and this infinite meaning of being also includes suffering, death, misery, and fatal illnesses. And according to logotherapy, the effort to find meaning in one's life is the primary motivating force in a person.

It is not the meaning of life in general, but the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

A reversal of the entire problem of the ultimate meaning of life is necessary here: we must learn, and teach the desperate, that it truly does not matter what we can expect from life, but what ultimately matters is what life expects "from us"! In philosophical terms, one could also say: it is almost a Copernican revolution; for we no longer ask about the meaning of life, but we feel that we are constantly being asked, like people to whom life continuously poses questions, every day and every hour, questions to which we must respond, giving a correct answer, not only in meditations or in words, but with an action, a correct behavior. Ultimately, living means nothing more than having the responsibility to respond correctly to life's problems, to fulfil the tasks that life presents to each individual, to face the demands of the moment.

Human freedom

A human being is a finite thing, and their freedom is limited. They are not free from conditions, but they are free to take a stand toward the conditions.

The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity

Conclusion

Hopefully, those passages made you want to read it. For sure, it's definitely worth it.