Viktor Frankl's book, Man’s Search for Meaning, gives a different perspective on the question we ask all the time.
I think I had this idea that I’d read the book and have all the big answers.
But it’s actually a lot easier than that.
Frankl said that, “Man should not ask what is the meaning of his life, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”
Because we create our meaning. And according to logo therapy, we can do that:
By creating a work or doing a deed.
By experiencing something or encountering someone.
By the attitude that we take toward unavoidable suffering.
Join me as we break it down in this episode so you can avoid what Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.” That what’s the point feeling dads get when overwhelm and stress pile up.
Viktor Frankl's book, Man’s Search for Meaning, gives a different perspective on the question we ask all the time.
I think I had this idea that I’d read the book and have all the big answers.
But it’s actually a lot easier than that.
Frankl said that, “Man should not ask what is the meaning of his life, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”
Because we create our meaning. And according to logo therapy, we can do that:
By creating a work or doing a deed.
By experiencing something or encountering someone.
By the attitude that we take toward unavoidable suffering.
Join me as we break it down in this episode so you can avoid what Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.” That what’s the point feeling dads get when overwhelm and stress pile up.
This is the Durable Dad podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. Episode number 46, what's happening? The Durable Dad podcast. Hope you're doing well.
Speaker 1:
I am in a book club and the book club is guys book club. The first time I was in this club it was when we lived in Colorado and this was before kids and the only rules were that one man would choose the book he would host and he would only be able to serve meat and whiskey. This was before kids, like I said, and nights would go long. We would have a really good time discussing some cool books. And that was years ago. We moved. When we got here to Ohio, I kind of missed book club, so kind of started one up here, and it's with a couple of my buddies that are in the neighborhood. Now it looks a little different. We don't just eat meat, but still one guy hosts and serves. Sometimes we have beer, Sometimes we don't even drink. We wrap up by eight o'clock. Sometimes we go really late and go to nine o'clock. So it looks different but it's still the same thing Dudes, book club guys getting together, hanging out. It's a fun time With the guys that we do in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1:
We've read Jurassic Park. We've read Brave New World, this really cool, unique book I would have never read, called Letters to the Sons of Society If you guys want a short read, check it out. It's really eye-opening, perspective shifting for me. So the reason why I'm telling you about my book club experience is because this quarter the book is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and I want to talk about it on the podcast today. To just tee it up, though, viktor Frankl is a Holocaust survivor. He was in four concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Frankl was a psychiatrist before he went into the camps and afterwards, after being liberated, he continued practicing therapy and he actually developed his own therapy called Logo Therapy, and logos, the Greek word, translates to meaning, so his therapy was all based on finding meaning in your life. So I went into the book kind of thinking that, all right, finding meaning, finding purpose in life, it's a big thing. I'm going to lock it in and then I'm going to go live life, and what I found, what I read, how I understand it is that it's actually a lot easier than that. Finding meaning in life is a lot easier than we think it is. But I'm going to start by a life without meaning.
Speaker 1:
When we don't have meaning in life, viktor Frankl calls it being in the existential vacuum, and this is the space where we just don't feel like we exist for any reason. I've heard a guy say that he feels like he's a shell of himself or he's kind of just going through the motions in life and not really living it. Or if you go through your day and you're just kind of like it's the same old, same old, nothing's new, that's the existential vacuum when you're questioning does my life have purpose? And a quote here is when a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure. I talked about this in episode number 36, conquer your Vice, how we seek short-term pleasures, and it's filling this void. Another quote we can observe in such cases that the sexual libido becomes a rampant in the existential vacuum. So porn, right, that's what comes up for me when we seek pleasure. A lot of dudes struggle with porn. I've had my struggles with porn in the past, and if you struggle with porn, you're not alone.
Speaker 1:
This is Victor Frankel talking about it in the middle of the 20th century. It's still a struggle now. So this book, the message, is about getting out of the existential vacuum, finding your meaning. According to Frankel's Logotherapy, one of the ways that we can discover meaning in our life is through meaningful action. Quote the existential vacuum manifests itself in boredom, and I think that happens because when we do get bored, when things get quiet around us and we're not busy, that's when the voices in our head really start talking and questioning what's going on in life. Why are we really here? What's my purpose if we're not staying busy? So the existential vacuum lives in boredom. So to stay mentally healthy, we have to take action. That action doesn't mean just staying busy, though. It doesn't mean just doing tasks and knocking out your to-do work. That's not the kind of action he's talking about.
Speaker 1:
He says to find meaning we have to be striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. That freely chosen is really important. When we're stacked up with responsibilities that we feel like we have to do, those aren't freely chosen tasks. We're not going to find much meaning in those. If we want to get up and work, if there's a want, a desire, then there's some meaning there. If I have to do it, if I need to go to work, we're going to start losing meaning. I talk about this a lot in episode 6, that difference between have to versus want to, versus get to versus need to. So that's why sometimes we can feel really busy and still feel this emptiness.
Speaker 1:
And then there's another part to these meaningful tasks that Victor Frankel talks about. It's the motivation behind the tasks. And he keeps coming back to this delineation between self-preservation and looking outward, looking out for the greater good, being a servant to other people, to the world. The difference there, self-preservation versus looking outward that comes up a lot in the book. He says the way in which a man accepts his fate and all the sufferings it entails may remain brave and dignified and unselfish, or in the bitter fight for self-preservation, he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. So is our motivation fear-based, is it survival-based? Is it a family preservation, really just looking out for ourselves, or is the motivation outside of our self? And when I read this perspective I'm thinking about this one guy that I'm working with that works in his family's business.
Speaker 1:
That's been around for a couple generations and he's been really successful in the business and he's never really felt like himself. He feels like there's a target on his back and that he gets a lot of feedback, where people are pointing fingers at him. And they had an off-site retreat coming up and we were coaching around it. He had some presentations and he wanted to get mentally prepared. He was worried that he was going to get attacked and that the feedback was going to be negative and they were going to be in this house and he wasn't going to have a place to escape or retreat to over the course of a couple days and this is what the brain does. The brain goes into this self-preservation when we don't check ourselves. So he's there and I just ask him what's he looking forward to? And he starts talking about how this is different for the company, how the company's off-sites have never really happened. They've always been on-site and it's going to be good for the team to get away from the desks and they're actually not going to check email or be online at all, which is a first.
Speaker 1:
And he thinks that this retreat is going to shift some of the tide in the company culture, kind of from that old school regime to maybe new energy, new flow and that this whole idea was his, that this was kind of his brainchild. He wanted to have more fun involved not happening this time, but they're going to do some really nice dinners and they're going to be in this really beautiful place. He was also pumped about some of the people that were attending just thinking that it would bring everyone together. And I stopped him because as soon as he started talking about the retreat in that perspective, in the perspective of helping the company, in perspective of helping those individuals feel part of the team His whole demeanor changed. He went from this inside self-preservation, fear mode to a lightness and when I pointed out he felt it right. Instead of looking inward, he started to look outward, and that's what Frankel's talking about. He says the more one forgets himself by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love, the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. This was really true for Frankel while he was in the concentration camp.
Speaker 1:
He talks about his manuscript, talks about it right at the beginning of the book and how, as the Germans took away everything from these prisoners as they moved into the concentration camp, all their possessions away from their home, all their luggage. Everything that was left was just the clothes on their back. Frankel still had this manuscript tucked away and other people kept family heirlooms like rings or jewelry or books or whatever that they had tucked away, hoping that they would get to keep something. And I mean listen and side note here. Reading some of these experiences he had and saw in the concentration camps are tough to stomach and I'm not diving into it that much in this podcast, but I'm gonna try to stick to the facts. He walked through the check-in process, if you wanna say, at the camp, and when they take away all your clothes he talks about how they took away the manuscript. They never saw the manuscript but it got thrown in the pile of clothes and he lost it.
Speaker 1:
And that was big for him and the reason it had so much meaning, because the motivation behind it was for the greater good. This was the basis of his logotherapy that he wanted to share with the world and it was all of a sudden gone. But throughout his experience at the different camps he still had the idea and the desire and the dream to share his ideas with the world and he would find a scrap of paper and he would write ideas down. He would be laying in bed, which were boards of wood, with nine guys sleeping next to him and lined up, and the hut would be infested with rats, and he would still be writing on these little pieces of paper. And that's what kept him going, not thinking about himself and self-preservation, but remembering the message he wanted to share to people, to humanity.
Speaker 1:
So, according to logotherapy, we can discover the meaning to life in three different ways. One is by creating a work or doing a deed, and that's what we just talked about the meaningful tasks in our life and having the right motivation behind them. The second way is by experiencing something or encountering someone. Meaning is not something that stays consistent throughout life the whole time. I said it earlier, it's not this one big answer. You find it in different spots of life, you find it in different tasks, you find it in different experiences and different people, like sometimes, for him in the concentration camp it was the manuscript, other times it was experiencing something.
Speaker 1:
He says experience something. I think what he means is something real, something in nature, or something that is genuinely human, part of humanity. So a quote is we experience the beauty of art and nature as never before. He talks about being out on a work detail and just seeing the sunrise across a barren land and how beautiful it looked different glimpses of humanity throughout the atrocities that were happening. Someone would sing a song, someone would be praying, and those little glimpses of life really brought meaning in a time where it seemed like there was no meaning.
Speaker 1:
Encountering people, he says by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness, by loving him, we can find meaning. And that's a lot of what I coach on relationships. That's what comes up for me, like our relationships with our wife, our relationship with our kids. We can find so much meaning in learning to find love in those relationships and sometimes that's hard to do, but there's a lot of meaning there when we can find love. So those are two ways by creating a work or doing a deed that's meaningful, that has the right motivation, something you want to do. The other way is experiencing something or encountering someone. And then the third way to find meaning is by the attitude that we take toward unavoidable suffering. So this is all about perspective.
Speaker 1:
I'll leave you with one more quote. Everything can be taken away from a person, but one thing the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances to choose one's own way. That's a quote that's quoted over and over. You'll hear it a lot. It's from this book, mansearch for Meaning. The guys that I'm in book club with probably aren't ready for the in-depth internalization that I have done with this book and the thoughts I've put into it. So you guys get ready. If you listen to this podcast, I'm ready to fire off on this book and I hope you guys kind of enjoyed my take on it. If you have another take, if you have feedback, would love to hear it. Let's have a convo. I hope you have an awesome week and I will catch you next time.