Category: Analysis

There is more in live than being happy.

Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents in September 1942. When his camp was liberated three years later, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished, but Frankl, prisoner number 119104, had lived.  In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl’s bestselling 1946 book, he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, he concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, “Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation.” Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, “Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?”

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