Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

What leads us forward and helps us along the way, what has guided and is guiding us, is a joy in taking responsibility. But to what extent is the average person happy to take on responsibility? Responsibility is something one is both “drawn to” and “withdraws from.” This wisdom in the language indicates that there are opposing forces in human beings that prevent them from taking responsibility. And indeed, there is something unfathomable about responsibility: the longer and the more deeply we look into it, the more we become aware of it, until finally we are seized by a kind of dizziness. If we delve into the nature of human responsibility, we recoil: there is something terrible about the responsibility of a human being—and at the same time something glorious! It is terrible to know that at every moment I bear responsibility for the next; that every decision, from the smallest to the largest, is a decision “for all eternity”; that in every moment I can actualize the possibility of a moment, of that particular moment, or forfeit it.