Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

Perhaps someone will now object, they admit that “the suicide’s behavior goes against all reason; but does not life itself become meaningless in the face of the death that inevitably comes to every human being in the end? Does death not make all our beginnings seem pointless from the start, since nothing endures?” Let us try to find the answer to this objection by asking the question the other way around; let us ask ourselves, “What if we were immortal?” And we can give the answer: if we were immortal, then we could postpone everything, but truly everything. Because it would never matter whether we did a particular thing right now, or tomorrow, or the day after, or in a year, or in ten years, or whenever. No death, no end would be looming over us, there would be no limitation of our possibilities, we would see no reason to do a particular thing right now, or surrender ourselves to an experience just now—there would be time, we would have time, an infinite amount of time.