Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

There was a young man engaged in an active and productive career—he was a busy graphic designer in advertising—who was suddenly torn from his work because he fell ill with a malignant, inoperable spinal cord tumor at the top of his spine. This tumor quickly caused paralysis of his arms and legs. Now he could no longer keep up the way in which he had made his life meaningful, namely the path of being active and employed: he was pushed to one side, in a completely different direction; being active was becoming increasingly inaccessible, and he was relying ever more on finding meaning in the passive experiences of his restricted situation, and extracting meaning from life even within such limited possibilities. So, what did our patient do? While he was in the hospital, he read intensively, he tackled books he had never had time to read in his busy professional life, he listened diligently to music on the radio and had the most stimulating discussions with individual fellow patients. So he had withdrawn into that area of existence in which it is possible, beyond being active, for a person to fulfill the meaning of life and answer life’s question in the passive incorporation of the world into the self. Therefore, it is understandable that this brave person, even at that point, by no means had the feeling that his life, even in its very limited form, had become meaningless.