Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

Although I am using a somewhat journalistic phrase here, the state of mind and the spiritual condition of an average person today is most accurately described as “spiritually bombed out.”

Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down—the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one—the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self. So, in the end, was there something like a decision that needed to be made?

everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being. Therefore,