Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

“They never forgot that life was a gift that the Nazi machine did not succeed in taking away from them.”

If the prisoners of Buchenwald, tortured and worked and starved nearly to death, could find some hope in those lyrics despite their unending suffering, Frankl asks us, shouldn’t we, living far more comfortably, be able to say “Yes” to life in spite of everything life brings us?

pleasures do not give our life meaning. In contrast, he points out that even the dark and joyless episodes of our lives can be times when we mature and find meaning.

How we deal with the tough parts of our lives, he observes, “shows who we are.”

There are three main ways people find fulfillment of their life meaning, in Frankl’s view. First, there is action, such as creating a work, whether art or a labor of love—something that outlasts us and continues to have an impact. Second, he says, meaning can be found in appreciating nature, works of art, or simply loving people; Frankl cites

Kierkegaard, that the door to happiness always opens outward. The third lies in how a person adapts and reacts to unavoidable limits on their life possibilities, such as facing their own death or enduring a dreadful fate like the concentration camps. In short, our lives take on meaning through our actions, through loving, and through suffering.

A common thread in these disparate words of wisdom comes down to the ways we respond to life’s realities moment to moment, in the here and now, as revealing our purpose in an ethics of everyday life. Our lives continually pose the question of our life’s meaning, a query we answer by how we respond to life.

our unique strengths and weaknesses make each of us uniquely irreplaceable.

a materialistic view, in which people end up mindlessly consuming and fixating on what they can buy next, epitomizes a meaningless life, as he put it, where we are “guzzling away” without any thought of morality. That very eagerness for consumption has become today a dominant worldview, one devoid of any greater meaning or inner purpose.

“Suicide,” he wrote, “is never able to solve a problem” or to answer the question being asked of us by life.

there was one part of their lives that remained free: their own minds. The hopes, imagination, and dreams of prisoners were up to them, despite their awful circumstances. This inner ability was real human freedom; people are prepared to starve, he saw, “if starvation has a purpose or meaning.”

our perspective on life’s events—what we

make of them—matters as much or more than what act...

“What is human,” he argued, “is still valid.”

What remained was the individual person, the human being—and nothing else.

that each of us actualizes the content in our own act of being. That which is actualized is also much more effective. Words alone are not enough.

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.

Doubt about the meaningfulness of human existence can easily lead to despair. We then encounter this despair as the decision to commit suicide.

there are people whose desire to commit suicide comes from the fact that they simply feel tired, tired of life. But this tiredness is a feeling—and we all know that feelings are not reasons.

Such a person creates a “balance sheet” and compares what they have (credit) with what they feel they ought to have (debit); they weigh up what life still owes them against what profit they believe they can still derive from life, and the negative balance that they then calculate induces them to commit suicide.

“We are not in this world for fun.” And this is true in the double sense of what is (being) and what ought to be.

But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else—preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible.

Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked—and behold, duty was joy.

after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?

With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us. Now everything depends on what is expected of us. As to what awaits us in the future, we don’t need to know that any more than we are able to know it.

But none of us knows what is waiting for us, what big moment, what unique opportunity for acting in an exceptional way,

The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.

our answer can be an active answer, giving an answer through action, answering specific life questions with a deed

that we complete or a work that we create.

Whether a life is fulfilled doesn’t depend on how great one’s range of action is, but rather only on whether the circle is filled out.

But we know how meaningless it is to guzzle away without any morality and how catastrophic this meaninglessness can be to anyone who is fixated only on consumption.

we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings:

Because how human beings deal with the limitation of their possibilities regarding how it affects their actions and their ability to love, how they behave under these restrictions—the way in which they accept their suffering under such restrictions—in all of this they still remain capable of fulfilling human values.

how we deal with difficulties truly shows who we are, and that, too, can enable us to live meaningfully.

What do athletes do but create difficulties for themselves so that they can grow ...

suffering as a result of misfortune is only meaningful if this misfortune has come about through fate, and is t...

“There is no predicament which cannot be ennobled either by an achievement or by endurance,”

Either we change our fate, if possible, or we willingly accept it, if necessary.

How misguided it now seems to us when people simply complain about their misfortune or rail against their fate. What would have become of each of us without our fate?

against circumstances they cannot help and which they certainly cannot change—have not grasped the meaning of fate.

suffering, as long as it is necessary and unavoidable, also holds the possibility of being meaningful.

rather, in some cases, endurance itself is the greatest achievement.

our meaningful achievements in life can be fulfilled at least as well in suffering as in working.

there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment—so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life.

being human is nothing other than being conscious and being responsible!

the one thing that is certainly senseless and has absolutely no meaning is . . . to throw away your life.

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

it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility!

what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past.