Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

. . Whatever our future may hold: We still want to say “yes” to life, Because one day the time will come— Then we will be free!

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.

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.

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

“There is no predicament which cannot be ennobled either by an achievement or by endurance,” said Goethe.3 Either we change our fate, if possible, or we willingly accept it, if necessary.

“Live as if you were living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

“Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!”

indeed one cannot earn love; love is not a reward, but a blessing.

finally, it was seen that even illness, even incurable illness, yes, even incurable mental illness, does not give anyone the right to judge a human life as being “unworthy of life” and deny them the right to life. Thus,

Thinking of the words of Nietzsche who once said, “Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how”—a “why,” that is part of the content of life, and the “how,” those were the conditions of life that made camp life so difficult that it only became bearable with regard to a “why,” a wherefore.