“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes.” This is an excerpt from the preface by Gordon W. Allport in Victor E. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”, a brief account of one man’s experience inside a German concentration camp published in 1946 (Frankl was a Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry).
Reading of the experiences of a person who was involved in arguably one of man’s worst acts of cruelty on its own kind left me feeling nothing short of overwhelmingly grateful for my current circumstances. The recollection itself only lasts 100 pages but it cleverly recounts his treatment by dividing a prisoner’s behaviour into 3 stages: (1) Shock upon being exposed to such conditions as were seen in those camps. (2) Apathy as a result of acclimation to their mistreatment. (3) Reactions of depersonalisation e.g. the realisation that family members have died, survivors guilt, a sense of entitlement due to mistreatment etc. He parallels the aforementioned with his own anecdote for survival which was purpose. Frankl describes conversations he had with fellow prisoners about eliciting pride in suffering, that if they were subject to this abuse they may as well get good at it! To even comprehend taking this viewpoint in such conditions is hard to fathom. But to replicate the core message and apply it to western society’s comparably trivial problems fills me with a sense of confidence. Mainly because I’m left clutching at straws when I try to produce an excuse as to why I can’t achieve what I want in life or experience my version of success. Notice I said “my” version of success. Far be it for me to tell you the reader what should or shouldn’t define success. The answer lies in the deeper levels of questioning you have with yourself. Ultimately, you will know at some point if you were bullshitting yourself all along.
I often hear people say when discussing what they want out of life or simply what they’re working towards, the response is “balance”. Paraphrasing Frankl on this subject, he echoes the notion that to consider equilibrium or homeostasis a marker of mental well-being is dangerous. That in fact to strive & struggle as opposed to living in a tensionless state is what promotes growth and contribution. Unfortunately the technological age that we are all apart of has created somewhat of a paradox. We live in a society that continues to improve on convenience and effortlessness. Instead of being weighed down by a lack of meaning, our frustration has been harboured due to lack of pleasure. The 19th century, Polish philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer puts it perfectly “that mankind was doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.” Let that sink in for a moment. Who would’ve thought something pondered centuries ago would ring truer today!
Observe the stress and general disdain you had when you were at school. How you couldn’t wait to be on Christmas holidays and to not have to listen to teachers telling you what to do all the time. But after about 3 weeks you’d run out of exciting things to do. You no longer found pleasure or excitement as you did in those initial weeks. The same occurs on a micro level for your typical 9-5 workers. How many unproductive, boring Sunday arvos have you had? All the stress of work leaves you thinking that nothing is the perfect something. Intuition tells me that’s not what you’d have hoped you’d done in retrospect on your death bed? Which brings me to the fork in the road in this sense of meaning in life and why do we need a why. This attitude is only harboured at a point in time where we don’t believe death is imminent, but we also understand our existence is finite. But what if that changed?
Due to the advancements in health sciences and ability to reduce child mortality rates (4.1 in every 1000 live births in Australia as of 2014 research by the U.S Department of Human Services) the number of us living well into adulthood has skyrocketed. With the focus now more on preventing disease that will likely cause death later in life, are we on the verge of becoming a-mortal? This is the understanding that dying from natural causes would no longer be an issue, however you could still be murdered or die in a car accident etc. This undoubtedly opens up a number of moral, social and economic issues to name a few. Nonetheless I want to keep this subject on the vein of purpose and meaning. How do you think you would live your life if you knew the only way you would cease to exist was either in an accident, murder or suicide? It’s a crazy concept to fathom but is potentially only a few generations away! The optimist in me encourages the thought of growing with numerous generations of grandchildren and great-grandchildren etc. The bonds of influence that could be created on my own bloodline. Not to mention the desire of travel and exploration. Being able to strategically plan when and where you want to go and experiencing so much change in those same locations over a vast expanse of time currently unbeknown to us. The realist in me says that I would tire of such novel ideas and the weight of a theoretical forever would bring with it no sense of urgency to achieve. I believe what drives most of us who love to achieve is that we realise this can’t last forever. When we are young we don’t ever think at the time we’ll be the old bastard bellowing “back in my day” but in reality it’s an appropriate course. With every affordance our generation is granted, we build on the ideas of those past with the expectation that future generations will do the same with their opportunities.
With the pettiness that exists in modern society around what matters like gender pronouns, sugar is the devil and the US election becoming the greatest popularity contest on earth I am wary of a future where the only means to an end due to such an amazing advance in human technology may mean the most common form of death is something I’m trying so desperately to prevent in my field…suicide.
Life as Benny 