# Humanities & Anthropology > Philosophy >  The Paradoxical Secret to Finding Meaning in Life

## Jovialis

> _"In 1942, the great psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, his wife, and parents were deported to the Nazi Theresienstadt Ghetto. His father died of pneumonia half a year later from the ghetto's deplorable conditions. The next year, Frankl and his wife were transported to the infamous Auschwitz death camp, where more than a million people would eventually be murdered. He was then transferred to two additional camps, separating him from his mother and wife, both of whom would eventually perish._
> 
> _During this ordeal, Frankl came to believe that the only way he could survive and maintain his sanity was to hold tightly to a sense of meaning and purpose. He was fond of quoting the philosopher Friedrich Nietszche, who wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” For Frankl, personally, meaning flowed from acting as a psychiatrist and physician to his fellow prisoners, as well as from reflecting on his love for his wife Tilly, as the following passage from his celebrated book, Man’s Search for Meaning, beautifully illustrates:_
> 
> _We stumbled on in the darkness. . . . The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. . . . Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us.” That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. . . . my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. . . . I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved._
> 
> _After being liberated from the camps, Frankl spent his life advocating for the importance of meaning as salve against suffering and the secret to happiness. Meaning brought him through the Holocaust and formed the basis for his entire approach to life._ 
> 
> _So it might seem surprising that he would provide the following admonition: “One should not search for an abstract meaning of life.”_
> ...


I like this approach. One could find meaning in life in a pursuit of various positive endeavors and virtuous acts.

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## Angela

> I like this approach. One could find meaning in life in a pursuit of various positive endeavors and virtuous acts.


This is one of my favorite books and has had a profound impact on me. 

If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it.

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## Jovialis

> This is one of my favorite books and has had a profound impact on me. 
> 
> If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it.


I'm definitely interested, I found those excerpts alone to be quite moving.

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