Man's Search for Meaning

I shall not ask you to imagine a concentration camp. I shall not ask you to imagine the smell of burning flesh, the sound of a kapok's club striking a skull, the sight of a man who has become a "Moslem," a walking corpse who has surrendered his will. I shall not ask you to imagine these things because you cannot. No one can who has not stood on that selection ramp at Auschwitz, watching a single SS officer's thumb point left or right, deciding in an instant whether a man will live for another hour or die in the chimney. I was there. I lost my manuscript, my life's work, to a disinfection chamber. I lost my wife, my parents, my brother. I lost everything that could be taken from me.

And yet I tell you this: even there, even then, something remained. The one thing the camp could not take was my capacity to choose my attitude toward what was happening to me. This is not a platitude. It is a fact of human existence as real as hunger or frostbite. When I stood in the darkness of a crowded hut, after a day of fasting, and spoke to my fellow prisoners about the meaning of our suffering, I was not offering them comfort. I was offering them a truth that had been tested in the fire: that life's primary drive is not the pursuit of pleasure, not the struggle for power, but the will to meaning. We are beings who ask "why." And when we find an answer, we can bear almost any "how."

This is the thesis of the book you hold. It is not a memoir of horror, though horror is its backdrop. It is a report from the frontier of human extremity, a report that carries a single, urgent message: meaning is available in every circumstance, even the most unbearable. There are three avenues to this meaning. You can find it by creating a work or doing a deed. You can find it by experiencing something or encountering someone, especially through love. And when neither of these is possible, when you are stripped of every external source of purpose, you can still find meaning in the attitude you take toward your unavoidable suffering. This is the third avenue, and it is the most profound. It is the discovery that suffering, when it cannot be changed, ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.

The single most important thing to take away from this book is this: between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is your power to choose your response. In your response lies your growth and your freedom. The camp taught me that a man can lose everything except this final human freedom, the freedom to "take a stand" toward whatever fate throws at him. The prisoner who became apathetic, who stopped shaving, who gave up hope, died. The prisoner who found a reason to endure, even a small one, survived. This is not a guarantee of survival. It is a guarantee of something more important: that even in the gas chamber, even on the deathbed, even in the depths of despair, you are not a victim unless you choose to be. You are a human being, and your essence is the search for meaning. Do not let anyone, not even your own suffering, take that from you.