🖋️ Victor Frankl
🎧 I listened to the Audiobook. Not as good as reading, but better than nothing!
These are summary notes of surprising information, written so I can better remember what I read.
How did I find it? Angela Duckworth “No stupid questions” podcast.
The book in 3 sentences
- Concentration camp can still find meaning.
- It’s not about what you expect from life it’s about what life expects from you. Your answer (for the meaning of it all) must not be in taking action in ‘Good Conduct’ in accordance with the job life puts in front of you. Life means taking responsibility for its problems.
- Fundamentally, one makes meaning thru accomplishment, experience of goodness or people, and how one handles unavoidable suffering.
Impressions
The book reads as a poetic, rosy lens on his holocaust experience? But maybe that’s a good strategy.
⭐⭐ Sufferings is like a gas. It will fill the space given to it. No matter how big the chamber. Suffering great or little will completely fill the human soul and mind. The magnitude need not matter. ⭐⭐
It is a little difficult to pull out the insight so many others claim to see. I might have to re-read this on with the physical book (non-audio).
Top quotes
Via love you can see the potential in the person which is not yet actualized but which ought to be. Make aware what they can be and can become.
Existentialism invites rampant horniness.
- This is a funky insight, but seems to track in my experience.
He describes this notion of paradoxical intent where you get the opposite of what you’re hoping for.
Kastan Day 