This is just one of my favorite things

NOTES ON:

THE MEANING OF LIFE

'Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how.'

Viktor Frankl

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THE EXISTENTIAL VACUUM

The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is understandable; it may be due to a twofold loss which man has had to undergo since he became a truly human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behavior is imbeded and by which it is secured. Such security, like paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered an other loss in his more recent development inasmuch the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct to tell him what he has to do and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
A statistical survey recently revealed that among my European students, 25 percent showed a more-or-less ed degree of existential vacuum. Among my American students it was not 25 but 60 percent. The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress. And these problems are growing increasingly crucial, for progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous e in the leisure hours available to the average worker. The pity of it is that many of these will not know what to do with all their newly acquired free time.
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Moreover, there are various masks and guises under the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure. That is why existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation. We can observe in such cases that the sexual libido become rampant in the existential vacuum.

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VIKTOR E. FRANKL

From

IMAGE

MALOU