Podcast #1,051: Man’s Search for Meaning, With Viktor Frankl’s Grandson

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

I first read Man’s Search for Meaning by the neurologist, psychologist, and philosopher Viktor Frankl in high school, and I have re-read it several times since. It’s one of the books that’s had the biggest impact on my life, so it was a real treat to speak with Alexander Vesely, Frankl’s grandson, about his grandfather’s ideas and legacy.

Today on the show, I talk to Alexander, who is a documentarian, and like his grandfather, a psychotherapist, about Frankl’s life, his development of logotherapy, a type of meaning-centered therapy, and how that approach to the psyche was tested during Frankl’s time in the concentration camps. We discuss why Frankl said that “everyone has their own Auschwitz,” how a lack of existential meaning can create depression, the three ways to actualize meaning in your life, whether meaning is something that is objective or subjective, the freedom we have to choose our attitude in all circumstances, including suffering, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• The Doctor and the Soul by Viktor Frankl
• Viktor and I: The Life and Work of Viktor Frankl — Alexander’s documentary about his grandfather
• Living Logotherapy by Elisabeth Lukas and Heidi Schönfeld
•  Logotherapy Online Academy
• Viktor Frankl Institute

Connect With Alexander Vesely

• Alexander at the Viktor Frankl Institute
• Alexander on LinkedIn
• Alexander on IG

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. I first read ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ by the neurologist, psychologist, and philosopher Viktor Frankl while I was in high school, and I’ve reread it several times since. It’s one of the books that’s had the biggest impact on my life. So it was a real treat to speak with Alexander Vesely, Frankl’s grandson, about his grandfather’s ideas and legacy. Today on the show, I talked to Alexander, who is a documentarian and like his grandfather, a psychotherapist, about Frankl’s life, his development of logotherapy, a type of meaning-centered therapy, and how that approach to the psyche was tested during Frankl’s time in the concentration camps. We discussed why Frankl said that everyone has their own Auschwitz, how a lack of existential meaning can create depression, the three ways to actualize meaning in your life, whether meaning is something that is objective or subjective, the freedom we have to choose our attitude in all circumstances, including suffering, and more. After the show is over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/frankl. All right. Alex Vesely, welcome to the show.

Alex Vesely: Thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are the grandson of Viktor Frankl who created logotherapy. It’s a type of existential therapy that we’re going to talk about today. And I’m sure many of our listeners are familiar with Frankl and his book, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. I remember when I read that book back in high school, it had a big impact on me. But for those who aren’t familiar with Viktor Frankl, can you give us a thumbnail biographical sketch of your grandfather?

Alex Vesely: How much time do I have? He lived to be 92 years old, so a pretty long life and a very interesting life. But just to give you the gist, he was, when you asked him, “What do you do?” He would say, “I’m a doctor.” So that was his definition of himself. He didn’t even call himself a psychotherapist, because he grew up in the time when psychotherapy was not yet its own thing. So he was one of the pioneers of modern psychotherapy. And as many might know from the name Freud, a lot of psychotherapy started in Vienna, Austria, and that’s where he was born and raised as well. And he was actually for a while a student of Freud and then of one of Freud’s disciples, Alfred Adler. And ultimately, they had a falling out, and he decided this is not for me. I don’t think that this is really how things work and how human beings function and what motivates them and what makes them, you know, live healthy lives and want to live healthy lives. And so as a doctor, he looked at his patients and he observed what were the differences between patients that maybe had difficult fate to deal with and yet they were doing mentally and emotionally fine.

And others who had comparably relatively easy lives, but they were overwhelmed and not healthy and needed a psychotherapist. So what was the difference? And he came to the conclusion that it was an element that it seems everybody else had overlooked. Everybody else in psychotherapy, that is, and that is the topic of meaning. He didn’t find that in any of his teacher’s teachings. And so he started his own therapy, his own form of psychotherapy and he called it logotherapy, which is a bit confusing ’cause you have to look it up in the dictionary. It’s an old Greek word, logos, which also means word. But in this case, the meaning that he chose is meaning. So it’s a meaning-centered therapy. And it was the first meaning-centered therapy. And that’s how he started. And then most people are familiar with his book, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, which is one of many books that he wrote. So he’s kind of always connected with that. But even he himself thought that wasn’t such an important book. Originally, he didn’t even put his name on it. But it was a personal account of his own hell that he had to go through, which was the Holocaust, ’cause he was Jewish.

And that was not a good thing to be at the time in Austria in the 1930s and 1940s. And luckily, he survived, he survived several concentration camps by sheer luck first and foremost. But he could also observe in that situation, in the camps, the validity of his theories and see is there something to it. And when people are really in despair and the distress is meaning important, does that make a difference? And he found that yes, this is actually the decisive, or one of the most decisive factors other than luck, you know, and I mean you could stand in the wrong place and be killed for that, right? Or have physical weakness or catch a disease and you were dead. So but if you put all these factors in the equation, the one thing that also played the central role and actually had an effect on the emotional and even on the physical well-being, to some extent, was the awareness of some meaning that might be in the future, some meaningful task or meaning can come in the form of a beloved person, family, a partner. And for that or for who it’s worth surviving and going through another day and not giving up.

So he published the book that he had to throw away when he entered Auschwitz, which is not Man’s Search for Meaning, of course, but the book was called ‘The Doctor and the Soul’, in which he put all his insights into how meaning relates to well-being. And that was lost. And one of the things that kept him going was his goal to rewrite that and to publish it and to make it available, his insights. And luckily, he lived to do that. And so that’s why we’re talking about him today. And we can talk about him today because he survived. Most of his family did not. So he lived to be 92, as I mentioned, so a long productive life.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s an important point to make. A lot of people have the mistaken assumption that he developed logotherapy while in the concentration camp. But in fact, he developed it before and then he was able to basically test it. Test his theories in the concentration camps. And then after…

Alex Vesely: Yeah. A trial by fire, so to speak.

Brett McKay: Oh, for sure. And then after the concentration camps, he published ‘The Doctor and the Soul’ and then also just had a very illustrious career. He became a public intellectual. A lot of… He was on television shows, radio shows. People were really, at the time in the ’50s and ’60s, interested in his ideas.

Alex Vesely: Well, I would say not just the ’60s and ’50s and ’60s, that continued on. And I think maybe that speaks to the validity of his insights, that they never went away, they were never mainstream. Like even when he was invited to speak, you know, Austrian television or American television, there was a lot of interest and he was a good speaker, so he had rhetorical skills too. And I think a lot of people came ’cause they said, “Oh, this is the guy, you know, who survived Auschwitz and what can we learn from him?” Which is valid, but it also kind of took away from all the work that’s so much more and that can be mined and has been mined, but never hit the mainstream. But interestingly, it also never went away. He always joked, you know, “I was never in fashion. So logotherapy was never in fashion. So it’s not going to be out of fashion anytime soon.” And that’s really true. People keep finding. And those who find it, who want to find it, they can find it. And those who are not interested in it, they don’t need to. It’s not a big business model.

Brett McKay: What was Frankl like as a grandfather?

Alex Vesely: Funny. Funny. Witty.

Brett McKay: I think that would surprise people.

Alex Vesely: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Before our conversation, we talked about, you did a documentary about your grandfather. And I watched it, and that was the first time I actually saw video footage of your grandfather. My only connection to him was through his books. And I had imagined him because he’d gone through the Holocaust and because he was writing about meaning and existential vacuums, that he was going to be this very serious, somber kind of guy. But the thing that surprised me was how full of life and vibrant and funny he was.

Alex Vesely: He was. He was. He had these deep thoughts, but he was also well grounded in the moment and in, you know, enjoying life and being able to see life from a different perspective. And I think that’s something you see in other people as well, who have been close to death and for some reason came back either by disease or by, you know, in his case, by chance. And they see life, they appreciate it more because they know it’s so precious and they know it’s short, and they know time is limited, and you never know. Row candidates, potential death row candidates. Right? We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. And so you can grow bitter over that and lament the fact that everything is fragile, everything can be taken away. But he didn’t. On the contrary, he said, “This makes it all the more precious, all the more worth living and making sure that you’re not missing out on all the things that are important.” And that can be, you know, writing. He knew he had work to do. He wanted to help people. That was his priority, really. But when it was time to make experiences or to be with the family, he would make time for that, and that would be the priority.

So the full spectrum. And I think maybe that’s what gave him credibility, ’cause, you know, he would say, he once, I don’t know if you know that story, he was invited in the US. Early, that was, I think it was his first visit to the US, and he was speaking there, doing a workshop. And the host afterward approached him and told him, “Dr. Frankl, did you notice that people were a little bit standoffish, a little cold?” And he said, “Yeah, I did.” And he said, “Well, did you wonder why?” And he said, “Well, you know, all my colleagues here they’re psychoanalysts. And what I’m talking about is not exactly psychoanalysis. It’s pretty much in many ways the opposite. And so I can understand that they’re not too happy.” And the host said, “No, that’s not it.” “So what is it?” And he said, “You, Dr. Frankl have come back from a severe suffering. You’ve come back from that and it’s jealousy because you did that and you were able to do that.” So you know, if there was some inconsistency in the logic, he would not let anything like this just be said and move on. So he thought about that, and he came up with that phrase that only he could say, which was, “Everyone has their own Auschwitz.”

And what he meant by that was, suffering is universal. The experience of suffering is universal. And I happen to experience it in one way, but in no way is that comparable or does it diminish the worst suffering, the worst experience of suffering that any other person has to endure or endures, chooses to endure. You know, if you’re talking to someone who’s severely schizophrenic, for example, that’s a nightmare. People are going through hell every day. And it wouldn’t be fair. You can’t say, you know, “Well, listen what I went through, right?” So you can well do that within your own experiences. And that’s what he did. He would say, “Well, you know, if I had a bad day, I would think back and say, you know, Viktor, pull yourself together. What would you have given for some, I don’t know, some dispute with a publisher 20, 30, 40 years ago when you were in the camps, when it was about survival?” And that is something you can do, but you cannot compare to other people’s suffering.

And that’s something he understood and people understood. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ has this attraction that people often tell me they read it and they reread it because they find something in it that gives them hope and inspiration. And I think that’s that relatability of. He was talking about suffering. He wasn’t talking about his suffering. He was talking about the universal experience of suffering and how that is part of human life, of every human life. Life doesn’t come without a certain amount of suffering. And even if comparably, you would say, that’s an easy life or that’s a little problem, it is not for the person who’s confronted with that.

Brett McKay: When did you first read your grandfather’s works, his books, yourself?

Alex Vesely: Late. I was 19 and I was on my way to Toronto, Canada, for a logotherapy conference. And he couldn’t go anymore by himself because he had a heart issue that he had ever since he exited the camp. And he actually never told us. But the doctor said, “You shouldn’t fly anymore.” And so he said, “I’m not going to fly, but can you go and can your sister go and read a welcome message from me?” And we said, “Sure, it was great.” I was 19, going, flying to Toronto, and I thought, you know, “I really should know at least the book that everybody has read when I get there, because, yeah, I don’t want to be embarrassed. People tell me, ‘Oh, you know, this part or that part of the book.” So I read it on the plane. I read it in English though, my English was good enough. And you said before that you thought he would be such a somber and serious man. And I had that thought too when I first read ‘Man’s Search for a Meaning,’ I said, “How is that my grandfather?” I would think that that’s a person who’s really somber and battling with, you know, an inner darkness.

And then I understood that the humor was actually what saved him. And that can be used as something. And actually logotherapy does tap into humor as a way to distance oneself from one’s own situation and one’s problem, at least a little bit. And that can have a healing effect. And I think, because he was so interested and focused on what’s happening around him and what is necessary, what needs to be done, that he was able to survive. And he even mentions that if you had this inner richness, it was easier to cope with the immense pressure.

Brett McKay: So logotherapy, we’re going to get into the details of it here in a bit, but broadview, it’s just about finding meaning in your life. I think it’d be helpful to do some historical context. I thought it was really interesting in ‘The Doctor and the Soul’, where Frankl talks about the environment in which he created, not he created, but maybe discovered or brought to light logotherapy, he developed it in the shadow of some of the giants of early 20th century psychology. You mentioned a few of them: Freud, Jung, Adler, there was Skinner. You mentioned that he was a protege of Adler at one time. And he talks about one of the problems with these therapeutic approaches in the early 20th century was that they often devolved into something that he called psychologism.

Alex Vesely: Yes, yes.

Brett McKay: What did he mean by psychologism?

Alex Vesely: Psychologism is a form, as he would put it, a form of reductionism. And that means something that shouldn’t be reduced or deducted from something else is being reduced to. And he said you always notice it when you hear the phrase “nothing but.” So for example, Freud would say, “There is no such thing as true love, the love between two human beings, but this is nothing but sex.” And you know, the sex drive or instinct.

Brett McKay: Libido.

Alex Vesely: Libido, exactly, exactly. Maybe, you know, you choose a certain partner because maybe you have some childhood memories and that kind of left an imprint on you, so you got your type or whatever, but there’s no such thing as love. There’s nothing but, so nothing but something else. Or if you think of behaviorism, right? Everything we do is nothing but behavior that somehow we learned that it’s good if we do it. Or you know, by maybe our parents gave us some candy or said, you know, “Good boy,” if we did something and bad behavior was punished. And so we are just basically animals. And all our behaviors, there’s nothing original about it, but it’s all kind of been put into our heads. It’s a program. It’s nothing but a program. And he would stand up against it. He would say, you know, “This is part of the truth.” He didn’t say it was nonsense. Obviously, we have drives and instincts and psychodynamic processes within us. But we are more than our psychodynamic processes and drives and instincts. We have them. But for example, we can also… We have the freedom to say yes or no to them.

So I can, as a human being, always decide, “What am I going to do with it? What am I going to do with my quirks or my needs?” And animals have a harder time doing that, as far as we know, when they have a drive, when they need to eat or something, you know, they’ll kill the prey and eat it. There’s no choice here. But a human being can say, “I’m hungry and there’s some food, but for some reason I decide, you know, my body is hungry, and my instinct tells me, you should eat, otherwise you’re going to feel bad or even die. But I can say no to my drives, to my instincts, to my behavior that has been trained or imprinted or whatever.” And so we have that freedom. So freedom of will was a central pillar of logotherapy ever since 1926. Now, and that was not something that others would accept. So he was going against the established thinking and model of what it means to be human.

Brett McKay: And there still is a bit of psychologism today of people who would say, “Oh, your temperament is just genetics and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Sorry. Or your environment, “The reason why you might be committing crimes is because, well, you grew up in poverty or abuse.”

Alex Vesely: Exactly.

Brett McKay: And your grandfather would say, “Well, you know, those things might be a factor in how we make our decisions or how we behave. They are conditions.”

Alex Vesely: But we are free.

Brett McKay: But yeah, in the end, we have our agency. That’s what makes us human. We can rise above that. And he saw that firsthand in the concentration camps.

Alex Vesely: He did. He did. That was one of the major differences. Freud, who fortunately never had to experience a concentration camp from the inside, he theorized that when you take away from people the basic needs, when you deny them their basic needs, security, food, whatever, they will all act the same. They will all fall back to their instinctual behavior like animals. And they will basically kill each other for a loaf of bread. And already before the war, my grandfather said, “No. I don’t think that’s true. On the contrary, I think in those situations when the basic needs are not met, it brings to the forefront even more the true character that someone has, or I should say, decides to be, because they’re also people who have bad character traits and maybe have even had miserable lives and did a lot of damage, but they behave differently all of a sudden in the camps.”

We always have the freedom to change as well. Otherwise he wouldn’t have wanted to be a psychotherapist, but he predicted something else. And it’s exactly what happened. And as he put it, he said in the camps, under that immense pressure, life and death situations, what emerged was on the one hand, the swine and on the other hand, the saints. So the very worst people allowing their, just as Freud predicted, just their instincts to take over and say, “Me, me, I need to survive and I’ll do anything in order to survive.” Which no judgment, and that’s understandable. But there were also those people who helped others till the end, or of course, the story of Maximilian Kolbe, for instance, who took somebody else’s place, who said he has a family. And he said, I don’t, so take me. And Nazis did. So who sacrificed his life for somebody else. Yeah. So that’s the whole spectrum of what it means to be human.

Brett McKay: What do you think your grandfather would think of today’s mental wellness culture? Would you say that’s just psychologism for the social media age?

Alex Vesely: Well, pretty much. I mean, there’s in some respects, it’s getting a little better. I mean, there’s talk about meaning now, which at the time, he was the only one really, nobody talked about meaning. And they would say, okay, if you talk about meaning, the meaning of life, you are welcome to speak at the Department of Religion, but this has nothing to do with psychotherapy. But ultimately, the problem with it is still that one of the other central ideas that he had, or observations that he made, better, is the self-transcendent nature of us humans. And what that means is, originally, primarily when we’re not indoctrinated or somehow battling with our own neurosis and quirks, if you like, primarily we are as human beings, always oriented beyond ourselves onto the world. That can be meaningful tasks to do, fix something that’s broken, do something that’s necessary, or other people, that’s love to encounter another person. There has to be no other purpose there.

And to be there and to experience or be there for that person. So meaning comes in that form too. So it’s different from this idea that most other psychotherapies, I really don’t know any other who would not say that it’s ultimately about the ego, right? That basically you’re always taking a detour. You’re helping somebody else, you’re just trying to calm down your social conscience, your bad conscience or something. So again, some inner process, or even the people who talk about meaning, even people who call themselves logotherapists who say, oh, it’s meaning will make you feel better. You’re gonna be better off if you do something meaningful. But that’s true in a way, but it’s not the reason why you should do something meaningful.

The reason why we do meaningful things, ideally, is in order for them to get done, because they’re important. If I do something out of love, if I save another person, I do it for that person, period. I don’t do it yet again to kind of instill some state within myself, that would actually be… And that would be pretty… Would you like to be rescued by someone who says, oh, I just did it for myself, so I feel better? It’s when we care about other people. And sure, there are selfish motives and we just had Christmas or maybe a lot of people gave some money to some charity, not for the noblest of reasons, right? But just for that very reason to say, okay, I did that. Well, then it’s still better they did it than if they didn’t do it.

It’s still meaningful to support a good cause. So you can take that at face value. But my grandfather would say that’s not the essential, the most interesting aspect of humanity. It actually is not all the selfish ego balancing acts that we do. And he did too. And everybody does except for maybe a saint. But whenever we transcend ourselves and truly do something for the cause for it to be done, for that person to be helped, then this is what’s truly human. And what’s kind of the best in our nature, our ability to do that. And why not focus on that, or at least put it into the equation, which so many therapies do not. They will say, oh, well, it’s nothing but, right? It’s nothing but, you just wanted to do something good so you feel better about yourself. And that’s not true. And he said better to take something at face value, which is maybe not completely 100% pure altruism, rather than taking a deed that has been done for truly a good motive and explain it away and say, this was nothing but.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. One of the biggest problems your grandfather believed modern man had to face was a sense of meaninglessness. And he called it the existential vacuum.

Alex Vesely: Yep.

Brett McKay: What were the characteristics of a person stuck in an existential vacuum?

Alex Vesely: Well, now we’re going deep into the practice of logotherapy. So it can come in different forms and ways and behaviors. Usually, people find meaning, and they’re oriented towards meaning by their very nature. So oftentimes it’s when there’s a lack of meaning, it’s sort of like oxygen. We don’t think about it while it’s there, but you take it away and there’s nothing other than we think about. It’s like, where’s the air? And it’s the same with meaning. And so oftentimes we’re confronted with people who struggle with the question of meaning when things get tough, and when there is this existential vacuum. He was the first therapist or doctor who said, just the absence of a meaningful perspective in life, of knowing that for some things you are good. You see the turnaround. It’s not what’s good for me, but what am I good for?

What or who? If that is lacking, if there is a vacuum, that can over time in fact lead to depression, to a full-blown depression, which in no way looks different than any other depression, including genetic. Genetically caused. And today we know that there’s this mystery of some depressions not going away by whatever treatment is being applied. Now, why is that? Well, because it’s not happening on the level of the psychophysical. It’s not a question of change your lifestyle or take more time, sleep a little more. It’s not genetic where you say, which you can see. Well, usually when you make a diagnosis and people say, I had an uncle who killed himself, and there’s no apparent reason why someone is feeling depressed. It’s a good guess that that person has a… There’s a hereditary factor. But there are also people who are fine in all these, how do you say, departments, right?

Everything is going well, and yet they feel miserable and their lives feel empty, and there is literally no reason for them to get up in the morning. And we all need that. That’s what really his work was. And what the work of a logotherapist is to help people find, again, something that is meaningful to fill that void. Because a void in life is never a good thing. So it can be depression, it can be small, it can be the typical Sunday neurosis, right? Or people who don’t know what to do with themselves when all the stores are closed or something happens where they’re taken out of their usual routine. And they hate that because this is a good… Routine is a good way to evade the question of is what I’m doing actually meaningful or not? ‘Cause we can keep ourselves busy, all kinds of excessive behavior, and even to some extent drug abuse.

There’s nothing else going on in my life. Then the question of taking in some substance that will make me feel good, it’s not a question of why. It’s a question of why not. Nothing stands against that. Even if I risk my life or I risk my health, well, why not? What stands against that? And if you have a strong why, people who have a clear why, they are not so much in danger of filling their lives with a behavior that is meaningless. Because of course to take a substance that’s gonna ruin your health is gonna take you away from meaningful possibilities. But it can also be excessive behavior. Excessive shopping, excessive thrill seeking, right? FOMO. There was a comedian once in the ’50s who came up with this joke of a motorcycle rider who says, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ll be there faster.”

And he took this up as kind of the motto of this, I don’t see much meaning in my life. There’s nothing of substance, nothing of value. So in order to fill this inner void, this vacuum, I want to put in as many things as possible, experience a lot to kind of numb that, knowing that there’s really nothing of value. So that’s one of the ways it can express itself. But oftentimes, you know, you have to find that out. And people don’t necessarily go into psychotherapy and say, I’m suffering from an existential vacuum. In fact, most people don’t.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think one thing he talks about too is boredom can be a common symptom of being stuck in this existential vacuum, like you mentioned the Sunday neurosis where you’ve had the busy week, and then finally it’s Sunday night, you really have nothing going on, and you’re lying in bed or just sitting on your couch thinking, I’ve got nothing going on in my life. And people have that itch to fill it with something that void. And as you said, there’s different ways people can do that. Drugs, it could be shopping, it could be trying to find ways to make more money. It could be scratching the sexual instinct.

Alex Vesely: Yep.

Brett McKay: Oh, the other thing too, you said the danger of the existential vacuum is that it can make people susceptible to conformism or totalitarianism as well.

Alex Vesely: Yeah. If I don’t know where I’m going, what I stand for and what are the values and the meaningful tasks that I want to actualize, if this orientation is lacking, right? Then maybe I’m susceptible and become susceptible to, well, then I’ll just do what everybody else does, and that’s conformism, or I’ll just do what everybody else wants me to do. And that’s total totalitarianism.

Brett McKay: Did he have any theories as to why people living in the west in the 20th and still happening today, the 21st century, are more prone to this existential vacuum?

Alex Vesely: Yeah. It’s the price of freedom, and it’s also the price of, well, it can be the price for living in relatively safe and with a good standard of life. And he predicted that, again, in 1930s, where the standard of life where he was living at least was not very good. I mean, for most people you had the crash. So people were suffering, but they were saying, oh, as soon as we’ve solved that problem, as soon as the economy is back and up and running again, and people can afford to eat, and the people can afford maybe go on vacation from time to time, then they’re gonna be happy. And he predicted, well, no, this is not necessarily so. In fact, the existential crisis might even be reinforced once all these things that we supposedly need to live from are there. That still does not answer the question of, what do we live for? And that’s an important one. And in some ways, even more important than what we live from. What do we live for? And that’s a choice.

Brett McKay: Yeah. One thing he said about the existential vacuum, or the existential void is the price of freedom that we have. He said this, he says, “Humans living in the modern world, we no longer have instinct to tell us what we have to do.” Right. We’re not like animals that just say, we have instinct, like, you gotta eat, you gotta have sex. We can rise above that. But he says, “The other problem is there’s no more tradition that tells us what we ought to do. So people don’t go to church anymore. They don’t believe in bigger philosophies or whatever. And as a result, they have nothing guiding their life. And so they’re more prone to fall into an existential vacuum.”

Alex Vesely: And he witnessed that firsthand, because if you think of the history and the times that he grew up in with all the monarchy had just faded away and was a time where the trust in those institutions that were kind of handing down meaning for generations, they were falling away. And as young people like him would say, “Well, I don’t have to live by that”. Who says that this is the way that I should live? And he also said, “This is nothing bad.” It can turn bad if you don’t find anything. But in itself, freedom is wonderful. It’s great. And he would say, it’s not just a hallmark, but it’s a prerogative of youth to ask these questions and to not accept meaning being handed down by traditions or the family or… But to go out and say, I’m gonna find my own answers.

I’m gonna take that challenge. And he would applaud that. And oftentimes, he would help people by telling them, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re actually very brave asking that question. You’re not just not sick.” Again, as Freud had said if somebody asks the question does my life have a meaning or not, they’re sick, they need therapy, they need psychoanalysis. And he said, “No, that’s actually a very honest sign of maturity. And it puts you in the same group with the biggest philosophers who ever walked the earth to ask a question. There’s some bravery about it.” And to say, “I’m gonna find my own answers”. It’s only when that process is taking so longer and longer and there’s nothing and comes to view. And that can happen sometimes that people get this what he called existential frustration, and then it can turn into people giving up on searching and saying, there is no meaning, I’m done with searching.

And then you have those kind of neurotic reactions to this inner void, to this existential vacuum. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. But then you need to talk about these things. And you can’t just have a psychotherapist who says, “Well, take those pills and you’ll feel better.” You are working on a different level. Again, you’re taking an existential crisis, something that’s at the center of the human experience and reducing it to say, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable. So let’s turn off the discomfort.” It’s sort of like saying you’re in a house is burning, and your fire alarm is going off, “Oh, let’s just kill the fire alarm. It’s really loud. It’s really annoying.” But that won’t prevent the house from burning down. And no existential crisis. There’s no solution as to how am I going to live my life if I’m just taking, popping in pills to not feel any discomfort.

So again, the form of reductionism that we still today so often meet, and how many psychiatrists take the time to actually have that conversation and find out is that a person who actually needs antidepressants, because there’s really, the problem is an imbalance, and there’s nothing wrong with their life, and they have a lot of meaning, then that exists. And then antidepressants are a blessing. But if you’re dealing with somebody who’s in existential crisis, you gotta find out and you’ve gotta work on a different level, you need to find answers there. Otherwise, you’re not helping the person. Actually, you’re making things worse because you’re kind of taking away their ability to… It’s a healthy discomfort because it keeps you going. And it’s a motivator to act and to say, “I gotta do something about my life.”

Brett McKay: Yeah. That depression or boredom can be a smoke alarm.

Alex Vesely: Exactly. There’s nothing… Boredom has its meaning because it’s telling you, hey, you’re missing out on some meaningful opportunities in your life that are waiting for you to be turned from possibilities into realities. And you’re not doing that. So it’s an alarm.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk more about how we can find meaning. I think first we’ve been saying meaning a lot. Like, we gotta find live a meaningful life, do meaningful things. What did your grandfather mean exactly by meaning? Because I know he wrote this originally in German and there was translations done. I think you talked about this in a previous interview. Sometimes the translation from German to English, it doesn’t quite capture.

Alex Vesely: Exactly.

Brett McKay: The German word that he used initially. So when we say meaning, what are we talking about?

Alex Vesely: Well, at some point he would say meaning and purpose, because those have a bit of different connotations in English. Yeah. But you’re right, there’s no ideal word. And so he said, I’m using the word meaning, and I’m giving a lot of examples so that anybody who reads about logotherapy might be able to understand what I mean when I say meaning. But yeah, it’s best to work with examples. So he said there are three ways you can actualize meaning in your life. Number one is kind of the obvious: Whenever you ask somebody what makes your life worth living, they would say, well, I do this and that with my life, right? This is my work. This is the work that I do. Or you talk to an artist, they’ll say, well my next painting that adds meaning to my life. So he called those the creative values, the things that we put into this world, the way we influence and change, and hopefully change for the better, the world through our actions, through our deeds. And then there’s another aspect that’s also still people would guess it, and that will be experiential values. So not just the things we put into this world, but the things we take out of this world and into our senses. The experiences of, you know, you name it. Of something that’s beautiful, of something that’s true. If you’re a scientist and experiencing, finding truths.

Brett McKay: It could be nature.

Alex Vesely: Yeah, exactly. Nature, or art, music. He always mentioned the example, “If you ask somebody who’s in the concert, listening to their favorite music, and you ask them, is life meaningful? They’ll say, Of course it is. Yeah, it’s beautiful. Can’t you hear?” So that’s meaningful too. If we’re having this conversation, and there would be, I don’t know, an aurora borealis, that’s in the news these days outside the window, and we wouldn’t even look. You know, this happens, what? Every once in a lifetime or so, we would miss out on something meaningful. And that is to experience. So life is about that too. But then he added a third factor. And that’s when life does not offer those possibilities to do much or to experience much. And usually that comes into play or that becomes noticeable when things are going bad, when things are not going well. Say you’re dealing with an incurable disease or you’ve lost somebody who’s near and dear to you. All the things that happen sooner or later in life. I mean, incurable disease, hopefully not. But I mean, it happens every day.

And then he said, “There’s still a way to actualize meaning, to find meaning and to actualize it.” And when it comes to say, suffering, it’s the way in which we confront the suffering, the way in which we shoulder. We still have that freedom and freedom of choice. We still have possibilities there of how to deal with a predicament or a difficult situation. We can deal with it in a meaningless way or even say, “Okay, you know, one example that shows you that absurdity, the meaninglessness would be, say, if I get a bad diagnosis, that’s lethal, I’ll kill myself.” As if that would make any sense.

So if you think of the ways you can deal… There are always ways that are more meaningful on how to deal with something and even if it’s limitations. Just incidentally, I met some… Caught up with some friends the other day and they’re older now and I heard the wife of my friend has been in bed for three years, can’t move, they don’t know what it is, but she’s losing the ability to move her body. And I thought, you know, that’s terrible. In what state is she going to be like? And visited her. They put up her bed in the living room and they surrounded her with beautiful pictures. She loves colors and she was the same person I knew. She was making us feel good. You know, people around her feel good and say, “You know, don’t worry, I’ve had a good life and I’m enjoying the things now I didn’t have time for back then.” So just that attitude. And my grandfather said, “This is the most difficult, this is the highest way, the highest value or way you can realize meaning is in a difficult situation.” Choose a way to shoulder that that is inspiring, that is in some way also, you know, creating something, putting something meaningful in this world, because it shows you’re okay. You know may be one day I’ll have a bad suffering some incurable disease.

And I experienced that and said, “Oh, well, you can also shoulder it bravely like this, like she did, or you can just lament.” And I said, “Why are you not sad?” And she said, “Well, that wouldn’t make any difference. So I decided not to be.” It sounds so logical, but there are those examples of people who show us what is possible, what is humanly possible. And so that will be another way, how we deal with bad situations. And of course, goes without saying also deal with good situations. I mean, you can have a lot of opportunities and be healthy and be young and be good looking and be miserable and not see the possibilities that you have. Or you can be grateful and say, well, I’m glad that I have these possibilities, that I’m healthy, that I can do something with my life. I’m grateful for that. And that again, is a choice. So the way it’s always a mix. What we do, what we experience, and the attitude that we actualize.

Brett McKay: It’s that last point about the attitude we take to suffering we can’t avoid. One of your grandfather’s most famous quotes is the one that says everything can be taken from a man but one thing; The last of the human freedoms: To choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Alex Vesely: Exactly, exactly.

Brett McKay: So in the end, that suffering, it’s an opportunity to exercise your most human capacity, which is agency, deciding what you’re going to do with your life.

Alex Vesely: Exactly. And he made it… He put up a mathematical formula. He said, “D equals S minus M.” Okay? So D equals S minus M. What does that mean? Despair equals suffering minus without meaning. Suffering does not automatically lead a person to be in a state of despair. The deciding factor, when push comes to shove, is meaning. And when you see some perspective of meaning, something that the way you can shape… He would say you shape your suffering in that you squeeze a little bit of meaning out of it. In that lies the possibility. And there’s no need to be in despair. And we learn that. And that’s something again, that he didn’t prescribe anything or demand it of people, not at all. But he would cite and quote these examples and talk about these and show people, you know, this is possible too. You know, maybe that can be an inspiring idea for your situation.

He would be very clear. Would say that life never runs out of meaningful possibilities, never until your last breath. Even when you’re in bed and dying, there’s still things that can be done. There’s still time for forgiveness, for example. And even if you can’t change nothing else, [0:43:23.6] ____ you can still change yourself. And that’s a possibility we all have. What attitude do we adopt towards our past and the way we lived our lives? And in that, you can also grow and transform yourself on an existential level, which is why he was often speaking in jails and prisons.

Brett McKay: When your grandfather talked about meaning, was it something subjective that you created for yourself, like a Nietzschean Übermensch, or was it something else?

Alex Vesely: No. It’s a very good question. I’m glad you asked it, because it’s a very decisive no. If you think it logically to the end, there is good reasons why that would be dangerous, because it would basically, you could justify any kind of behavior by saying, well, for me, it’s meaningful, right? If your point of reference is saying, if it’s meaningful to you, then it makes it meaningful, then you end up in a moral dilemma very quickly ’cause you’d say, for Hitler it was meaningful to commit genocide. So what’s wrong with that? If that was meaningful for him? So no, he would say, meaning is there. It’s objectively in every situation. And to make that a little more understandable, he would quote an incident where somebody came up to him before a lecture and he said, “Dr. Frankl, I don’t have time to listen, so can you just quickly tell me what’s the meaning of life?”

And you know, first he got a good laugh out of that, but then he used that. He said, “This would be like asking the best chess player in the world, what’s the best move?” And the answer to that would, of course be, “It depends on the situation, it depends on the game, it depends on where the figures are. But even more than that, it depends on the players. Who are they? What strategies do they use? Even how are they feeling this day? Are they on top of their game or not?”

So but if you put all these factors into equation, or a supercomputer, you know, that supercomputer can say, “Okay. In this particular individual situation, this or that with a 99% certainty is the best move if you want to win the game.” So that’s the most meaningful move to make. So it’s always [0:45:32.5] ____ which means meaning relates to the person, to the individual, and to the specific situation. And then when you take as many variables into account as you can, you can say this or that is the best move, but it’s never that you decide it is the best move. If I wanted to win a chess game, I’d say, “Well, this feels meaningful to me. So I’ll decide that this is the most meaningful move.” Then you’re very likely going to win. So it has to be found. Meaning cannot be given, it cannot be prescribed. It can at best be described. He would say, but everyone has to find it on their own.

Everyone is on their own terms. And I think there’s a kind of beauty to that too, because it really puts the logotherapist and the client on the same level. Because this is something we all do, consciously or not, is to decide in every moment, what’s the most meaningful move? What’s the most meaningful possibility in my life right here, right now, regarding, you know, me as an individual? Who I am. Do I have some knowledge that I can explain? Yeah. Okay, well, then it’s meaningful to do that. Is there somebody drowning in the river and I can’t swim? Well, it’s not meaningful to jump into the river. You know, two people are gonna drown, but maybe I can make a phone call. So what’s the most meaningful move?

It depends on the person, on the individual, but it is at the same time tran-subjective, he would say. So it’s out there. It’s an objective quality that’s in the situation, inherent in every situation. And he would compare it to kind of the Gestalt ideas of Max Wertheimer and other thinkers, who spoke of the demand quality of a situation. What is the situation demanding of me right now? How am I going to respond? It’s not so much us who asks, you know, “This is what I want from life, and if I don’t get it, you know, I’ll throw a fit.” But what is life demanding of me? How am I going to respond? And I’m purposely saying respond and not react because if it was react again, there would be no freedom. But how do I respond? I can choose my response. And even if say, somebody does things to me that are meaningless or unjust, I don’t need to react to that. But I can choose a meaningful response which is going beyond my own needs and which, if it’s meaningful, everybody benefits, even the other person involved.

Brett McKay: Yeah. That’s something your grandfather talks about a lot and repeats in a lot of his books, is when people are feeling that existential angst, vacuum, void, instead of asking, well, what’s the meaning of life? He said, “That’s the wrong question to ask. You need to ask yourself, what’s life asking of me right now?” Your grandfather developed a few techniques in logotherapy to help people put logotherapy into practice. One of them is encapsulated in a quote that I’m gonna be honest with you, when I first read it 25 years ago, I had a hard time understanding it. I still have a hard time understanding it. There are times when I read it and I think, oh, I get it. And then I read it again, like, oh, I don’t actually, I don’t get that. So here’s the quote. And I’m hoping you can help me finally understand what he meant by it. The quote is, “Live as if you’re living already for the second time. And as if you had acted the first time, as wrongly as you’re about to act now.” What does that mean?

Alex Vesely: That’s an interesting one. Well, I think the answer is really much simpler than you think it is. Basically, what he was talking about is, as I just mentioned, every situation in life is unique. Right? This moment that we’re experiencing right now is never going to happen again. We’re two individuals, who knows? Tomorrow we might not, you know, one of us might not be around anymore. Things happen. Life doesn’t always give us the same opportunities the next day than it does today in this moment. So everything is transient, everything is… All these possibilities that we are faced with, they’re fleeting and they can be gone the next moment, the next instant. And so the choices we make, whether to pick something that’s at least relatively meaningful or aiming for the best, or not even trying is an important one. That’s not just something that we should put aside.

It’s important because it’s ultimately, this is what makes our life, right? Our decisions, what we decided to put into this world. And so I think it was pointing out that importance of every moment being unique. And maybe sometimes we kind of go on autopilot and just react in the very sense of the word and don’t notice that actually meaning is already somewhere else, that it’s jumped to a different place and not the routine, not the thing we usually do. And we have to be mindful of that and be open and look at the whole situation and say, “Okay. Well, just because I have always done something like this, or maybe just because it feels like this now, maybe I’ll give it a second thought. Maybe what I’m about to do is wrong.”

And once you’ve done something wrong, you regret it. Once you put something into reality, you cannot take it out of reality. It’s there forever. And it’s like a document of your life and what you have done and what your existence meant in this universe forever. And it’s hard sometimes if we think of the things we did wrong… And of course, this is human nature. We always mess up and make wrong decisions. That’s just part of being human, of course. But to strive at least, and to say, well, maybe this is already something that I’m doing which is not the most meaningful. Maybe I should rethink that before I have to go back and, well, live with the responsibility of what I’ve done without the freedom to change it.

Brett McKay: Okay. That makes sense. So as you were talking, I was thinking about something I do on autopilot that I’m not happy about. And I wish I could do different or wanna do different. You know, getting grumpy with my kids when they do something frustrating. So I have to think about, okay, this is how I usually do it. If this happens again, I don’t have to do it that way. There’s another way I could do it.

Alex Vesely: Right…

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay.

Alex Vesely: What it would be like if I already had done it.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Vesely: I would regret it. So why not choose to not even put it into existence in the first place?

Brett McKay: Okay. I like that. Okay. Thank you. I finally understand it. It’s been 25 years, or probably more. I know a lot of people, because it’s a new year, there’s listeners who are hoping to improve themselves, maybe live a life with more meaning. They wanna be better humans. Are there any daily or weekly practices that you’ve come across or maybe you’ve developed, ’cause you’re also a licensed psychotherapist, that people can do to keep their eye on finding meaning in their lives even when things aren’t going their way?

Alex Vesely: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s a good question. I mean, it’s actually really good. A lot of times, a lot of the problems could be prevented. And logotherapy has a lot to offer, not just for people who already some crises is in their lives, but even before that, to kind of check, am I on the right path? Or is this maybe not such a good or stable path that I’m on, or meaningful path? Ultimately, that’s what it’s about. And so one of the things… There are a couple of exercises, a lot of exercises were developed by Elisabeth Lucas. My grandfather was very impatient. He didn’t take much time to develop, you know, meditations and things like that. But Elisabeth Lucas did, and there are a lot of resources that you can find in her books. You know, one of the things that’s part of an exercise is to think, to imagine if your life was over tonight at midnight. What would be the things that… Well, first of all, that you would say, I’m glad this or that happened. I’m glad I had this experience. I’m glad I had this encounter. I’m glad I was able to, I don’t know, do this in my life, to achieve something.

But then the second question is, what are the things that I would really regret knowing that my life is going to end in a couple of hours that I wish I would have had more time to do, to finish, to start, to turn into reality from a possibility, and what would be really heartbreaking and I would not feel good about leaving that undone or unexperienced. And think about that and then open your eyes again and take a look at what that is. And you’ll be aware that probably you’re not going to die at midnight. Maybe, but hopefully not. But if there is something that comes to mind that you really would regret not having done, go do it. Don’t waste your time. Because possibilities can be gone the next moment, if there is something meaningful that you’re postponing for whatever reason ’cause it’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, ’cause it’s a sacrifice, because I don’t know, maybe you’ve forgotten about it. You know, life, things happen and things come in between us and what’s really important. Remember that and then go out and do it while you can.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Alex, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Alex Vesely: Well, there is the Logotherapy Online Academy that is now offering training in English for the first time, which I’m doing together with Dr. Heidi Schönfeld. Logotherapy-online.com you can find it there. And there’s also the Viktor Frankl Institute of America where you can do an online course which is sort of a short and snappy overview, a basic introduction to logotherapy. And you can do that on your own from home. And it doesn’t take much effort.

Brett McKay: Well, Alex Vesely, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Alex Vesely: It’s been a pleasure for me. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Alexander Vesely. He’s the grandson of Viktor Frankl and also a documentarian who did a documentary about Viktor Frankl. You can find more information about his work at the website viktorfranklinstitute.org, also check out our show notes at aom.is/frankl where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And also check out our new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed. You can find more information at dyingbreed.net. Till next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.