Lessons from Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning (Part 3)

Nietzsche: “he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

…the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naïve hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was noencouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died.

As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.

– Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, on the disappointment of false (unrealistic) hopes

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The folly here is that when suffering, a man sets his soul for ultimate self-destruction. Resistance can always be heightened, as Nietzsche writes, and even indomitable for a time. But where one sets the endpoint for suffering, the expections by which suffering will end can be easily disappointed, and if so then even time itself can bear the fatal attack on his shoulders.