Originally Posted by
CathyA
This "purpose" thing is confusing to me. Is everyone saying that they believe they are here to accomplish something?
I don't have a purpose.
I think it can be defined as "why do you get up in the morning?"
This was Viktor Frankl's point in his book Man's Search for Meaning, which is one of my favorite books. Here's an excerpt from an article about the book
1. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
This is the refrain of the entire book.
Throughout the book, Frankl speaks deeply about his own ‘why’ and its power to help him endure his situation.
He also speaks of many prisoners who had completely lost their ‘why’ and quickly lost their life as a result.
Frankl and his fellow prisoners had to endure atrocities that many of us cannot even imagine. Prisoners had to survive on one small piece of bread a day and maybe some thin soup. They had to work 20 hours each day, digging and laying railroads and so on. If you looked weak, you were beaten. If you stopped working, you were beaten. And you didn’t get much of a second chance after that. You could be killed for any reason.
There are three ‘whys’ that stand out from Frankl’s writing:
Love
Work
Dignity in suffering
We have likely heard many people utter these words from a concentration camp prisoner: “I have nothing to expect from life anymore”. In fact, we have probably uttered these words ourselves. Many of our own darkest moments look positively radiant when compared to that which POWs like Frankl had to endure. And yet we still have the gall to say such things.
Frankl asserts that it doesn’t matter if we have nothing to expect from life. We can still find meaning:
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.