Man's Search for Meaning blog post

In Man's Search for meaning the author suggests that meaning or purpose in a person's life can help them to overcome challenges that they face. I think that it is a valid thesis and shows its merit in everyday situations. I, myself can think of situations where I have faced challenges and hardships and thinking of something that I wanted to achieve helped me face the challenge head on. I think that a big part of this is the idea of hope and that when people have a meaning or purpose in their life they have hope that certain aspects of their life will work out and certain events will be able to happen. As it is said in Shawshank Redemption, hope is a dangerous thing and I think in the book the author captures how effective hope and meaning can be and how crushing it can be when hope is destroyed.

"Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man—his courage and hope, or lack of them—and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly eʃect. The ultimate cause of my friend’s death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed."

In this section Frankl shows how effective having a purpose or a hope can be. One of the men who was sick was rooted by his purpose of getting out of the concentration camps, which he believed would happen on March 30th. When this salvation didn't happen he died the very next day. This was one of the most powerful parts of the book to me because I thought it showed how powerful the idea of hope was. This man survived greatly because he believed in something he felt he had a chance to live and a purpose to live when he lost that purpose he had no reason to go on and died. This is also evident in other parts of the book where Frankl talks about his dad and how one of his main purposes was to make sure that his dad survived, and while this was diluted for a while he still felt for his father and tried to keep him alive. Overall I completely agree with Frankl's theory, while it applies to his specific and awful situation it can still apply to people today who are going through much smaller challenges.