What the storm blows away

A lot of the time, when people talk about what carries them through difficult situations, they point to the positive side of things: happiness, motivation, the feeling of safety, the fun they get out of it. And as long as life is calm, these things work. But they are weather-dependent. When the harder times arrive – and they do – happiness, motivation, and the feeling of safety are the first things blown out the window. They are not foundations. They are decorations on a foundation that hasn't been built yet.

So if positive affect can't carry you, what can?

Hope, built on meaning

Viktor Frankl – Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, founder of logotherapy – would answer: hope. And hope, in his thinking, is built on meaning.

But not the kind of meaning most people imagine. There is a narrative many of us carry without realising it: swallow everything, keep it together, keep working – all in the hope of some grand finale, some moment of validation where it all becomes worth it. Frankl is not talking about that. He is not talking about life's meaning as a destination.

What he is saying is something far more radical: the question "What is it all for?" is not a question you ask life. It is a question life asks you. Every day, every situation, sometimes every minute.

Meaning is scalable

And this question scales. That is perhaps the most liberating aspect of Frankl's thinking. Meaning does not have to stretch across a lifetime to be meaningful. Think of chronic pain patients. They rarely plan in terms of "the next five years." Sometimes the horizon is a week. Sometimes it is a day. And if the pain is bad enough, the horizon is this very minute.

Even in that minute, Frankl says, meaning can be found. It does not need to be the big, revelatory thing. It can be small – and small things carry, too.

Three sources of meaning

According to Frankl, human beings can generate meaning in three ways. First, through creation: building something, making something, bringing something into being that wasn't there before. Second, through experience: beauty, nature, music, art, love – to be truly present in an encounter with the world. These two sources are intuitive; most of us recognise them.

Frankl's decisive insight is the third: meaning can be generated through suffering itself. Not because suffering is good. Not because it should be sought out. But because of what he calls the double uniqueness of every moment.

Double uniqueness

Every human being, independent of performance or achievement, is unique. And every situation – in its context, its timing, its particular constellation – is also unique. Out of this double uniqueness, something arises in every moment: a question, a task, an opportunity that only this one specific person can answer in this one specific moment. And in that uniqueness lies meaning.

What this means in plain terms: the way you genuinely suffer is not generic. Your pain is yours – shaped by who you are and by the moment you are in. And precisely because no one else stands where you stand, no one else can respond to it the way you can. That response – however quiet, however small – is meaningful.

What even Auschwitz could not take

Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist from Vienna. From 1942 to 1945, he was an inmate in Nazi Germany's concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He lost his wife, his mother, and his brother to the regime. He survived, and he spent the rest of his life researching a single question: how was survival possible in a place designed to destroy every last trace of humanity?

The concentration camps made their inmates suffer meaninglessly. There was no creation possible, no beauty to experience. Both conventional sources of meaning were stripped away. All that remained was pain. And Frankl's answer was: if you take your suffering as your task – if you accept the endurance itself as something that asks something of you – then through that task, you can generate meaning. And that meaning gives you hope. And that hope lets you keep going.

There is something in Frankl's account that stops me every time I return to it. The SS had every tool of horror at their disposal. Every lever, every mechanism of dehumanisation. And what they could not reach was a space inside these inmates – so weak and broken as they were – where they could still decide how they stood in relation to what was being done to them. Frankl calls this man's last inner freedom: the freedom to choose your attitude toward your circumstances, even when every other freedom has been taken.

Not all of them survived. Many did not. But those who found this space did not break. Not because they could fight back – they could not. But because they found something inside themselves that was beyond the reach of external force.

Worthy of suffering

"I dread only one thing: to be unworthy of my suffering." – Fyodor Dostoevsky

That sentence puts its finger on exactly what Frankl describes. It is not about glorifying pain. It is about the question of whether you can face what life puts in front of you without losing yourself in the process.

The why that carries

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote – and Frankl quoted it often – that whoever has a why to live for can bear almost any how. And this brings us back to the series, back to anxiety, back to the question of confrontation.

We talked about avoidance – how it works instantly but costs you over time. We talked about confrontation – not as a violent act, but as a learning process where expectation meets reality. We talked about acceptance as the ground. We talked about anxiety as a compass that shows you a direction.

But now, when you are actually standing there – at the edge of whatever you have been avoiding – what you need is a why. A reason. Something so meaningful to you that you are willing to take on whatever it takes. Not because you are brave. Not because it feels good. But because what is on the other side matters enough.

What Frankl leaves us with

And so this is the question I want to leave you with: what areas of your life, what people, what things are so meaningful to you that you would be willing to suffer for them? That you would be willing to go through whatever it takes?

A confrontation without a why – without meaning – is merely stress on your body. But a confrontation with meaning becomes transformative. And then we are straight back into Jung's territory: individuation, the shadow, the hero myth – but now with the fuel that makes the journey possible.

That is Viktor Frankl's gift to us.