Man's Search for Meaning notes / Depression

Guy at work is depressed so I thought I'd help him by reading Man's Search for Meaning by Vitor Frankl. Now I'm depressed. Who's going to cheer me up? What's my purpose? Where's the meaning in my life? If I die today, what will be my legacy?

I'm going to stick to lighter reading from now on.

Frankl survived three years at a Nazi concentration camp and based on his experiences founded Logotherapy.

These are my notes from the book.

From the Preface:

• Life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.
• Don't aim at success -- the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, an it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. 

From Experiences in a Concentration Camp

• The prisoner who had lost faith in the future -- his future -- was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay.
• What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and 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 right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. 
• These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. 
• People wanted to commit suicide -- it was a question of getting them to realize that life was expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. 
• A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
• Camp survivors -- only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them. 

Logotherapy in a Nutshell

• Logotherapy (LT) focuses on the future, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. LT is a meaning-centered psychotherapy. 
• In LT the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life.
• Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific and must be and can be fulfilled by him alone. 
• LT regards its assignment as that of assisting the patient to find meaning in his life. LT considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning. 
• Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
• Ultimate meaninglessness of their lives --- existential vacuum -- don't know what to do. Instead he wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism.)
• Existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. 
• Masks and guises of existential vacuum -- sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure (addiction). 
• Meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day. What matters is not the general meaning of life but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. 
• Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. LT sees responsibleness the very essence of human existence. 
• Categorical imperative of LT: "Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now."-- like a second chance in life.
• By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of life, the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche. 
• The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he his and the more he actualizes himself.
• According to LT, we can discover meaning in life in: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone (loving someone); and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering
• In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as meaning of a sacrifice. 
• Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she could see a meaning in it.
• Super-meaning: this ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man ... bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. 
• Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself. 
• LT technique called "paradoxical intention" -- fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes. 
• Reversal of patient's attitude, as his fear is replaced by a paradoxical wish. 
• Fear of sleeplessness results in a hyper-intention to fall asleep, which, in turn, incapacitates the patient to do so. To overcome this particular fear, I usually advise the patient to not to try to sleep but rather the opposite. 
• Tragic optimism - make the best of any given situation.
• Mass neurotic syndrome -- the three facets of this syndrome -- depression, aggression, addiction -- are due to "the existential vacuum.
• Even criminals prefer to be held responsible for their deeds. At San Quentin, "I told them you are human beings like me, and as such you were free to commit a crime, to become guilty. Now, however, you are responsible for overcoming guilt by rising above it, by growing beyond yourselves, by changing for the better."
• Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless.