Fate, Skillful Action and Man’s Search for Meaning

"By robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our "provisional existence" as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless." Source: Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl was a psychologist who wrote the book Man's Search for Meaning the year after he was released from Auschwitz and Dachau Concentration camps. He wrote about how some people had inner will and constitutions that allowed them to develop inner freedom and dignity while a prisoner in camp. He wrote that any man, even under extreme circumstances, decides what shall become of themselves, mentally and spiritually. That everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

How?

He says:
1) By having a "why", an aim. He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.

2) By taking right action, skillful action over and over through all of our daily and hourly choices. Full responsibility for our actions. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.

Sidenote: He developed a therapy called Logotherapy, based on the premise that the primary motivational force of an individual is to find a personal meaning in life.