In Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he describes his horrifying experience in several concentration camps during World War II. His heart-wrenching description is a must-read, though at times it is tough to get through some of the pages and visceral descriptions. Both before and after his experience in the Nazi camps, Frankl’s personal and professional crusade was one of promoting logos, or meaning, which he felt a lack of was responsible for much depression and mental illness in the world.
However, Frankl’s description of prisoners that had given up stood out to me most as I read his book. In his description, they would stop moving, stop caring, and begin smoking. “At that moment,” describes Frankl, “we knew that for the next forty-eight hours or so we would watch them dying. Meaning orientation had subsided, and consequently, the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over.” Seeking immediate pleasure was synonymous with giving up—a bold comparison. My first thought reading this was how it parallels many aspects of out life today, particularly the current elderly generation that, for the majority, seems to be most interested consuming, comfort and little else. They are certainly not the last generation with this focus, and are soon to be surpassed by the next generation of constant, habitual pleasure seekers, however, they happen to be the first that stands so counter to prior generations in this regard. While my second thought was that comparing his experience in the hell of a concentration camp is likely a stretch, the rest of the book and Frankl’s entire psychiatry practice of logotherapy would beg to differ.
Frankl strongly pushed the importance of the “why” of living over the “how,” and that “ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.” He notes that many of his patients are haunted by an inward “inner emptiness,” or as he coined it, the “existential vacuum.”
The solution? “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
The present-day food choices of most individuals parallel this incredibly well. Forget low-carb, high-carb, calorie counting, etc.; if we are eating primarily for pleasure—and secondarily for convenience—long-term health is nearly impossible. We should eat for vitamins, minerals, and nutrients, i.e. the meaning of our food. The same can be said of a life solely dedicated to
pleasure, particularly short-term pleasures and convenience.
While there are certainly a multitude of reasons why other physical and mental health has deteriorated as a society in recent years, I propose that the reason is constantly living for pleasure and, as Frankl described it, a constant push for the “discharge of tension.” Mentally, this promotes “inner emptiness” and physically it neglects a body and physique that requires stress to maintain function and grow, but instead inundates with a constant barrage of short-term pleasures promoting the long-term barrage of excess adipose tissue, muscle loss, weakness.
Living for pleasure eventually transitions to living in pain.
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