There’s a moment in Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” that always stops me cold.

Picture this: he’s on a forced march through freezing darkness, feet bleeding in worn boots, surrounded by guards who see him as less than human. A fellow prisoner stumbles, and a guard screams about how meaningless their lives are.

And in that exact moment, Frankl has a realization that would not only save his life but eventually help millions of people find purpose in their own suffering.

The thing is, Frankl wasn’t thinking about survival techniques or escape plans. He was thinking about his wife. About a lecture he wanted to give someday. About the manuscript that had been ripped from his hands at Auschwitz.

He was creating meaning where, by all logic, none should exist.

I read “Man’s Search for Meaning” a few years back during a period when I felt completely stuck. My startup had just collapsed, I was bartending to make rent, and every morning felt like waking up to the same question: what’s the point?

Frankl’s book didn’t hand me easy answers, but it did shift something fundamental in how I understood suffering.

The one freedom no one can take

When Frankl arrived at Auschwitz, everything was stripped away. His clothes, his possessions, his identity. They even took the manuscript he’d spent years working on. He became prisoner number 119,104.

Not a doctor, not a husband, not a person with dreams. Just a number.

But here’s what stuck with him and eventually became the cornerstone of his entire therapeutic approach: “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.”

Think about that for a second. In the most dehumanizing conditions imaginable, Frankl identified the one thing the Nazis couldn’t control: how he chose to respond to his circumstances.

I remember reading this quote while sitting in my tiny apartment, feeling sorry for myself because my business failed. The contrast was almost embarrassing. Here’s a guy in a death camp talking about freedom of choice, and I’m complaining about having to take a service job.

But that’s exactly Frankl’s point. The size of suffering doesn’t matter. He wrote about this too, comparing suffering to gas in a chamber. Whether you pump in a little or a lot, it fills the entire space. Your heartbreak feels just as consuming as someone else’s tragedy because it fills your entire consciousness.

The freedom to choose your attitude isn’t about minimizing pain. It’s about recognizing that even in pain, you get to decide what it means and how you’ll carry it.

When suffering finds meaning, it transforms

One of the most haunting observations Frankl made in the camps was about who survived and who didn’t. It wasn’t always the strongest or the healthiest.

Often, it was the people who had something to live for. A reason that extended beyond the present moment.

Frankl himself survived partly because he wanted to rewrite the manuscript that had been taken from him. He spent countless hours mentally reconstructing his theories about meaning and purpose, scribbling notes on scraps of paper, holding entire lectures in his head. His suffering had direction.

He also thought constantly about his wife, even though they’d been separated and he had no idea if she was alive. He writes: “For the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”

This wasn’t denial or delusion. It was something more powerful. A recognition that even if the worst had happened, the love itself held meaning. The connection couldn’t be erased by circumstances.

Frankl observed that “in some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” When your pain points toward something larger than itself, it becomes bearable. Not easy, but bearable.

I saw this play out in a much smaller way after my startup failed. At first, it was just crushing embarrassment. Wasted time, wasted money, proof that I’d been stupid. But once I started journaling about what went wrong and what I’d learned, something shifted.

The failure became data instead of just shame. It became the foundation for the writing I do now, where I try to help people avoid similar mistakes. The suffering found a direction, and in finding that direction, it stopped being purely destructive.

Life asks the questions, we provide the answers

Here’s where Frankl gets really interesting and where he challenges pretty much everyone’s default approach to life.

Most of us walk around asking “What do I want from life?” or “What will make me happy?” We’re constantly interrogating existence about what it owes us.

Frankl flips this entirely. He writes: “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

And later: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.”

Think about that shift. You’re not the interviewer, you’re the one being interviewed.

Life is presenting you with situations, challenges, opportunities, and you’re responsible for your response. The meaning doesn’t come from achieving some grand destiny. It comes from how you answer the questions life keeps asking.

For Frankl, those questions came in the form of unimaginable suffering. How will you respond to dehumanization? What will you hold onto when everything is taken? Will you help that person who’s struggling even though you’re barely surviving yourself?

For most of us, the questions are perhaps less dramatic but no less important. How will you respond to that setback? What will you do with that opportunity? Will you show up for that person who needs you?

I recently picked up Rudá Iandê’s book “Laughing in the Face of Chaos” and found similar themes running through it. One line that resonated was: “You have both the right and responsibility to explore and try until you know yourself deeply.”

That connects directly to Frankl’s idea that we’re constantly being asked who we are and what we stand for. The questions never stop, and neither should our attempts to answer them honestly.

Frankl’s work taught me that meaning isn’t a destination. It’s woven into how you navigate the journey, especially the difficult parts.

What I find both comforting and challenging about this perspective is that it puts tremendous responsibility on us. You can’t blame circumstances for an absence of meaning because meaning comes from how you engage with those circumstances.

The cancer patient who finds purpose in their remaining time and the healthy person who feels empty despite having everything are operating with the same fundamental truth: meaning must be created through how we answer life’s questions.

Frankl spent three years answering the same questions over and over in those camps. Will I maintain my humanity? Will I help others? Will I keep believing that this suffering can have meaning?

Each day was another exam, and he passed enough of them to survive and eventually help millions of others find their own answers.

Reading his account, I’m struck by how unglamorous meaningful survival looked. It wasn’t heroic speeches or grand gestures. It was choosing to share a piece of bread. Imagining a future lecture. Treating other prisoners with dignity.

Small answers to small questions that, added together, created a life that could withstand almost anything.

Rounding things off

I won’t pretend that reading Frankl solves everything or that finding meaning in suffering is simple. It’s not. Some days you find it, and some days you don’t. Some suffering feels senseless no matter how you frame it.

But what Frankl offers is a fundamentally different way to approach the hard stuff.

Not “how can I avoid this?” but “what can I make of this?” Not “why is this happening to me?” but “what is this asking of me?”

The man survived Auschwitz by recognizing that even in the most constrained circumstances, a fundamental freedom remained. And if that freedom existed there, it exists everywhere. In your disappointments, your setbacks, your moments of feeling completely lost.

You get to choose what it all means. You get to decide how you’ll answer. That’s not a small thing. For Frankl, it was everything.