Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning Helped Me in Pages and Perspectives

A Holocaust survivor’s wisdom helped me see that even in suffering, I had a choice — and that choice changed everything.

I was going through another bout of depression when I picked up Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. My mind was buzzing with fear and self-doubt. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of invisible weights wondering how i could possibly survive.

Anxiety has been a constant companion throughout my life. Depression, too, has walked close behind. There have been times where it all felt unbearable, where I couldn’t see how tomorrow could possibly be worth the fight it would require.

I don’t remember what prompted me to grab that book. Maybe I was desperate. Maybe I was searching. But I do remember what it felt like to read it — like someone had lit a candle in a dark room. Not enough to illuminate everything, but enough to show me I wasn’t alone.

Viktor Frankl was a neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor. He spent years in concentration camps, enduring starvation, brutality, and the loss of his father, mother, brother, wife and unborn child. And yet, he wrote one of the most hopeful books I’ve ever read. The core idea of Man’s Search for Meaning is this: even when everything is taken from you — your freedom, your dignity, your health — you still get to choose how you respond.

Frankl says, “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.”

That line stopped me cold.

Because certainly, he had faced so much more than I ever did. When you’re in the pit of anxiety and depression, it feels like you don’t have choices. It feels like the darkness calls the shots. But Frankl’s words cracked through that lie. He showed me that even in unimaginable suffering, we have a say. Not always in what happens to us, but in who we become because of it.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is a harrowing account of life in the camps. Frankl doesn’t sensationalize the horror. He just tells the brutal truth. The second part is an introduction to logotherapy, his psychotherapeutic approach built on the premise that human beings are driven not by pleasure (as Freud argued) or power (as Adler believed), but by a search for meaning.

Reading that changed the way I looked at my own pain. I had always asked, “Why am I like this? Why do I feel this way? Why can’t I fix it?” Frankl gave me a different question: What is this suffering trying to teach me? What purpose could I find within the pain?

It didn’t cure me. I still wrestle with anxiety. I still have days when the world feels heavy. But Man’s Search for Meaning helped me shoulder the burden a little better. It reminded me that there’s power in choosing how to carry the weight.

Frankl didn’t write a self-help book. He wrote a survival manual for the soul. And for someone like me, someone who has fought silent battles no one could see, it was a lifeline. It gave language to things I had only felt in fragments. It gave me perspective.

Sometimes we want answers. Frankl gave something deeper: a challenge. To live with purpose. To suffer with dignity. To refuse to let despair have the last word.

If you’re in a hard place, I won’t pretend this book will fix everything. But it might do something even more important. It might help you see that you’re not powerless. That your pain can serve a purpose. That even in the darkest of nights, there is a choice. And in that choice, there is hope.

Frankl reminded me of something every warrior must know: courage isn’t the absence of pain — it’s the decision to move forward in spite of it. To suffer with dignity. To fight the quiet battles no one sees, and to rise anyway.

Whether you wear armor or scars — or both — you’re still standing. That means your story isn’t over. It means you’re still in the arena.

What does meaning look like in your life right now? And if you’re still searching for it, what questions are you asking?

If you’ve read Frankl’s book — or if you’re walking through your own valley right now — I’d love to hear what it’s meant to you. What helped you hold on when things felt dark?