COVID Archipelago: Our Search For Meaning

With the current pandemic, many have understandably found themselves in difficult times, whether it’s unemployment, taking care of ill family members, or other events that test us.

When hard times fall on us, it’s important to have the right perception of reality in order to survive and find a way to grow out of it.

I hope you can find some inspiration but more importantly a way to alter how you perceive your current situation.

 Empowerment comes from being able to take control of what you can, and the only thing we can truly control is our perceptions.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. — Victor Frankl

Our mind immediately recognizes that the quote above is profound before even knowing its meaning.

Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist that survived life in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. 

He wrote the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” to describe daily life as a prisoner and introduce his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying some purpose one’s life to feel positive about and then immersively imagining that outcome.

According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected his longevity.

To survive, many prisoners found humor to be helpful in making it through another day.

Humor, more than anything else, can pull us out of the emotional intensity of a situation and rise out of it, even if only for a few seconds.

The other thing was curiosity. 

Curiosity as to why things happened and whether he would survive the consequences.

“I had experienced this kind of curiosity before, as a fundamental reaction towards certain strange circumstances. When my life was once endangered by a climbing accident, I felt only one sensation at the critical moment: curiosity, curiosity as to whether I should come out of it alive or with a fractured skull or some other injury.”

In the following weeks, he was surprised by the amount of punishment his mind and body endured. 

Despite being subject to a combination of work exhaustion, starvation, forced labor, sleep deprivation, filth, and freezing cold, his body carried on.

What was more strange was that prisoners who seemed physically strong, robust, and healthy collapsed faster than smaller, weaker prisoners. 

Frankl figured that although sensitive individuals might suffer more physically, they had a psychological edge.

They had an inner life to draw on that nobody could access except them.

A place where they could “retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom”.

Since suffering was a daily occurrence in the camp the way an individual interpreted this suffering was of great importance.

Game Reframe

While one approach is retreating to an inner sanctuary, another helpful approach was reimagining the circumstances of reality in a different way.

This was exemplified in the famous movie “Life is Beautiful”, when Guido Orefice, a Jewish Italian bookshop owner, who uses his creativity and imagination to protect his son from the horrors life in a Nazi concentration camp.

How? By making life trying to survive in a Nazi concentration camp a game.

 Literally. Just watch this short clip.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s most popular quote is that a person who

“has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”

The Mistake Game

What happens when we take that concept further?

Imagine that throughout your life you never ignored a mistake that entered your life, whether it was your fault or not.

In doing so, you did everything you can to correct it. 

Would you suffer from all the trouble you take responsibility for? 

Would you constantly be anxious?

Another book, The Gulag Archipelago, explores this theme. 

The book will shock you to your core especially when you read about the atrocities and realize that the whole book is not based on fiction.

Imagine you just finished defending your country against the Nazis, serving as a two-time decorated soldier.

Somehow, even with a poorly prepared Soviet army, you managed to win the war.

You return home to your country and along with your comrades you’re arrested, humiliated, stripped of your rank, and charged for spreading “anti-Soviet propaganda”. 

You’re dragged off to prison and watch through your jail cell as your country celebrates its victory in the Great Patriotic War.

It gets worse.

You get sentenced to eight years of hard labor where you are worked nearly to death. 

He realizes that this is a terrible situation and wondered how did he get there?

The easy answer is that Stalin is a terrible monster and he did this. 

It’s not your problem. It’s not your fault.

Solzhenitsyn felt that answer, while likely true, didn't give him anything to do aside from just rot in the prison with no meaning. 

Identifying as a victim of fate wasn’t going to help him survive or gain spiritual power over his abusers.

Since he had a lot of time he decided to play a game.

The game was this:

The reason things happened wasn’t because of fate but because of something I didn’t do.

So he went back over his entire life.

Every detail, every event, and tried to remember every time he made the mistake of letting something go or didn’t do what he should have done.

He based this not off a moral code (there really wasn’t any morals in Russia during that time) but his intuition to feel that he had not done the right thing.

In going back through his memory he recalled people he really admired.

Those people were tough and pure. You could plant them in the worst circumstances and they would not bend.

They were incorruptible.

He also saw a few people like this in the camp. 

No matter how brutal a guard was, they never broke. Even though they could be killed, they did not even bend.

Nothing would corrupt them nor touch their mind.

This was a remarkable thing to observe because it doesn’t get any worse than where he was:

A concentration camp in the middle of the sub-zero winter in Russia being worked and starved to death by the country you just went to war for just to satisfy the grand vision of a brute like Stalin.

Even in these circumstances, Solzhenitsyn found people who would manifest admirable qualities that would leave you in awe. 

He discovered where in life he didn’t do what was right. So he decided to take responsibility and learned from these kinds of people.

So the conclusion he reached was that when one person decides to take responsibility and stop lying, that one person can bring down a tyranny.

Despite his terrible experience, he refused to turn against man or God even though he had every reason to do so. 

Instead, he wrote secretly, at night, documenting everything.

This resulted in the book, the Gulag Archipelago, which was a factor in helping to bring down the Soviet Union.

Tragedy Strikes Yet Again…and Again

While the book receives acclaim nationally and internationally, he once again is struck with tragedy.

The secret police (KGB) seize the manuscript of his next book and it only is published in the West. 

His books continued to spread and be published in the West.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970 was awarded to him “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.

The Soviet Authorities are enraged and order the secret police to poison him.

When that failed he was expelled from the Soviet Union, stripped of his citizenship, and forced to take residency in a new society both strange and resistant to his story.

Years pass and the Soviet Union collapses. He returns home to have his citizenship restored.

He continued to write and speak in his homeland until his death in 2008.

A year later, The Gulag Archipelago becomes mandatory reading by those responsible for establishing the national school curriculum in Russia.

The impossible victory becomes complete.

Meaning

As Frankl put it, a person’s “Search for meaning” is the primary motivation of life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. 

There is nothing more effective in helping one survive en the worst conditions than knowing that there is meaning to one’s life.

If we think back to Solzhenitsyn’s story, we can find a metaphor in there.

We are all victims of our own tyrannies just as we are victims of someone else’s tyranny. 

Rather than accept things on “bad luck”, what would happen if we confront them head-on? 

There is an idea that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension.

The tension between what you have already achieved and what you still ought to accomplish. 

Or the tension between what you are and what you can become. 

Everyone has their own specific mission in life to carry out which demands fulfillment.

Being a great spouse.

Being a loving parent.

Being a responsible employee.

Being a resilient entrepreneur. 

Ultimately, the first mission is who we are in the movie that is our life. 

How do you end hard days by when you weren’t disciplined? Or perhaps you didn’t do what was right? 

We don’t do it by whipping ourselves with negative motivation and insults.

It is done by reaffirming your self-respect. 

While having love and faith for yourself you also know there’s more in you. 

There’s a higher expectation to meet.

And you can do it.

This emphasis on responsibility is found in the proverb

“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”

Widening Our Perception

Frankl introduces the concept of logotherapy at the end of the book. 

Logotherapy is a concept based on the premise that the primary motivational force of an individual is to find meaning in life.

Rather than power or pleasure, logotherapy is founded upon the belief that striving to find meaning in life is the primary, most powerful motivating and driving force in humans.

The best way to explain what this means is a simple analogy between an eye specialist (opthalmologist) and a painter.

Logotherapy is more about acting as an opthalmologist than a painter.

A painter tries to convey a picture to you of the world as he sees it.

An opthalmologist tries to enable you to see the world as it really is. 

So logotherapy is about widening and broadening the visual field so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible. 

According to logotherapy, you can discover this meaning in life in three different ways:

1. Creating a work or doing a deed
2. Experiencing something or encountering someone
3. The attitude you take toward unavoidable suffering

Gods and Monsters

In the worst circumstances, life feels like its happening “to” us. 

However, we have the power of perception to decide that it is happening “for” us.

Your great ancestors were strong, smart, and capable people. 

Each generation found a way to survive and all those hundreds of years have accumulated into you today.

There is potential and opportunity everywhere if you choose to see it. 

The unique human potential at its best can transform a personal tragedy into a triumph and one’s predicament into achievement. 

When we are no longer able to change a situation we are challenged to change ourselves.

In the concentration camps, Frankl and Solzhenitsyn watched and witnessed some of their comrades behave like monsters while others behaved like saints.

A human has both of those potentialities within them. 

Monster and Saint.

God and Satan.

Tragedy and Triumph.

Which one we actualize should depend on our decisions, not our conditions.