A why to live for

Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist when he was deported to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He lost his family, his work, everything he had. In the middle of that horror, he noticed something that would later become the core of his work: it wasn't necessarily the physically strongest who survived best psychologically, but often those who held on to some sense of purpose to keep going for — a person to return to, unfinished work, a reason of their own.

In 1946 he published Man's Search for Meaning, drawing on that experience to lay the foundations of logotherapy, an approach centered on the idea that human beings need meaning, not just pleasure or the absence of pain, to hold themselves together. In the book he revives a line he attributes to Nietzsche that sums up his central idea: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." It's not that suffering stops hurting; it's that a clear sense of purpose gives you something to hold on to while it lasts.

This idea, born in the worst imaginable conditions, has a very everyday application. When work is hard but you feel it matters, it's easier to carry than comfortable, empty work. When you care for someone and know why you're doing it, the tiredness feels different. Meaning doesn't remove the difficulty, but it changes your relationship to it: it stops being only a burden and also becomes a purpose.

You don't need to go through a concentration camp to apply this. It's enough to ask yourself, in front of whatever is hard right now, what your why is. Sometimes it won't remove the how, but it will give you the strength to get through it.