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Comment by alberich | Hacker News Reader

"Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life."

So the thousands who died on the camps were some kind of nihilists, eh?

Why people always want life to be meaningful. Life may very well be absurd.

Is the pursuit of meaning a requirement for living a good life? I don't think so.

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Well, I think the trick is the find meaning in small things and not to worry too much (all of the time) about how what you do fits in the grand scheme of things. Because, indeed, things that are meaningful on a small scale might be absurd when you put them in a bigger context.

So I don't see a contradiction here.

Of course worrying about what things mean on a larger scale can be virtuous, but you also want to come to terms with your limitations as a human being in a specific context.

It's like people have a taste for orderly things, (after all, life feeds on the reduction of entropy). An absurd chaotic life is not satisfactory.

One of the great questions of the logotherapy practice, though it's never put this way for obvious reasons, is when the patient seeks for help and the psychiastrist asks: why don't you kill your self? The whole job of the doctor is to help the patient to find the answer for this question and help him to integrate that answer into his life.

And on the people who died in the camps being nihilists, well, the nazis didn't ask people about their ideas before killing them. And I think that some people had the death as their own meaning in life (e.g. the father who put himself in the death's line, in place of his child).

'Is the pursuit of meaning a requirement for living a good life? I don't think so.'

I don't either. I think living a good life brings meaning.

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