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> They must somehow find meaning in their predicament

This helps you keep your sanity, but when the same thing happens on a large scale, it can also cause all sorts of social problems.

There are many cultures that valorize unnecessary suffering for the sake of suffering, just because it has always been a part of life. Often this takes the form of a rite of passage, such as genital mutilation, mandatory military service, and ridiculous amount of cramming in high school (especially in East Asia). Work that serves absolutely no purpose other than putting food on your table might fall into this category.

People often romanticize such activities, they think there's some profound meaning and honor in enduring them, and they even feel ashamed if they fall short of the societal norm. But in many cases, the illusion of honor is just a collective coping strategy. Koreans valorize studying 18 hours a day because they know of no other way to learn. Americans valorize full-time employment because most of them are stuck doing it. Soldiers everywhere brag about how brutal their training was because it makes them feel like their dick is bigger. In every instance, the valorization and romanticization gets in the way of progress.

If you as an individual discover meaning in something that everyone else ignores or takes for granted, that's great, you've become a better person through that experience. But if you see a bunch of people doing it together, it's usually a recipe for conservatism. The ultimate strength of humankind does not lie in our ability to endure pain. It lies in our ability to change the world so that nobody needs to endure the same kind of pain anymore.

Thanks for the insights.

> Work that serves absolutely no purpose other than putting food on your table might fall into this category.

Have you read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'[1]? The discussion on the concept of Value may challenge this idea that you have put forward.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...

I don't have any problem with individuals finding value wherever they want to. I might disagree with them, but that's OK.

I only have a problem when a certain interpretation of value becomes an oppressive social norm, i.e. when people force once another to adopt their interpretation and no other.

I've read ZATAOMM, but remember it as a discussion about Quality as the alignment/connection between objective and subjective worlds. Did I miss something?

I agree, but this is a tricky matter.

By one side, simply the best way of achieving any measure of success requires a lot of work, that's easily seen rationally; many other sacrifices we make though don't generate meaningful results. But we associate the effort required to perform all those, so to have enough morale to perform hard work by accepting sacrifice, some may need (irrationally) to perform other kinds of sacrifice.

Let me clarify this in the east asian setting: sometimes just prizing the result (good grades, acceptance at university) will not actually provide good results because kids (and people in general) are not perfectly rational and can't clearly make a best strategy to their goal. So people start prizing the necessary (but not sufficient) steps to reach the goals, namely sacrifice -- which leads to the stupid biases of putting unproductively much study, working an unproductive number of hours, and so on. Another reason there may be a bias toward sacrifice is that the other side is usually much worse (i.e. major unwillingness to put up work), so society overcompensates.

So even if you look at it rationally, it may make sense when you take into account our psychological quirks. Of course, it's all the best that we don't have those to begin with, and I figure a great part of our learning is simply bypassing those natural barriers, optimizing for results.

I agree with your analysis.

What I can't stand is the amount of brainwashing that goes on in every instance to make those sacrifices, overcompensations and necessary evils look like some sort of sacred duty. Please, call a spade a spade.

Humans may have psychological quirks, but they're not stupid. If you keep pretending that something is even more important than it already is, sooner or later people will realize what you've been doing and take it as an insult to their intelligence. What usually follows is cynicism, which is essentially overcompensating for romanticism.

Here is a bit from Robert Antelme's "L'Espèce humaine", badly translated by me from the German version ("Das Menschengeschlecht") into English:

"On Sunday we have to do something, it cannot go on like this. We have to get out of the hunger. We have to talk to the people. There are some among them who are rapidly deteriorating, they are letting themselves go, they let themselves get destroyed. There are even some among them who forgot why they are here. We have to talk with each other."

This happened in the tunnel, and was carried on from mule to mule. In this way a language started to exist, which was no longer the language of cursing or something thrown up from the stomach, and also not the barking for a cup of food. This language here created a distance between the human and the muddy, yellow earth, so that he was no longer dug into it, but its master, master even over the empty pocket of his stomach. In the pit, in the bent body, in the deformed head, the world opened."

I've had several members of my family go through addiction and have dealt with clinical depression. I gave Frankl's book to one of my older sisters and it had a profound impact on her. It was no silver bullet to her recovery, but it made her look at life completely differently.

Also, in the movie, "I Am Legend" you can see what happens when we're deprived of interaction with other human beings. Will Smith's character goes through seemingly humorous interactions with mannequins in the video store at the beginning of the movie. Although people were snickering in the movie theater, it occurred to me that he was simply trying to create meaning for his own life, even if in some nonsensical way, to avoid going crazy because there were no more "humans" to interact with. It was a constant theme throughout the movie and I'm not sure too many people got that.

These are similar to the arguments Camus makes in the Myth of Sisyphus (on the minor philosophical point of whether or not one should kill oneself).

As a counterpoint, in "If This is a Man", Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi describes his inability to find meaning in his experiences, and a lack of triumph of the human spirit, in himself and other inmates.

As the title implies, the book claims that not only did the Nazi's attempt to dehumanize the concentration camp inmates, but that the succeeded. This was sufficiently confronting that the US title was changed to "Survival in Auschwitz"

EDIT: fixed typo

In case anyone else is confused by the typo in the title -- it should be "If This Is a Man".

I cannot understand why people still decide to base their motivations on slippery concepts like the meaning of life or on some romantized, conjectured intrinsic values of our species. It seems to me that there are much better mental models of our existence that can help us to organize our thoughts and lifes, most notably things that are derived from the theory of evolution, neuroscience and from behavioral biology.

In this case, probably because when you're being tortured, it's small comfort to know how the synapses of your tormentors' brains are firing. Things like defiance in the face of adversity or finding meaning in life seem to be universal across cultures, and a lot more fundamental to the way our brains work than something like scientific understanding.

Because such slippery concepts make it more possible to survive adversity. It's almost as if it was a trait selected by evolutionary pressure because those were the mental models that helped their users survive.

I choose to use nonrational (not irrational or rational, necessarily, but indeterminate) thoughts like "My life has purpose" as sources of motivation since it shortcuts the process of extracting meaning from theories that take a great deal of time to research and internalize.

I am not a rigorous accountant of truth in my worldview. I choose a worldview that works for me since I don't have the time or energy to truly consider all options.

"The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning."

"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

– Stanley Kubrick, http://genius.cat-v.org/stanley-kubrick/interviews/playboy-1...

If scientific validity were our lone motivation, than yes, it would make sense to ignore these "slippery concepts," as you describe. But this is not the case. I, for one, dread the mechanization of human behavior, even if it may seem accurate. The same goes for others, too. In general, people will not reduced themselves to mere cause and effect; they want to exist as more than than.

Having verifiable evidence against my beliefs means nothing, because my intention is not factuality. That's why creationism and evolution may coexist in the theologians mind. And that's why the utilitarian ideology will never become widespread.

The sciences are valuable in all tangible senses, but these "models," as you describe, are just that - models. And I feel no obligation to model my existence. Honestly, I prefer not to understand myself. Life's more amusing while unpredictable.

My dad once dropped this wise gem:

If you are under 20 and a capitalist - you have no heart.

If you are over 20 and still a socialist - you have no brain.

My guess is that those mental models don't provide much comfort to people suffering from depression. Our brains evolved over many years and they require certains things to be present to be able to work at a normal mood elevation. Research suggests that the ability to find meaning or living according to "core values" is a necessity for most of us to escape depression. Whether or not it's logical or rational is irrelevant, it's how our brains work and it's just as important as sunlight, physical movement, and normal Vitamin D levels.

> you can be an affirmation of the strength of humankind.

Well, that gave me goosebumps.

Downvotes?

HAHA, HN, you make me laugh.

Thanks!

In all seriousness, I had the same response when I read Man's Search for Meaning the first time. The first half of the book describes, in clinical detail (Frankl was a psychiatrist) the details of daily life in Auschwitz and other Nazi camps. I don't need to say that they are disturbing, but you might be surprised to hear that they're also uplifting.

The book will make you cry. Not because it's sad but because it's a reminder that although humans are capable of causing great evil, we're also capable of looking that evil in the face, even through our own powerlessness, without turning away. We dish it out but we can take it, too.