5.20.24

Currently, all of my creative endeavors are so tangled up with and concerned with fundraising, securing funding, and so on that I find I am struggling to really focus on the act of creation as a joyful process unto itself. And while I’ve written out the intellectual proof-points that should be able to defeat this kind of thinking here on this blog over the past month, those sorts of “go create art in the woods” theories are great, but none of those actually take care of payroll for the kinds of teams of people required to build the things I want to build.

And at least 80% of the folks who reach out to me to talk about their creative projects right now when you scratch beneath the surface, they are really looking for money to help fund their projects too!

“I can’t forget the sound, cause it’s here to stay: the sound of people chasin’ money and money getting away!”

So let us instead return to the books, to giving thought to the creations of others. I guess that’s how creativity always really starts, right? You fall so in love with what someone else is doing that you think, “Someday maybe I can do that!”

Yesterday I finished Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

I was first assigned this book in high school, likely a sophomore year (1992?) English class assignment. (Written in German, but “English” is what “Literature” was called back then.) I’m sure I understood as much about it as an entitled 14 year old boy really could understand about a non-fiction work describing life in concentration camps and the use of a particular didactic of psychoanalytic theory to help people think about the meaning of their lives.

In my studies on Happiness and philosophy and cognitive psychology this year, I kept bumping into Frankl’s concepts again and decided to reacquaint myself.

Descriptions of years in Auchwitz and Dachau provide the framework for Frankl’s experiences and much of his thinking about how people can assign meaning (and why they need it) in even the bleakest circumstances. This is the first half of the book. The second half is a meditation on “logotherapy” which is the school of psychoanalysis Frankl fathered and spent the second half of his life advancing.

There is much in this powerful book to contemplate. A few of the key concepts here:

The twentieth century showed us that human beings can create the gas chambers, but that human beings – having been stripped of almost all of their humanity, shaved, tattooed, starved and beaten – can also still walk into these chambers with their heads held high. These two poles of human expression serve as a sort of alpha to omega of the power, terrible cruelty, and the ennobling dignity of the human spirit.

That even when all other things are taken from a person, that person retains the ability to decide how they respond to any stimulus. This forms the basis for all modern ideas of mindfulness. You decide.

That each person must find their own meaning to their own life; there are few standard answers, all meanings are bespoke and can only be determined by the individual.

In an oft quoted line, we are reminded that “when there is a powerful WHY a person can deal with any HOW.” Purpose and meaning insulates and fuels survival (thrival!) in any scenario; without purpose a person will give up. With sufficient purpose they can survive almost anything, or at least go to their death with some level of peace.

Frankl lists out three things that tend to be a source of meaning to many people: The first of these is love of another human (or other creature I suppose). The second of these is the compulsion to create something (Frankl’s need to finish his book on Logotherapy got him through camp life). The third of these is the ability to impart meaning to unavoidable suffering.

Obviously, the first two make a lot of sense to me. Moms developing the superhuman strength to lift a car from the legs of their child, the writer who holds on against cancer until their great work is finally finished, etc. The third (finding meaning in unavoidable suffering) I continue to struggle with a bit, seeing it as a bit of an intellectual skeleton key designed to give people without either love or creative drive a reason to keep plodding along. But maybe upon further consideration I’ll understand it better (hopefully not through personal experience!)

One final concept that is mentioned a few times is the notion of dealing with life by imagining you are at the end of it, looking back, and believing you did everything wrong. Now go back and do it the right way.

“Think on yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what is left and live it properly.”

Maybe we’ll try on Marcus Aurelius next.

But first, let’s go try to find folks some money to enable creation in others.