Unworthy Viktor Frankl Disciple
When it comes to addressing human suffering—mine and everyone else’s—I keep going back to Man’s Search for Meaning. But in spite of my admiration for this heroic author, I don’t feel like a worthy disciple. A bona fide Viktor Frankl disciple is a mature human being who has found the wisdom to embrace suffering, loss, old age and death with grace, courage, and dignity.
In contrast, I appear too morose, petulant, and depressive to wave the Viktor Frankl flag. I have had chronic nightmares since I was a teenager. I am girded by an excessive self-regard that makes it difficult to laugh at myself. I fear death. I have an unrelenting ambivalence toward religion that torments me day and night.
In spite of my love for Viktor Frankl and his message, I fear that there is no meaning, that we just bullshit ourselves into believing there is meaning so we don’t fall into the despair of knowing that all our actions amount to nothing but a hill of beans.
To worsen matters, I haven’t even done the normal things we expect of mature adults. I haven’t forged deep friendships that I imagine normal, healthy people doing. For a while, I was interacting with friends and acquaintances on social media in perfunctory, superficial, noncommittal ways, and eventually when I realized these interactions didn’t constitute any real connection and that they encouraged half-ass friendships, I backed off so that now I rarely engage with anyone on social media.
As I said earlier, I’m not ready to die. I’m not sure if there is a VIP parking space waiting for me in heaven or if I will be punished interminably for my bad deeds or moral shortcomings or for worshipping the wrong god or if my death will be nothing more than total annihilation.
As I slog into old age, I am dealing with another type of annihilation as well: I am struggling with a sense of my growing irrelevance in this youth-oriented world, and feeling irrelevant is a sort of death in its own right. My pessimism is cowardly and ignoble. I sound too much like the death-dreading pessimist Frankl describes:
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old?
Growing old matters to me a lot. Growing old hammers it into my head that death is coming and that my life has wafted all the grandeur and perfume of a mildewed dish rag.
The other night I dreamed I was working out in a health club. It was so dark inside I could not recognize the faces of the other gym members. They were just silhouettes. The dream made it clear: The light is fading. Time is running out. Death is just around the corner.
George Carlin says when we’re born, we’re given free tickets to the freak show. I’m going to miss the freak show, and even more I’ll miss the freak show’s funny, ironic, sardonic commentators, like Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Louis C.K., who use their razor wit to process this freak show for the rest of us. In a short time, the freak show will be going on without me because I’ll be six feet under ground.
Speaking of being six feet under ground, when you die, people forget about you rather quickly because a lot of shit happens: A catastrophic earthquake, a bad day at the stock market, a troubling outbreak of a new mosquito virus, an alarming report of a E. coli contamination in your favorite brand of peanut butter. Your death gets buried under the news.
Death in some ways is an affront to my vanity and my desire to be relevant. It affirms how insignificant I am.
I should have thought of meaning and mortality at a much younger age, so I would have more time to “correct” my life, but as I said, I was beholden to bullshit. And then 54 happened. I can no longer bullshit myself.
So now at 54, I’m re-reading the great anti-bullshit book, Man’s Search for Meaning, for the hundredth time, and I’m trying to follow its principles: change my depressive attitude toward life’s inevitable suffering, find a higher purpose, and, to paraphrase Frankl, approach my life as if I’ve been given a second chance to live my life as good as it was shitty before my second chance.
So what is my purpose? I can identify some things that give my life purpose. For one, I need to be more patient with my daughters. I’ll probably be dead by the time they’re 40, so I need to bond with them all I can. I need to love them. I think it’s impossible to love them enough or too much.
I need to be a better husband to my wife. I need to be less selfish and stop excusing myself for my depressive peevish attitude.
I need to be less of a child and more of a man so that my wife only needs to mother only two children, not three.
I need to follow my wife’s advice and go to Kaiser to get a CPAP sleep apnea machine so my grizzly bear-like snores won't keep her up all night as she frets that I will die in my sleep and render her a single parent.
Because I can be morally lax with a tendency to medicate my depression with sloth, churlishness, and self-pity, I need to live as if all my actions are accountable to my family, as if the world is judging what I do in secret. Hopefully, if I live this way, I’ll have more integrity, more moral rigor, and more discipline.
Viktor Frankl says we find meaning three ways: loving others, engaging in important work, and learning to embrace inevitable suffering with the right attitude—one that is courageous and gracious. Here I’m reminded of Stephen Colbert, a Catholic, who says that suffering is a gift from God, and that we must learn to love our suffering.
So far I’ve failed on that count. I’m a coward and a whiner in the midst of suffering. I blow a fuse just waiting on hold with the cable TV tech support. When my girls are contrarian, messy, and obstinate, I grow impatient and either lose my temper or retreat into a sulking pity party. My immaturity chafes at my wife and frays her nerves. My shame for failing her and my children does nothing to empower me to be my higher self. My shame seems to only make me worse.
Shame pulses through my veins day and night and spreads its poison throughout the home.
I am ashamed of being so ashamed of myself. Sometimes I’ll go into the garage and give myself a timeout—for no reason. Just because.
I’m too fragile for my own good. Once I went to a tofu festival in Los Angeles. They didn’t have normal bathrooms. They had port-o-potties. I opened the door of a port-a-potty, and I bore witness to more untreated sewage than I could process, sending me into a crippling depression. For a month I had to convalesce in my room while listening to motivational podcasts before I could finally get out of bed and resume my life. Being me sucks. Being me is a full-time job, and a shitty job at that.
What I have learned after all these years? It’s easy to read Viktor Frankl and agree with his principles. Living those principles is another matter.
So at 54 the Bullshit Switch shut off. Now I need to get all the bullshit out of my head and see what, if anything, lies underneath. I feel I need to do this with some urgency. I’m running out of time.
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