McMahon's Search for Meaning

The Parable of the Man Who Over-Thought His Way Out of Life

Chapter 11

The Parable of the Man Who Over-Thought His Way Out of Life

Viktor Frankl is correct to warn us of the “existential vacuum,” an emptiness that makes us desperate and resort to mindless consumerism, a condition that turns us into debased creatures, more like animals than humans. Whenever I think of the human being as Sated, Mindless Beast, I am reminded of a delicious passage from a Tobias Wolff short story, “Smorgasbord,” in which the narrator describes the patrons of an all-you-can-eat buffet stuffing themselves:

They ducked their heads low to receive their food, and while they chewed it up they looked around suspiciously and circled their plates with their forearms. A big family to our left was the worst. There was something competitive and desperate about them; they seemed to be eating their way toward a condition where they would never have to eat again. You would have thought they were refuges from a great hunger, that outside these walls the land was afflicted with drought and barrenness. I felt a kind of desperation myself; I felt like I was growing emptier with every bite I took.

Wolff observes a painful irony between the feeders’ overeating accompanying a state of spiritual evisceration. History is full of such lost souls, those mindless consumers of bread and circus, who warn us to flee their empty existence and seek refuge in the life of the mind, the world of the intellect, in which we try to free ourselves through honest self-inventory and analysis, but often I fear that I, and others, error in the extreme of thinking, becoming too pensive for our own good.

I know people who have never read Man’s Search for Meaning, who don’t contemplate meaning or happiness and are not mindless consumers falling prey to the “existential vacuum.” They are so busy living a life rich with connection to their family, friends, and community that they have never bothered to ponder philosophy or meaning of life questions. They may not qualify as having a life of meaning, as Frankl defines it, but they are good, decent, happy people. And I would not disturb them from their rich life by vexing them with my existential questions.

Often I worry that I over-think meaning and that this can be dangerous. To confirm my anxieties, one of my students, from China, wrote about the topic of over-thinking meaning in his Viktor Frankl essay, which focused on a story that the student’s father had told him. The essay, “The Man Who Over-Thought His Way Out of Life” was about a young man who asked God the meaning of life. God told the young man to go to the sea and lift the rocks. God promised him that eventually he’d find underneath one of the rocks the answer he was looking for. The man lifted millions of rocks over the decades until he was a hundred years old. There was only one rock remaining by the seaside. At last, this must be the rock, the old man thought to himself. But when he lifted the rock, there was no answer beneath it. The old man looked into the sky, summoned God and told him he had done as God had instructed him, but he had found nothing. “Because,” God said, “there is no meaning, you idiot.” Laughing manically, God said, “I tricked you!”

Knowing he had wasted his entire existence on a fool’s errand, the hundred-year-old man shook his fist at God, cursed at him, and died.

I’m confidant Viktor Frankl would agree with the fable’s moral, that meaning is not an abstraction to be pursued but is part of the life we live and that the man who spent his life lifting stones failed to live any kind of life at all.

Teaching Man’s Search for Meaning, I fear I over-think meaning and stand at the coastline, millions of rocks upturned yet with more unanswered questions than I had before I started the venture. I am so lost, so mired in the abyss of ignorance that surely I am unworthy of teaching Frankl’s masterpiece.

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When Self-Sacrifice Can be a Bad Thing for Parents and Their Children

Chapter 10

When Self-Sacrifice Can be a Bad Thing for Parents and Their Children

Perhaps driven by parental guilt and competitiveness, there is this extreme ideal of self-sacrifice for our children, our beliefs, our cause and our mission that becomes misguided. I agree with Viktor Frankl who writes in the Preface to Man’s Search for Meaning that there was a constant message he had for his students based on the importance of self-sacrifice:

“Don’t aim for success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”

Too many parents misinterpret the wisdom of Frankl’s words, especially the part of “one’s surrender to a person other than oneself,” with the idea that complete surrender to their children is a measure of their parental devotion. One danger of this extreme ideology of self-sacrifice is that in the service of their children that parents have forgotten to be a self and as a result have failed to be a somebody with character and depth for the children to look up to.

I didn’t think of this parental fallacy until I read these insightful words from Jonny:

I don't feel like I really landed on earth until my first daughter was born. Before that, Real Life was always in the future, but as soon as she screamed her way into the world, my life mattered. Or to put it another way, "The shit got real."

That said, I've come to feel strongly that the best way for me to serve my daughters and their unfolding is through serving my own. Not in a self-serving manner, but that by actualizing myself, my own dreams, and creating my own meaning, that I can provide an example for my daughters. The last thing I'd want is for them to grow up and see that their father hasn't done what he has tried to help them do: discover and follow their bliss.

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"Viktor Frankl Would Want You to Find Your Own Path"

Chapter 9

"Viktor Frankl Would Want You to Find Your Own Path"

Jonny thinks my worthiness, or not, of teaching Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning should be rooted in something other than being an orthodox Frankl disciple:

I'm starting to think that while on one level you are questioning your worthiness to teach Frankl, and on another you are asking whether you can actualize Frankl's principles in your life, on an even deeper level you are going through a process of transcending Frankl himself and coming to your own philosophy of life, that incorporates elements of Frankl, but also of CK, Dangerfield, and numerous other influences into a gestalt uniquely your own. Forgive my forthrightness, but it is almost like you are asking (yourself) for permission to move beyond Frankl, who seems to be your spiritual-philosophical father figure.

I mean, its almost like you have three choices: 1) You can stay as you are, and live in the pain of not living up to the ideals of Frankl, your spiritual-philosophical father figure; 2) You can actualize Frankl's ideals in your life, and be a "baby Frankl"; 3) You can forge your own path. Its probably clear where my bias is.

I'm with Freud in that I believe we all must "kill our father." Not literally, of course, and not even necessarily (or only) our actual biological father, but our FATHERS. This, I think, is what Frankl would want of you: find your own path. Don't seek to actualize his ideals, but find what is real for you and actualize that. In the end it isn't a negation of Frankl, but it is a transformation of what he is saying into something that is living and real for you.

Certainly not all of us can be great philosophers, but we can all actualize ourselves, we can accept and engage our uniqueness. This is something I occasionally tell my students: the universe doesn't want you (the student) to be the fellow classmate you're jealous of, or your parent that wants you to be a better version of them, or your older sibling, or your hero; the universe wants you to be you, as the unique expression that you are.

This is my personal philosophy of life, so I realize it is subjective - but it is one that serves everyone, that is embracing of any and all variants in that it asks us to actualize who we are, rather than who think we should be. It isn't the easy path, but it is the most fulfilling, I think. Be who you are! It sounds trite, but it is deeply powerful, I think - one of those core truths that we all overlook, and in so doing miss the main course.

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My Daughters Make Me Re-Think a Life of Meaning

Chapter 8

My Daughters Make Me Re-Think a Life of Meaning

I tell my students my “meaning” in life, if I have any at all, is for my daughters to never have to work at Walmart because, rightly or wrongly, Walmart has in my mind become a symbol of evil and a future dystopian America, some horrid chapter out of The Hunger Games. I am discouraged to hear that Walmart is a popular business model for other enterprises to impose substandard working wages on their employees, wages so low that a report recently came out that shows many full-time Walmart employees must supplement their incomes with food stamps.

Walmart should be ashamed of these revelations, but I’m sure it is not since Walmart is a Giant Industrial Sociopath. I’m sure its minions are concerned about how the food stamps story tinges its image while not giving a damn about its employees’ state of hunger.

If I did not save enough money for my daughters to attend college and instill in them a love for learning that would make them aspire for a life beyond the prison bars of a Walmart existence, I tell my students, I would consider myself a failure as a father and as a human being.

So for me, “meaning,” if it exists, is in seeing my daughters flourish, blossom, and bloom into an existence of their own choice and making, and that would be an existence in which there is a huge chasm between them and Walmart.

Indeed, that would give me some meaning, but I’d have even more meaning if I saw a strong moral core in my daughters. If my life was so shabby and loathsome that it influenced them to be vain, selfish, entitled, whining victims, similar to the pissy little brats who are expelled from Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, I tell my students, then that would be resounding evidence that I am a failure as a father and as a human being.

I am not a moralist for morals’ sake alone. I see a connection between morality and happiness. In the same Critical Thinking class in which I teach Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, I also teach Eric Weiner’s Geography of Bliss, a travel memoir that examines those countries that are high and low on the Happiness Index and the causes for those countries’ abundance or lack of happiness, and the more I study Weiner’s book, the more clear it becomes that happiness and morality are inextricably linked. The happiest countries such as Iceland, Switzerland, and Thailand teach social reciprocity, discourage envy, and encourage humor, all strong moral agents. The least happy country Weiner visits, Moldova, is painted as a place mired in selfishness, narcissism, envy, and learned helplessness.

So while I struggle to find the heroic meaning as defined by Viktor Frankl, I am comforted to know that I am no nihilist, someone who rejects the idea of right and wrong. I shudder at the moral repugnance of Walmart metastasizing across America. And I recoil equally at the thought of my life being so morally bankrupt that my children turn into the childish malcontents who incur the contempt and loathing of the beloved Willy Wonka.

My meaning may fall short of Viktor Frankl’s noble ideal, but at least I have relative meaning. Absolute definitions elude me for now.

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Does Wanting Nice Cars Make Us Evil?

Chapter 7

Does Wanting Nice Cars Make Us Evil?

In his standup, Louis C.K. says he’s evil because he drives a really nice car that he doesn’t need, that if he were a good person, he’d sell the car, buy a cheaper one, and use the proceeds to help feed starving children. But he doesn’t do that. He keeps his nice car knowing full well that his selfishness results in less charity to the hungry. And therefore, he concludes, he’s evil.

I tell my students that most of us are like Louis C.K. We’d rather use our resources to procure luxuries and comforts at the expense of helping others. Therefore, most of us, according to Louis C.K.’s definition, are evil.

My students will say, “Yeah, but, McMahon, he’s a comedian. He doesn’t really mean he’s evil. He’s just being funny.”

I retort, “But he’s funny because he’s telling the truth. Humor works when it reveals something true about ourselves. A good comedian like Louis C.K. makes us rethink our values and habits by shedding light on them in a new way. So maybe we are evil, or at least selfish, and this state impedes us from finding meaning in the manner that Viktor Frankl defines it.”

I like cars. And I like watches. My Japanese students, many who recognize the expensive Japanese diver watches I wear to class, call me a “Watch Otaku,” which means I have an obsessive’s fanatical devotion to watches, a materialistic hobby that casts doubt on my inner spiritual richness and therefore degrades my credentials to teach a book as precious as Man’s Search for Meaning.

How many starving children could have been fed with the thousands of dollars spent on my collection of Seikos, Orients, and Citizens? Louis C.K.’s words make me laugh. But they also condemn me. I am an unworthy Viktor Frankl disciple.

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When Halitosis Can Push You Off a Bridge

Chapter 6

When Halitosis Can Push You Off a Bridge

I’ve loved comedian Richard Lewis for over thirty years, having fond memories of his standup on David Letterman as far back as the early 1980s. I immediately felt connected to his neediness, anxiety and depression. For example, he talked about how depressed he could get from foul odors and told a story of preparing for a date when his grandfather, reeking of insufferable halitosis, got right in his grandson’s face and wished Richard good luck on his romantic venture. Catching a whiff of his grandfather’s bad breath from hell had such an effect on Richard that he cancelled the date because all he could think of was his grandfather’s loathsome halitosis, which gave him thoughts of jumping off a bridge.

Viktor Frankl says we can choose our attitude toward life, that we are not a “plaything of circumstance.” But can Richard Lewis and I choose not to be repelled to the point of despondence and depression by rank odors? Our overreactions to stimulus seem to be part of our hardwiring and this is one type of example that makes me skeptical of Frankl’s claim that we are agents of free will.

Another type of example, one that I talk about with my students, was my “choice” to finish college. People I went to high school with congratulated me for getting my Masters and becoming a college professor at the young age of twenty-five. Part of their happiness for my success it seemed to me was based on their low expectations for my future. I was a troubled high school kid, self-conscious, anti-social, absorbed by bodybuilding. From the age of fourteen to nineteen I was the sidekick to Falco, a former high school classmate, three years my senior. He was equally troubled and had no future prospects evidenced by his short-term jobs at a margarine and ketchup factory, Toys R Us, a pork processing plant. One day I went with him to the unemployment office and Falco knocked on a nicotine-stained plastic partition to talk to a pinch-faced weasel about getting a job. The unemployment office and its joyless functionaries looked like a bastion from hell, a place I’d be doomed to frequent if I continued to hang out with Falco.

I was nineteen and on academic probation at the time. Standing in that hellish unemployment office, I saw this huge flashing red light bulb over my head and the warning flash possessed me with fear, which compelled me to break away from Falco and get serious about college.

I tell my students this story and make it clear that I don’t know if I made a choice to go to college. After the Light Bulb Moment, I didn’t make a choice to continue my education; I was driven by fear. Every morning I woke up and felt a cold gun pressed to my temple, coercing me to getting up early and going to college.

I had no choice in the matter. College would open opportunities for me. Not going to college would most likely put me at the mercy of the unemployment office. Was that a choice? I never saw it as one.

I also tell my students I was smart enough to know I wasn’t smart enough to make a good income without a college degree. I was no Bill Gates.

I make it clear to my students that lots of young people, many smarter than I, were in my circumstances, on a road to nowhere, but inexplicably they don’t have a Light Bulb Moment and they end up more vulnerable than they should have allowed themselves to be.

Did I choose to have a Light Bulb Moment? Did I choose to feel fear like a cold gun pressed to my head every day while I went to college? Did I choose to become nearly incapacitated by morbid thoughts when confronted with foul odors?

I don’t think so. I think I was hard-wired a certain way. So on the subject of free will I remain an agnostic, at best, and this casts doubt on my ability to teach the principles of my hero Viktor Frankl.

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“Don’t Start Acting All Special Here Because You’re Not”

Chapter 5

“Don’t Start Acting All Special Here Because You’re Not”

My brother is the kind of person who if you tell him you’ve been diagnosed by a professional with chronic depression and generalized anxiety disorder will roll his eyes and say, “Everyone has that, bro,” as if to say, “Don’t start acting all special here because you’re not.”

I’m not saying that such an exchange occurred between my brother and me because McMahon’s Search for Meaning is not, as many might be inclined to believe, strictly autobiographical. My book in fact is a sort of novel, a work of fiction. Just like the TV show Seinfeld was a work of fiction starring Jerry Seinfeld playing a character of the same name, same job, similar quirks, inclinations, and neuroses. As a fictional account of Jerry Seinfeld and his friends, the show wasn’t confined to literal truth and was, as a result, free to spread its wings and fly.

That’s what I’m trying to do with McMahon’s Search for Meaning. Get some wingspan and soar in a way that might help me transcend any depression and generalized anxiety that afflicts the fictional version of myself.

Speaking of depression and anxiety, I appear to have been born with it, a condition that burdened my parents. My father especially was chafed by my undying gloominess, which he didn’t want to see in me. So frustrated by my moping about, my father, a military man, would often attempt to will me into a higher version of masculinity, shouting at me “to grow some balls” and “to stop moving like an old lady.” These admonishments in turn made me feel even more inadequate, a condition that I tried to compensate for by becoming a Junior Olympic Weightlifter (number one in the 148-pound class at age 13), then a bodybuilder (runner up in the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco at age 19) and now a kettlebell aficionado. In addition to abating feelings of self-loathing, exercise appears to medicate me and lessen my anxieties, but the fix is only temporary and I feel constantly compelled to find things to take the bite out of my generalized anxiety disorder and depression, so that these undertakings feel like a full-time job. Or as I tell my therapist, “It’s a pain in the ass being me.”

My hero Viktor Frankl would scoff at my self-analysis. He would argue that I am not a victim of depression and anxiety, that I have the power to free myself of my mental afflictions, that I possess free will. As Frankl observes, “Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

To be a true Frankl follower, then, means to accept free will, which means accepting responsibility for our actions. I wish I could say I drink the free-will Kool-Aid, but sadly my feelings, at best, are ambivalent on the matter, evidencing that I am indeed unworthy of teaching Frankl’s masterpiece.

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How Can George Costanza Teach Man’s Search for Meaning Without Being Arrested for Fraud?

Chapter 4

How Can George Costanza Teach Man’s Search for Meaning Without Being Arrested for Fraud?

Imagine the hubris and fraudulence of me walking into the classroom on the first day of the semester and I’ve got Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning on my syllabus. Knowing something about this book, the students might assume I’m a certain type of person. I believe in ideals. I believe in personal change. I believe in hope. I believe in courage. I believe in moral responsibility. I believe in talking earnestly about Viktor Frankl’s idea of Tragic Optimism, the belief that we can and should embrace meaning and purpose in the face of unspeakable evil and suffering. And I believe that by teaching such a book my students’ lives perhaps will change radically and indelibly.

When all of these assumptions are made about me, there is an implicit statement to my students that I am someone who not only talks about Frankl’s themes, but lives them out. I am a life-affirming humanitarian and a deeply spiritual person who says “yes to life.”

We’ve got a serious problem. I am not that person. In fact, I am the very opposite type of character. I am more like George Costanza. Since the early 1990s people have told me I share certain facial expressions, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and neurotic quirks that remind them of the self-absorbed man-child from Seinfeld. Mind you, these are people who, as far as I can tell, like me and who seem to find me funny because of my tendency to exaggerate my woes and tribulations. But when I read Man’s Search for Meaning, I read about Costanza’s opposite, a very noble man, a survivor of the concentration camps, Viktor Frankl, whose desire is for us to transform ourselves into a type of person who is very un-George Costanza. We read in Frankl’s book that for life to be fulfilling and complete, we must accept death and suffering as part of the deal. Frankl writes: “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.”

Those words damn George Costanza whose single-minded drive for self-preservation and his constant displays of over-the-top cowardice squeeze all remnants of human dignity. In fact, the more undignified and self-centered George behaves, the more funny he is. For example, there is a Seinfeld episode where George, working as a clown for a child’s birthday party, thinks there’s a fire in the child’s home, and George makes a quick getaway, the first to make the escape, with no regard to anyone else’s safety. That’s not a Viktor Frankl move and I’m afraid it’s a move I might make in similar circumstances. So who am I to teach Frankl’s masterpiece? I feel like a vegetarian butcher or some other type of fraud whose phoniness is so egregious that campus police will interrupt me in the middle of a lecture, escort me out of the classroom and lock me up in the holding cell while questioning my credentials to teach a book whose principles I so clearly violate.

I can imagine sitting at a bare desk with a naked light bulb hanging over me while the police chief, holding Man’s Search for Meaning, glowers at me and says, “So you’ve been masquerading as a Viktor Frankl authority, have you now? I think you’re full of shit!”

He then puts a blank sheet of paper on the desk, draws concentric circles and says, “Costanza was a self-centered weasel during season one. By the final season, he was just a more intense weasel than he was at the beginning. That’s a centripetal motion or as you call it the Rodney Dangerfield Circle. And that, my friend, is you precisely.”

And then whisking me away into the cell, he says, “Sit there for a few weeks and contemplate the fraud you’re perpetuating on society.”

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The Soundtrack Inside My Brain

Chapter 3

The Soundtrack Inside My Brain

I begin one of my Man’s Search for Meaning lectures by drawing two large circles on the board. One circle begins at the outer margins of the board and goes inward in concentric circles, moving in a centripetal trajectory. The second circle begins in the center and moves outward in a centrifugal direction. I ask the students to choose the circle that best represents the kind of life they desire. Ninety percent of them correctly and instinctively choose the centrifugal circle or what I call the Viktor Frankl Circle. This is the circle of change. You begin at the center of the circle and make a radical transformation so that you can enter newer and newer phases of your existence. I tell my students this is the circle that is made in the overwhelming majority of Hollywood movies. I mention the Star Wars trilogy. We begin with Luke Skywalker who transforms into a Jedi. Americans love centrifugal movies.

The other circle represents stagnation. I call it the Rodney Dangerfield Circle. You begin with certain traits, which don’t change; they merely intensify over time. In other words, you become more and more of the same person you always were, your life path moving in concentric circles as your freedom to break free from the concentric circles dissolves into the abyss.

Hollywood is reluctant to make movies that feature the centripetal direction because Americans don’t go to these movies. Take Leaving Las Vegas in which Nicolas Cage begins the movie as a drunk. By the movie’s end, he is a dead drunk. Movies like that can ruin careers.

I then tell the students I fear I am of the centripetal type. I am a certain way and over time I become a more intense version of my original personality traits. For example, my head is contaminated by a certain kind of musical soundtrack. The soundtrack is pessimistic, self-pitying, melancholy, and defeatist. I dare say it may even have a tinge of the narcissist.

This soundtrack has been playing inside my head for decades and it’s essentially the same three songs, “Alone, Again, Naturally,” by Gilbert O’Sullivan, “Aubrey” by Bread and “Careless Whisper” by Wham. Not only do these songs play inside my head, they become, as my wife calls them, “ear worms,” compelling me to whistle the tunes at all times of the day and night, prompting my wife to tell me to “cut out the crappy soundtrack.” She says the “grating violin of sadness” animates my life and it’s time to replace the old soundtrack with a new one.

I am in complete agreement with her. In fact, it sounds crazy, but there is a part of me that despises these songs. I find them to be pathetic, lugubrious and schmaltzy, unworthy of my musical obsession, unworthy of even being listened to on occasion, yet they exist underneath the fundamental foundation of my psyche and define my self-pitying spirit.

I start thinking about the soundtrack in my mind. It’s been playing so long, I can’t even imagine a better soundtrack out there. Living inside the same soundtrack is a form of imprisonment and blindness. Part of me longs to breath the fresh air of change to my soundtrack or as the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, “Hope is a new garment, starched and stiff and glittering, but it has never yet been worn.”

The human condition, I tell myself, is people learning how to get rid of their despairing soundtrack and replacing it with a new, hopeful one. To fail to do this is to be doomed to a spiritual death, to become a member of the walking dead.

As I recoil at the thought of becoming one of these defeated ghosts forever walking the earth to their Soundtrack of Death, I think of Viktor Frankl. While in the concentration camps, he saw people become despondent and hopeless, seeing their lives as defined only by survival, a “provisional existence” without meaning. He observed that once a person lost belief in meaning, that person was doomed to falling into a chasm of despair in which there was no reason to endure suffering. For some, it was easier to give up and die in the camps or to commit suicide.

Frankl watched people give up on life and observed his own will to live, based on his conviction that he had meaning: helping others survive in the camps and surviving so someday he could lecture others on the importance of finding meaning, which he indeed did.

The Soundtrack in Frankl’s Mind was one of hope and meaning. Mine is of sadness, desperation, and futility. Could I incorporate the principles in Frankl’s book to change my soundtrack? I teach his book after all. I’ve got kids. I’m married. Don’t I owe it to my students, my children, my wife, and myself to make a soundtrack change? But as I write this, “Careless Whisper” is getting louder and louder. I feel desperate, anxious, nearly too paralyzed to go on.

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The Rodney Dangerfield Factor

Chapter 2

The Rodney Dangerfield Factor

Here’s how I summarize Man’s Search for Meaning to my students on the first day of class: Subject to endless tortures and exhaustion in the concentration camps, Viktor Frankl observed that some people, including himself, became stronger in spirit, held on to life, and maintained their moral values while others became dehumanized, apathetic, and spiritually dead. While identifying these two camps of people, Frankl came up with his book’s main argument about the nature of suffering, which is really a moral imperative for all of us: No matter how torturous our circumstances, no matter how deeply we are thrown into the vortex of evil, no matter how utterly meaningless our freak show of a life seems to us, we must find meaning by choosing the appropriate attitude that uplifts our humanity in a way that radically changes who we are, discarding our false necessities, and stripping ourselves bare of all our illusions. The constant and often overwhelming suffering that the world dishes out to us every day is not reason to despair or to become a vicious animal or to embrace the philosophy of nihilism; rather, all the world’s pain and suffering is an inevitable part of life that affords us the opportunity to find meaning, to connect to others, and to become a stronger person so that our new self doesn’t even resemble its previous incarnation. We can and must make this radical change, Frankl argues, by finding a higher purpose, an ideal larger than ourselves. Quoting Nietzsche, he says, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Finding meaning and purpose in the midst of life’s cruelty and evil is what Frankl calls “Tragic Optimism.”

I have yet to make this radical change. Look at my childhood photos and look at me now, and it’s the same expression: a brooding, pissy-faced creature forced to endure This Mistake We Call Life. My parents tried to cheer me up when I was a kid. They took me to circuses, carnivals, puppet shows, but these entertainments only made me worse. Frustrated by my gloominess, my father would say, “Jesus, son, it looks like a birdy went poo-poo on your lip.”

My father was taken back perhaps by my undying sadness, which he didn’t want to see in me. So angered by my moping about, he’d often shout at me “to grow some balls” and “to stop moving like an old lady.” These admonishments in turn made me feel even more inadequate, a condition that I tried to hide by being intimidating and when I couldn’t hide my feelings of self-loathing and rejection I was desperate and this desperation, I’m convinced, gives off a repelling hormone, the Desperation Hormone, which I now surmise made that college girl so repulsed by my existence.

My hero Viktor Frankl would scoff at my self-analysis. He would argue that I am not a victim of the cynicism and despair, that I have the power to free myself of my mental afflictions, that I possess free will. As Frankl observes, “Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

I want to believe Viktor Frankl. I really do. But I keep returning to an interview I read with one of my heroes, the comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who said you can’t really change who you are. “You never really change. You’re born a certain way and that’s it.” When I first read this interview in my early twenties, I remember immediately agreeing with Dangerfield. We are creatures molded at birth and we cannot escape who we are fundamentally. So what’s it matter if we embrace Tragic Optimism or not? Why do we give a damn about our choices when the end result of who we are is going to be the same?

Another hero of mine, George Carlin, had a similarly pessimistic view. He famously said, “When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.” Carlin is telling us that we’re a doomed species and the best we can do is laugh at our inevitable destruction. When I look at the human race, I often find myself agreeing with Carlin’s cynical pronouncements and the conclusions he draws from them.

So what is it then? Are we free to change ourselves, as Frankl argues, or are we stuck in our predicament? Who am I to believe? Saint Frankl? Or my comedic heroes Dangerfield and Carlin? Do I have to take a side? I love Frankl whose courageous life gives me inspiration for the possibility of a better, nobler existence. But I love my cynical comedic heroes whose nihilistic diatribes have also brought me a sort of cathartic joy. Yes, it’s true. Nihilism when packaged by a master like Dangerfield or Carlin has a pleasure all of its own. Sometimes I’m in a solemn Frankl mood but other times I’m in a more scabrous comedian mood. I’ve got the Frankl Factor inside me, but I also have the Dangerfield Factor. Do I have to pick one over the other?

I’m in my middle age, and I haven’t yet been able to answer that question, so who am I teach Man’s Search for Meaning?

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