This book, similar to how Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air taught me the emotional and physical rigor of training to be a doctor, taught me the humanity of a psychologist, on the tight tension between scientifically rigorous, while radically loving and humane in their approach to therapy.

Above all, I think this book suggests a realistic (but beautiful) explanation to the great question, “what is life’s meaning?”

Frankl reveals that the answer cannot lie in some abstraction (evident in his ‘logotherapy’ approach), but rather in the difficulties that we face in each given moment of our lives. That mental health, a healthy state of being, is not attaining a vacuum of externalities that create tension, but having the will to live in a normally tense reality of the world. What remains constant in life is suffering, but the great freedom afforded to us in that time is our response to it—will we hold on to some home that lies beyond the given struggle, or will we succumb to the hopelessness and give up?

What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call “noödynamics,” i.e., the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it. (p.105)

In that moment which Frankl was stolen his life’s work upon entry to indefinite persecution, he divinely receives a piece of paper with the most important Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael. And in that moment, what once was his reason to live transformed by the suffering he faced, challenged to live his thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper. With hope that he will reveal a great deal in the world of psychology through his unique lens of persecution.

It is a grand timing at which I picked up this book, and how this book helps me make sense of my current state of being.

What I must currently overcome is my incompetancy. I am too naive in believing that I can do big things, and yet not put in the required work.

Often, the trap is believing that financial freedom is the only worthy metric of my competancy. But to use such metric is an active denial of my current 신분, which is a student. The student who is blessed to study without worry of finalcial consequences (at least for now), and the student whose brightness of the future relies most heavily on my ability to learn and absorb. In other words, being most faithful as a Christian, researcher, and student is the priority, and the rest can come later. Reinforces greatly, 미쳐보고, 지쳐보자.