Right now I'm reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Frankl is an existentialist psychologist and a Holocaust survivor. In his book he writes about the search for meaning that helped him survive the horrors he faced. While reading this, a few things occurred to me—things which are related to my earlier posting on suicide and the will to live.

If Frankl is right and we all yearn to find some sort of meaning in our lives, then it doesn't seem that life is just about surviving or coping. To my mind, if the average person didn't believe that there is some sort of meaning in life (whatever that meaning may be to him), then surely we would be seeing many more people make the decision to end their lives. But we are not seeing this. Most people elect to live their lives—many of them elect to live them to the fullest. This is striking.

Of course, it might be argued that perhaps people are just too scared to commit suicide. This is probably true. However, that fear is probably tied up (even for Atheists) in a fear of what will happen after death—implying some sort of philosophical/supernatural belief about life. Thus, whether or not we're consciously aware of it, we've attached some sort of meaning to life. And part of living fully seems to be exploring and appreciating these meanings in greater depth.

Less cosmically, I think many people elect not to kill themselves because, somewhere along the line, they make a significant and powerful realisation: If I have the power to kill myself—the ultimate exercise of power in the world—then surely I also have the ability to do something about the things that are making my life so painful, so miserable, so seemingly impossible to cope with. The means may not seem immediately apparent—especially during a deep depression—but the logic of it really does seem inescapable and cannot be ignored. It may be next to impossible to change certain circumstances that may be contributing to seemingly never-ending pain, but even then we still have tremendous power: because we have the ability to strengthen our ability to cope. Just at the moment when it seems there are no more choices left in our lives, the light shines. Indeed, it's no surprise that some of our happiest moments rise from the ashes of our darkest ones. Perhaps this is an expression of another seemingly universal truth: for there to exist light, there must also exist dark.

(See also my diary entry of 4 August 2002 on what keeps people alive).