Mitchell Loughlin > Recent Status Updates

A chapter dedicated to how hot his mom is and how that’s makes his life harder. She’s also nerdy, smarty, and caring but has been spending less time with him as he gets closer to his father’s age when he died (assassinated) and he looks just like him.

He’s is #7 in the world at armada. Tonight’s mission is the first to attack the alien planet.

Hard not to make connections between ready player one and this game both characters are on the edge of graduating high school obsessed with a decade that their male idolize role models grew up in. references a lot of the same movies and video games. There is a rush band reference, which is in ready player two
Fun book so far this game is definitely going to be used in income against aliens unless he’s just crazy

He goes to “work” which is a game store with a Rich and eccentric owner that doesn’t care about turning a profit and just wants to hang around with like-minded nerds. The man is also obsessed with this game developer who made Armada, but is instead of playing one of the earlier versions of the games that instead of dog fighting drones is focused on ground combat drones. Two are both very skilled.

Zak idolize his father from the ages of 0 to 10 until he found a manuscript hidden in the attic that outlined his father’s theory that the military was using video games to train every day people to find against alien invaders
He had kind of repressed this memory, but now I was putting the strings together between his favorite game Armada and this theory. This game is a drone combat style alien invaders game

After seeing this, he realizes that his class bully is picking on a kid again and retaliates. Him and this bully have a long history including getting into some kind of altercation back in middle school that earned him the name Zak attack. Before you can get any further storms out of the classroom and head home, terrified that he has developed schizophrenia like his father.

Zack Starman, who is essentially Wade Watts with a 80s obsession instead of a 70s is sitting in class one day when he sees a UFO out the window except it’s the exact model seen in the video game Armada that he has been playing obsessively for months. He quickly determines that he is hallucinating partially because of his obsessive playing and partially because his late father seems to have had schizophrenia

From this one may see that there’s no reason to pity old people instead of young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities no possibilities in the future, but they have more than that instead of possibilities in the future they have realities in the past. the potential realities that they have actualized the meaning of fulfilled the values they have realized

If an ape was being used to develop a polio vaccine and was punctured again and again, would it be able to grasp the meaning of it suffering? most people would say no. Therefore, it is conceivable to posit that a man suffering is not without purpose, but that the purpose is beyond the understanding.

The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself, maybe on the way to self-management perhaps to cure

Our current mental hygiene, philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy that unhappiness is a symptom of male adjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.

Statistical survey revealed that among Europeans 25% showed a degree of existential vacuum while American students this number was 60%

An existential vacuum is defined as the lack of awareness of one’s meaning, which creates a void in oneself

If an architect wants to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together, so if a therapist wishes to foster the parents mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of attention through orientation towards the meaning of one’s life

Quotes!
We have to consider that a man who has been under enormous mental pressure for such a long time is naturally in some ways a danger after his liberation, especially when released quite suddenly this danger is the psychological counterpoint of the bends

I really like the way Victor frames his meaning he often will tell a story that illustrates his point occasionally beating you over the head with it and occasionally being very subtle there was a small passage that was highly analytical to understand his dogma, but this is sandwiched by experiences

Logotherapy in a nutshell

Logos or meaning in Latin is about finding a purpose in life. It does not need happiness as a principle and excepts that sometimes life is hard. It spins problems on their heads and confronts the uncomfortable. It says suffering can be a method of finding purpose but also that love, and passion can be equally effective avenues. Paradoxical thinking can help alive tension

Many left the camps to learn their family was taken. The why that allowed them to continue has been extinguished. These men often rebelled, thinking if they had experienced so much suffering they should be entitled to leeway. Some of these men found purpose in living on for their kin.
Others men who lived through the camps with an ambition found a renewed sense of drive and hunger to pursue that purpose.

The philology of a man who has been released from the camps is interesting, while being impossible to determine the actions it is possible to reflect on the common outcomes of these actions through the lense of that persons meaning.
The survival rate of the men in camp was 1/28. Many of those who hung on did so through purpose, and if that purpose was allowed to be fulfilled changed everything post release

Many tried to encourage there downtrodden companions through establish why life still had expectations upon them. May it be raising there child or finishing there great works.

Victor occasionally tried to retreats into a clinical analysis of his condition “ emotion, which is suffering ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it”. This being his why, he shared with his fellows

“It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future”
“He who has a why to live can live with almost any how”

Around the time of Christmas the death toll sky rocketed. The work was not deemed to be any higher but in the minds of the prisoners who believed they would be home by Christmas, their sense of why was gone. Suicides were strictly prohibited from being interfered with, instead

The opportunity for death was ample, but through sticking to his constitution, his purpose of friendship and finding positive moments fate guided him through the suffering

When men were chosen to leave for a cushy camp two days later the men that were left behind were liberated. It was learned that the men who were transferred were burned alive in a barn hours after leaving.

When he left Auschwitz, he learned that one day later, the men had begun to turn into cannibalism. He had chosen to leave when he could have stayed, but he wanted to stay with friends again.

The point is to illustrate that often you can’t outrun fate

Victor tried to escape once and decided instad to stay with his friends. He later learned the man who tried to escape was killed almost immediately.
Another time they were going to be moved to a worse camp and men were allowed to not go. If they volunteered for the hardest work. This was a ploy and the men who volunteered died there was no transfer

Death in typhean: a story that Victor referenced a lot.

A homeowner returns home and hears a servant’s tale, he has seen death and that he needs to borrow a car to flea as fast as possible so that he will not perish. The homeowner agrees and soon encounters Death questioning him “Why he scared the man so.” Death replied that he did not intend to, but he was surprised to have not encountered him on the road

Suffering is described as being akin to gas. It will fill the body it is contained in. Things always seem as if the worst is yet to come though it may have already passed. Through that suffering a person has the opportunity to forge it into something new. A purpose. Whether that purpose be surviving to see you’re beloved or find so sort of normality. But the same suffering may lead man to baser instincts

Four days sick, lying among the stench of the dying was a respite from the snow and work. Envy of others jobs was met with jokes of “atleast in not doing this”

He talks about love, how when it is deep it goes beyond the body of your beloved. How the absence of knowledge of his wife was excruciating but did not alter his feelings. He would pretend to talk with her when things got hard

Victor discussed some of the tribulations Jews would face in the camps, relating them to his personal or shared experiences. He shared these stories not to expose tyranny or cole that suffering exists but to forward his thesis. Moments that could be viewed only as suffering he shaded with camaraderie. On a long march through a slushy rain, holding the arm of a fellow for support the two men think about their wives

Most of the prisoners were given a uniform of rags which would have made a scarecrow, elegant by comparison

The prisoner of Auschwitz in the first phase of shock did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horse for him after the first few days after all, they spared him from the active committing suicide.

At that moment, I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream no matter how horrible could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us

Instead, he playfully picked up a stone and threw it at me that to me seemed the way to attract the attention of a beast to call a domestic animal back to a job a creature would you have so little in common that you do not punish it

Victor asserts each prisoner of the camps follows three main phases.
1. Admittance to the camp. Typified by an ignorance to what is to come, people are often afraid, separated from their loved ones, willing to trust some.
2. Apathy, or the numbing of emotions. When a man has seen to much to be surprised except by his lack of reaction. Children beaten, men wasting, theft, beatings….
3. Release

Man’s search for meaning is the stories of everyday people who lived in concentration camps and the effort of explaining logotherapy theory which states that a persons life is dedicate not by the pursuit of happiness but instead by the pursuit of purpose.
Victor was a Jewish doctor who in ww2 was taken into the camps. He almost used his Id# instead of his name but thought it would undercut the message

Abigail and Brooks go to Chicago where they have the trial. Abigail is very smart and convinces the jury of her innocence and the mafias guilt. She manages to extort one of the two officers that had attacked her and implicate the other one at the same time she faked her death with a butt packet and Brooks shooting at her with a blank a few FBI members were in on it, Brook gets her a bench in her favorite spot.