Lynette’s Reviews > Man's Search for Meaning > Status Update

In making personal choices, as affirm our autonomy. “A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self determining.

What he becomes — within the limits of endowment and environment — he has made out of himself.”

“The choices humans make should be active rather than passive.”

“It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us, and to these questions we can respond only by being responsible for our existence.”

3 meanings
- creating a work or doing a deed
- love
- even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by doing so, change himself

Personal tragedy turned triumph

Consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown

“doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualities to the best of the respective individuals knowledge and belief?”

Unemployment neurosis wow

“The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self management, perhaps to cure.”

“That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.”

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”