Author of the international bestseller Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl wrote a series of essays within a year of his release from Nazi concentration camps. These essays, originally published in 1946, were recently published in English for the first time.

One of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s most famous formulations of his categorical imperative was that man must not be made a means to an end, but remain an end in and of himself. In our own time, we see economic systems become such that people are becoming the means to the end of production. “Man power” is harnessed with ends other than mankind in mind. During the recently-concluded Second World War, man and his life became the means to carry out death.

In the Nazi concentration camps, there was extreme dehumanization and undermining of life. People weren’t killed outright, but used for labor until they could labor no more. In the eyes of the state that sent them there, they weren’t even worth the thin soup given at the camps. The enforced etiquette of the camp required prisoners to raise their caps upon receiving their daily ration as a gesture of gratitude and respectful deference. The daily ration of soup came only after laboring all day, hacking the frozen ground with a pickaxe until sparks flew.

This same state that created a network of death camps carried out murder on a tremendous scale in mental hospitals, where evaluators would assess patient capacity for effectively contributing and producing for society’s good, and recommend for destruction those they considered undeserving of life.

Nazi horrors have poignantly revealed what happens when human life is considered a means to an end rather than a crucial end in and of itself.

The pervasive ennui, or tedium, that has followed the Second World War is typical of post-war generations. The human spirit has taken a sound beating, and it’s left us vulnerable to feelings of hopelessness. We are in need of spiritual reconstitution. The first step is to tear out the root of fatalism that hamstrings the will.

The quest for world domination, the concentration camps, the subjugation of entire groups to slavery and slaughter: These horrors of recent history have all shown us that belief in progress as a matter of course is absurd. We are reminded of what people are capable of doing to one another.

Before the war, people’s actions were tied to a sense of optimism. Now our actions arise from pessimism. We are suspicious of beliefs and slogans and any proposals about how to live life well, or claims of objective truth. People are leery of being “taken in” by a pernicious ideology. Even many youths, who are most likely to be full of idealism and hope, are guarded.

Both the pre-war optimism and post-war pessimism are varieties of fatalism: One sees inevitable decline, the other inevitable improvement. Neither is viable. We don’t need lenses tinted with a dismal gray or a rosy pink. We need to act in the world in a way that sees it for what it is, that holds to life’s meaningfulness. This is difficult in a time of disenchantment. But this is not the time to give up; revitalizing humanity through forging a path between fatalisms is more important than ever.

How do we fight the pessimistic variety of fatalism that now grips society? We need to remember the power of the individual’s meaning, and that life is made meaningful through action—not just words.

The importance of the individual human life shines through with spectacular brilliance in dark times like the Third Reich. It was individuals who survived the morass, individuals who deepened it or ameliorated it. Some Nazi guards viciously beat their prisoners for no reason. Other Nazis surreptitiously paid for medicine and supplies for prisoners out of their own salaries.

Everything else was stripped away from humanity in those moments, except humanity itself. The individual human remained and could choose how to respond to life. Choosing requires more than words, as words alone are not enough. We must choose to act in the world.

The author (a medical doctor as well as a psychiatrist) was called in to examine the body of a woman who had recently killed herself. On the wall above the couch where her body lay was a framed inscription that read, “Even more powerful than fate is the courage that bears it steadfastly.”

The irony of these words hanging on the wall above the corpse of a woman who had committed suicide is tragic. In it, though, the author saw a poignant, although painful, demonstration of the insufficiency of words themselves. Being itself is infinitely more powerful than mere words.

There are four common reasons that people commit suicide:

One is for physical reasons. Sometimes the body malfunctions to such a degree and judgment is so impaired that people feel compelled to kill themselves. Then there are some who kill themselves as an act of revenge. They hope to leave a painful, guilt-ridden impression on another person or group of people they will leave behind. The third reason people commit suicide is life exhaustion. They feel too tired to continue  and decide to quit.

The fourth reason for suicide is what we can call a “balance-sheet suicide.” People assess what they have (credit) and what they believe they should have (debit), and find that they are in the existential red. People who use this kind of metric typically put their suffering on the credit side of the ledger and all that they don’t have from life (but believe they are entitled to) on the debit side. 

The problem with balance-sheet logic is that it assumes the point of life is experiencing maximal pleasure and minimal pain. Simply having fun is not the goal. But most people experience dissatisfaction far more frequently than satisfaction. It’s not even close most of the time. Even if someone managed to find more pleasure than pain in life, this is not an achievement that makes life meaningful. Pleasure has no power to make life meaningful; nor does the absence of pleasure diminish meaning in a person’s life.

We often forget that life does not owe anyone happiness, and those who chase it or try to conjure it at will invariably miss it. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard gave his reader the helpful analogy of a door. He wrote that the door to happiness opens outward, and closes on the person who is trying to kick it in a desperate search for happiness. Thus, his effort bars him from the very thing toward which he bends his effort.

The question must fundamentally change from, “What does life owe me?” to “What do I owe life?” Our default is to presume the right to question life, but it’s just the opposite—we must allow life to question us. When we allow ourselves to be questioned, we find responsibility—and in that responsibility we find meaning. We respond to these “life questions”—the questions life asks us from moment to moment. Our whole life is a long series of responses to the questions life constantly poses. How we choose to act in those moments gives a sense of meaning as we take ownership of life.

It would be absurd to ask a chess grandmaster which move is the best move in the game. The best move depends on a multitude of factors. The answer to the question of the best move is intensely and unavoidably situational. In the same way, the meaning of life and assertions about the best action to take are context-dependent. We are often tempted to look for overly simplistic formulations to life, but they tend to remove us from life’s concrete immediacy.

How large your sphere of movement is matters far less than how well you occupy the space that you have. A person with a wide circle who doesn’t occupy that space well will be less fulfilled than the person who occupies his small circle fully. A plumber may be envious or resentful of a business executive, but if the plumber has taken greater responsibility for his own full range of activity and influence than the executive has of his, then the plumber’s angst is misplaced. In the grand scheme of things, the plumber is leading a more meaningful life than the businessman. 

In a place like Auschwitz or Dachau, the circle of activity and responsibility became incredibly constricted. People had no control over the schedule, their movement, their diet, their activities, but no matter how small the circle, people are still capable of making a variety of choices—and prisoners made a variety of decisions. In the camps, some prisoners' actions said “yes” to life, others' actions said “no.”

Economic and sociological factors can certainly complicate an individual’s decision-making, and it would be wrong to trivialize such factors. We must give the idea “First food, then morality” its due, and recognize there is a kind of callousness in expecting uprightness from a starving person.

The concentration camp existence revealed the horrible meaninglessness that results from a person greedily devouring his rations but acting without any anchoring code or prioritizing anything more highly than food. But these same circumstances have also shown us that people are willing to starve if there is purpose behind the decision. It’s possible that people find meaning in life and act lovingly even when their stomachs are bloated from starvation.

A judge once asked the author to weigh in on a case of whether a youth who, in a very vulnerable situation, had stolen food to survive, was in some sense “inferior.” The author responded that, from a psychiatric perspective, the youth was not inferior at all, and that it should also be noted that it would require a person to be “superior” to resist the urge to steal in such a dire situation.

Life is valuable, however expansive or constricted our circle happens to be, whatever circumstances fate might have us up against. We are tempted to rail against fate, but fate is the path of our becoming. The German poet Christian Hebbel might have put it best when he said, “Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something.”