I read Man’s Search for Meaning last weekend and I have been thinking about it since.
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist. He survived Auschwitz. His wife, his parents, and his brother didn’t. The manuscript he had spent years writing was taken from him the day he arrived. He rebuilt it from memory after the war. The book is not about what was lost. It is about what he watched happen to people while he was inside it.
What he observed was simple and hard to argue with. The ones who made it through had something waiting for them. A person. An unfinished work. Something concrete on the other side. The ones who lost that stopped surviving, not always violently, sometimes just quietly from within. Nothing pulling them forward. They stopped.
He quotes Nietzsche to say it clean:
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Reading that in the context of Auschwitz is different from reading it anywhere else. It stops being a poster and becomes a clinical observation.
The concept I keep returning to is what Frankl calls provisional existence. In the camps there was no date on the horizon. No end point. Just an open stretch of suffering with no visible finish line. And what this did, he says, was distort the present completely. Days felt endless. Weeks disappeared. Without a future to move toward, time stops being a direction and becomes a weight.
He wasn’t only describing the camps.
I have been inside the second video for a while now. The production is done: six animations, all the b-roll, intro and outro. What I have been circling is the on-camera part, the piece that requires you to show up completely and not hide behind what you built. And I noticed this week that the longer I stay inside it without a clear end in sight, the heavier it gets. Not harder. Heavier. That is the difference.
That is provisional existence. Frankl named something I had been feeling without being able to say what it was.
His answer is not discipline. It is not pushing harder. It is keeping the why in front of you. Not the what, not the how. The why. The reason the thing matters before any of the mechanics. Because the how shifts and the what changes but the why is the only thing heavy enough to move you when the present has lost its shape.
I know why I’m making this video. I know why I’m doing this in public. That part hasn’t moved.
If you’re sitting next to something ready that you can’t start, I think Frankl would recognize that exactly. He watched people come back to life when they remembered what they were living for. Not inspiration. Not a push. Just the reason.
The blockade isn’t about ability. It never was.
