Expert answer:Reflection Paper on Life Experiences and Attitude

Solved by verified expert:Write a 1-2 page reflection on the following quote from Viktor Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Discuss the meaning of Frankl’s experience and attitude then apply it
to your own life experiences and attitude. Consider the question, how do
attitude and community relate to leadership? (MLA style) i have attached Franklin’s article. please follow the instructions.
there_s_more_to_life_than_being_happy___the_atlantic.pdf

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There’s More to Life Than Being Happy
Meaning comes from the pursuit of more complex things than happiness
Shutterstock
EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH
JAN 9, 2013
|
HEALTH
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“It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”
In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist
in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife
and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family,
including his pregnant wife, had perished — but he, prisoner number 119104, had
lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning, which he wrote in
nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference
between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing:
Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student,
one of his science teachers declared to the class, “Life is nothing more than a
combustion process, a process of oxidation.” Frankl jumped out of his chair and
responded, “Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?”
As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous
circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Frankl wrote in Man’s Search
for Meaning, “the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any
given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of
two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these
two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from
life, nothing to live for. “In both cases,” Frankl writes, “it was a question of getting
them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the
future was expected of them.” For one man, it was his young child, who was then
living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he
needed to finish. Frankl writes:
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and
gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much
as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is
realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence
and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes
conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who
affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able
to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be
able to bear almost any “how.”
In 1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-theMonth Club listed Man’s Search for Meaning as one of
the 10 most influential books in the United States. It
has sold millions of copies worldwide. Now, over
twenty years later, the book’s ethos — its emphasis on
meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to
something greater than the self — seems to be at odds
with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit
of individual happiness than in the search for meaning.
“To the European,” Frankl wrote, “it is a characteristic
Viktor Frankl [Herwig Prammer/Reuters]
of the American culture that, again and again, one is
commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must
ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.'”
According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high — as
is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word “happiness” in their
titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today
feel happy, without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the
Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a
satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear
sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a
quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their
lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life
increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical
health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of
depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically
leaving people less happy, according to recent research. “It is the very pursuit of
happiness,” Frankl knew, “that thwarts happiness.”
***
This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness.
In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the
Journal of Positive Psycholog y, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans
aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy.
Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many
other variables — like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children — over a
month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life
overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the
psychologists found, is associated with being a “taker” while leading a meaningful
life corresponds with being a “giver.”
“Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or
even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and
difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,” the authors write.
How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is
about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy
tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to
buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases
how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater
impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.
Nearly a quarter of Americans do not have a strong sense
of what makes their lives meaningful.
Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated
with selfish behavior — being, as mentioned, a “taker” rather than a “giver.” The
psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive
reduction. If you have a need or a desire — like hunger — you satisfy it, and that
makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they
want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs
and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the
researchers point out.
“Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people
leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others,” explained Kathleen
Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of
Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all
about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are
more likely to help others in need. “If anything, pure happiness is linked to not
helping others in need,” the researchers, which include Stanford University’s
Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky, write.
What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which
occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to
humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author,
with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human
Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named
an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.
The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves
away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of
Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the
meaningful life “you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve
something you believe is larger than the self.” For instance, having more meaning
in one’s life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking
care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often
actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of
happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than
themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in
their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the
meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with
low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy
interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching
television.
“Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to
others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy,”
Baumeister told me in an interview.
Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the
present moment — which is perhaps the most important finding of the study,
according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and
now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of
pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad
correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.
Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the
future. “Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of
the relatively meaningful but unhappy life,” the researchers write. “Happiness is
not generally found in contemplating the past or future.” That is, people who
thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time
thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning
in their lives, though they were less happy.
Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness
but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011
confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a
clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were
feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. “If there is
meaning in life at all,” Frankl wrote, “then there must be meaning in suffering.”
***
Which brings us back to Frankl’s life and, specifically, a decisive experience he had
before he was sent to the concentration camps. It was an incident that emphasizes
the difference between the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of happiness in life.
In his early adulthood, before he and his family were taken away to the camps,
Frankl had established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna and the
world. As a 16-year-old boy, for example, he struck up a correspondence with
Sigmund Freud and one day sent Freud a
two-page paper he had written. Freud,
impressed by Frankl’s talent, sent the
paper to the International Journal of
Psychoanalysis for publication. “I hope you
don’t object,” Freud wrote the teenager.
Peter Andrews/Reuters
While he was in medical school, Frankl
distinguished himself even further. Not only did he establish suicide-prevention
centers for teenagers — a precursor to his work in the camps — but he was also
developing his signature contribution to the field of clinical psychology:
logotherapy, which is meant to help people overcome depression and achieve wellbeing by finding their unique meaning in life. By 1941, his theories had received
international attention and he was working as the chief of neurology at Vienna’s
Rothschild Hospital, where he risked his life and career by making false diagnoses
of mentally ill patients so that they would not, per Nazi orders, be euthanized.
That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would
change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over
him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By
then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to
concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it would only
be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once
they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through
the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man
with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where
he could distinguish himself even further in his field.
As Anna S. Redsand recounts in her biography of Frankl, he was at a loss for what to
do, so he set out for St. Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to
the organ music, he repeatedly asked himself, “Should I leave my parents
behind?… Should I say goodbye and leave them to their fate?” Where did his
responsibility lie? He was looking for a “hint from heaven.”
When he returned home, he found it. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His
father explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues that
the Nazis had destroyed. The marble contained the fragment of one of the Ten
Commandments — the one about honoring your father and your mother. With that,
Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo whatever opportunities for safety and
career advancement awaited him in the United States. He decided to put aside his
individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates in the camps.
The wisdom that Frankl derived from his
RECOMMENDED
experiences there, in the middle of unimaginable
human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was
then: “Being human always points, and is
directed, to something or someone, other than
oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another
human being to encounter. The more one forgets
No Flowers On the Psych Ward
himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or
another person to love — the more human he is.”
Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what
makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to
serve someone or something larger than ourselves — by devoting our lives to
“giving” rather than “taking” — we are not only expressing our fundamental
humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than
the pursuit of simple happiness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
is the author of The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters. She is a
columnist for The New Criterion and an editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where she
manages the Ben Franklin Circles Project.
EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH
 Twitter
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