The United States is encountering its worst economic crisis since the 1980s. The stork market is crashing, and lots of people are getting more worried about the future amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict that is reverbarating throughout the globe in the wake of the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. U.S. psychologists are now recommending mental health books by Jewish victim of concentration camps Psychologist Viktor E. Frankl.
Experts and religious advisors now encourage people to center their lives on self-care and family ties. They are encouraging people to set goals and surround themselves with things that makes them look forward to the future. They also recommend goal setting as the anecdote to the rise in deaths related to mental health. Having a clear purpose for the future prolongs life expectancy.
Frankl, having survived Nazi Germany, quotes from Nitchze’s “if you have a way to live for you can bear almost any how”. Right now, there is a lot of fear and uncertainty about the future.The stock markets are down, inflation continues to go up.
What Frankl found, is that in extremely challenging situations– like being in a concentration camp– it was essential for a person to be connected to a future goal or purpose. When a person lost hope for their future, their physical body shut down and, in those brutal conditions, they quickly died.
In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes the consequences of one’s mental state in challenging situations, using the prison environments similar to those of concentration camps.
- The prisoner who had lost faith in the future— his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.
- Any attempt at fighting the camp’s [pathological] influence on the prisoner by [therapeutic] methods had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which he could look forward. Instinctively some of the prisoners attempted to find one on their own. It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future– sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence.
- A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.”
