GoodnightEntrepreneur

Helplessness vs. self-governance

My mother is keeping the newspapers these days – she feels that we are amidst a momentous historical event and she wants to keep her personal archive up to date.

Years from now people will refer to the global recession (depression?) of 2008/9.  They will discuss the major economic and existential changes that came about due to the 2008/9 financial crisis.

We are on a giant ‘slip and slide’; there is no turning back and we’re not too sure where it is going to spit us out.

“But this too shall pass.”

All of a sudden the concept of “self governance” seems unattainable.  Instead, we seem to be helpless against the effect of choices of big institutions, governments and “banking executives”. Significant global changes that we have no control over impact our lives drastically. All this is a textbook situation to foster feelings of helplessness.

The Nazi concentration camps are very typical examples of conditions that also heightened feelings of helplessness.  Yet, Frankl documented people who amid all off the inhumanity and devastation still found meaning.

The key principals he ascribed as reason for these people’s emotional survival were:

• To live for things outside of themselves.

• To find meaning even in suffering.

• The freedom of choice to rise above circumstances.

“Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.  Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible and of changing himself for the better if necessary.”

• To have a “zestful experience of life”.