Viktor Frankl: The Last Human Freedom
In February, I made what may have been my last drive from my hometown of Kings Mountain, North Carolina, back to Tampa.
I went home to help my sisters with the work that follows a parent’s death. We packed boxes, sorted papers, and decided what stayed or went. We closed the home where my mother had lived for over sixty years, the place that had shaped my sense of “home” all my life.
Before leaving, I made a short detour to Boone.
For years, Boone has been where I go to reset. Something in the mountains, the air, and the slower rhythm refreshes my perspective. This time was no different, at least for a few hours. I wandered through town, revisited familiar places, and breathed before heading into a long drive and an even longer emotional transition. Because the next morning, I still had ten hours of interstate ahead of me.
After making that trip more than a hundred times since moving to Tampa, the drive is almost automatic. I leave early to avoid traffic and settle into the highway’s rhythm. Somewhere in South Carolina or Georgia, the car seems to know the way without much help from me.
That leaves a lot of room to think.
And on that drive, I thought about what had changed in such a short period of time. My mother was gone. The house was no longer really home in the way it once had been. My work life had changed dramatically. What once felt settled now felt uncertain. Even Boone, still comforting, now brought the realization that these trips north would likely become less frequent.
Somewhere on I-95, with the road stretching ahead of me, I found myself asking a question that I suspect eventually finds all of us in one form or another.
What now?
I first encountered Viktor Frankl in college. Like many students, I read Man’s Search for Meaning because it had been assigned. It affected me even then, though probably in an abstract way, as many important books do when we are young. I understood the ideas intellectually. But I had not yet lived enough to fully understand what they were asking of a person.
Years later, I reread Frankl after my pastor, Rev. Magrey deVega, mentioned his life in a sermon. This time, the words landed differently. Age, grief, and change shift not only how we read important books, but whether we are finally ready to hear them.
Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor. His experiences in Nazi concentration camps shaped the work for which he would later become known. Much of his family, including his wife and parents, died during the Holocaust. Frankl survived Auschwitz and several other camps, carrying not only immense loss but also a question that would define his work. What allows a person to continue when nearly everything has been taken away?
Frankl rejected the idea that human beings are motivated solely by pleasure or power. He believed that what we seek most deeply is meaning. Not abstract meaning, but concrete meaning rooted in responsibility, love, suffering, work, and the choices we continue to make even under terrible conditions.
His most famous line is often quoted because it carries such weight.
“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.”
It is tempting to turn that into motivational language. Frankl deserves better than that.
He was not suggesting that suffering is somehow good, or that human beings can simply think their way through catastrophe in a positive way. He knew too much suffering to romanticize it. In fact, one of the striking things about Frankl’s writing is how little sentimentality there is in it. His observations are often calm, restrained, and almost clinical. He understood that suffering can diminish people. It can exhaust them, embitter them, break them.
But he also believed that even in those conditions, something remains. Choice remains. Responsibility remains. Meaning remains possible. I think that distinction matters.
Most of us will never face anything remotely comparable to what Frankl endured, and we should be careful not to flatten ordinary suffering into historical atrocities. But that does not mean Frankl has nothing to say to ordinary life. If anything, his work becomes especially important there.
Because eventually life destabilizes all of us in one way or another. A parent dies. A career shifts unexpectedly. A relationship changes. A body ages. A future once assumed begins to unfold in another way. Though not the horrors Frankl survived, these moments still leave us standing in unfamiliar territory, wondering what comes next.
That question is real. I know it has been real for me.
There are days lately when I feel tired but determined. I feel uncertain, but I am moving forward. I am rebuilding, though I am not always entirely sure what I am rebuilding toward. There are moments of anger and frustration mixed in with long periods of reflection. Probably, I spend more time reflecting than is always helpful.
And still, daily life continues.
There are errands to run, responsibilities to manage, decisions to make, people to care for, and work to finish. Even as I determine what the next season of work will hold, I keep going. Most mornings begin with a walk through my neighborhood because movement settles my thoughts. Sometimes the next meaningful thing isn’t profound. Sometimes it’s simply clearing one more task, making one more decision, or taking one more step before I fully know where the road leads.
Frankl would have understood that better than many modern readers do. Meaning, for him, was rarely grandiose. It was specific. Immediate. Practical.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes prisoners comforting one another, giving away their last piece of bread. Some chose dignity in situations meant to strip it away. Meaning was not found by escaping suffering, but by answering it. By deciding who to be within it.
That idea reaches far beyond catastrophic suffering. But Frankl’s idea applies to ordinary days, not just to times of catastrophic suffering.
How do we respond when life becomes unstable? How do we continue caring for others when we ourselves feel exhausted? How do we keep moving without becoming bitter? How do we continue choosing responsibility instead of withdrawal?
These are not abstract philosophical questions. They are daily ones.
I think that may be why Frankl’s work continues to resonate so deeply across generations. He does not promise clarity, comfort, or easy resolution. He does not tell us that suffering always happens for a reason. Instead, he suggests something both harder and more hopeful. That human beings retain the ability to respond meaningfully even when circumstances are painful, uncertain, or unfair. Certainly not perfectly, but intentionally.
Amid transition and grief, I have tried to continue practicing the disciplines and responsibilities that shape my days. I maintain routines that help steady me physically and emotionally. I continue my community work, organizing forums, citizen engagement, and justice programs, even as my own life feels unsettled.
Not because I have everything figured out. But meaning often lives in continuing to participate in life rather than retreating from it. Because I believe in the holiness of ordinary days.
Frankl understood that deeply.
There is a line from Frankl that I have returned to several times while writing this essay.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
I do not think he meant that casually.
I think he meant it as someone who had discovered that humans can survive far more uncertainty than they imagine. This is possible if they can still find a reason to keep moving forward.
Not all at once. Just enough for the next step. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. may have held Frankl in mind when he wrote, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
That ten-hour drive back to Tampa did not resolve anything.
My grief remained. My uncertainty remained. The future was still unsettled when I pulled into my driveway. In many ways, it still is.
During the drive from North Carolina to Florida, I realized that meaning doesn’t always arrive as a revelation. More often, it appears as a continuation. As a responsibility. Choosing to remain engaged with life even while rebuilding it.
Maybe that is the last human freedom Frankl was talking about.
Not the freedom to avoid suffering.
But the freedom to decide what we will continue carrying forward through it.
About Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl endured unimaginable loss during the Holocaust. Between 1942 and 1945, he was imprisoned in four different Nazi concentration camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.
While Frankl survived, nearly his entire immediate family was murdered. His wife, Tilly, died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen shortly after liberation. His mother, Elsa, was murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz soon after arrival. His father, Gabriel, died of starvation and pneumonia in Theresienstadt. Viktor tried to care for him. His brother, Walter, was captured attempting to escape Austria and was also murdered at Auschwitz.
The only immediate family member who survived was his sister, Stella, who escaped Austria and eventually emigrated to Australia.
Out of this profound personal tragedy, and his observations of human behavior within the camps, Frankl developed logotherapy, a school of psychiatry centered on the belief that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power, but the pursuit of meaning.
