Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This might seem like a strange place to begin a story about a happiness consultancy business, but 16 years ago I started my first happiness course with university psychology students, and the first session was all about how we choose to handle the cards we’re dealt.
I was hugely inspired by Victor Frankl’s important book Man’s Search for Meaning, first published in 1946. Frankl wrote the book in nine days at the end of the Second World War, based on his own experiences and observations of life in the concentration camps. Frankl writes persuasively of the ways in which he and his fellow prisoners coped with life under conditions of extreme deprivation, and identified patterns of behaviour associated with survival. His eventual summation is powerful:
“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”
I asked my students to read the book in its entirety and think about the situations Frankl so vividly described and how they might respond in such extreme circumstances. While this is a hard mental exercise, it provided a great way to begin the course by looking at our own characters, identifying our typical responses to negative events, and thinking about what we can change.
Frankl’s words resonate with me, and millions of others, in showing that circumstances do not determine how we feel. We all have the power to change, to choose, and to live a more rewarding life.
This is not to downplay the atrocities of war, blame the victims of violence, aggression, and the like, or take a completely selfish perspective. There are times and places where resistance is not only important but necessary, and as a social species, connecting with and supporting others is also vital. But it does give us a starting point for trying to change our own lives – and the lives of others – for the better.
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