Last month I spent 17 days traveling through Central and Eastern Europe (articles about my experiences forthcoming). I spent one of those days touring the Auschwitz and Birkenau WWII concentration/extermination camps. It was a moving experience that I highly recommend.
The front gate at Auschwitz. The words say “work sets you free.” Keep those words in mind as you read this article.
Before visiting the camps, I chose to re-read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a psychologist who was interred in four different concentration camps (including Auschwitz) during the war. He survived and wrote the book about his experiences.
Pick up the book and read it. It’s a fast read and quite inspiring. In it, Frankl argues that life always has meaning, even in the darkest circumstances. Furthermore he states that the ultimate human freedom is the “ability to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances”. His fundamental thesis is that none of us can control our external environment, but we all have the choice to control our reaction to those uncontrollable circumstances.
During my workout today, I was listening to the Modern Wisdom Podcast where Chris Williamson interviewed author Arthur Brooks about the topic of happiness in life.
Something Is Very Wrong With Modern Life – Arthur Brooks
Near the end of the podcast (starting at around the 1:39 mark), Williamson mentions Frankl’s work and this quote:
“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”
Williamson then proposed a theorem to accompany Frankl’s thoughts on meaning. He called it Frankl’s Inverse Law. From the podcast:
“Yeah, so there’s that famous quote, when a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure, right? He’s arguing lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief and superficial pursuits rather than addressing some of the line point.
And this is before scrolling even existed.
Yeah, perhaps for many, maybe even most people, this is a big issue. But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem, Frankel’s inverse law. When a man can’t find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.
That struck me and resonated with my personal experience.
Early in my life, I chose to become obsessed with working out and training martial arts because I got more meaning and satisfaction from those activities than I did by actually living an enjoyable life. I wasn’t very sociable. I didn’t have a lot of close friends. I had sporadic romantic relationships. I couldn’t talk about anything socially except guns, training, and fighting.
Once I became a cop, the problem worsened. I doubled down on my choice to constantly practice shooting and fighting to make up for my lack of a social life. I didn’t go on vacations or travel because I was using all my vacation time from work to attend shooting schools. After developing a high skill level and some teaching acclaim following 20 years of obsessive training, I realized I wasn’t truly happy. All my pursuit of hard things and mastery in the field of applied violence didn’t give me any true meaning in my life.
I put off happiness because I didn’t know how to make it happen. It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I learned how to be happy. Many of my peers still haven’t mastered that skill yet.
When I look at many of my current colleagues who are high performers teaching martial arts, fighting, and shooting skills, I see a very similar pattern. They became good at what they do because of obsession and hard work. But most of them chose that hard work because it was easier than developing meaningful personal human relationships or feeling the emotion of happiness.
The most successful trainers I know now temper their obsessive desire for peak performance with focused life activities designed to foster happiness and pleasure in realms outside of their fighting skills.
Some others still haven’t allowed pleasure to intrude on their hard work. I feel sorry for those folks.
I’m happy with my life now, but it took a long time and a lot of work to get to this point.
Most of you reading this are focused on improving your personal protection skills. Are you doing that because it’s easier than making yourself happy?
Read that quote again.
“When a man can’t find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.”
Is your training a distraction to keep you from the harder work of becoming happy?
It’s a question worthy of your attention.
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