Live As If You Were Living Already for the Second Time

"Self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence."

This essay was originally published during our Mindset Shifts U study of Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

I’ve removed the paywall, giving you an opportunity to explore a sample of the work at Mindset Shifts U and discover the valuable insights you’re missing.

Currently, we are considering Four Thousand Weeks By Oliver Burkeman. Session 4, which will begin on Saturday, considers Chapters 5 and 6 in Burkeman. In Chapter 5, Burekman teaches us about the neglected power of attention. He writes,

The classic and extreme demonstration of this is the case of the Austrian psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, who was able to fend off despair as a prisoner in Auschwitz because he retained the ability to direct a portion of his attention toward the only domain the camp guards couldn’t violate: his inner life, which he was then able to conduct with a measure of autonomy, resisting the outer pressures that threatened to reduce him to the status of an animal. But the flip side of this inspiring truth is that a life spent in circumstances immeasurably better than a concentration camp can still end up feeling fairly meaningless if you’re incapable of directing some of your attention as you’d like.

I will have much more to share about the power of attention on Saturday. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today.

You’ll have instant access to all 67 of our past sessions, along with our current work. Plus, you’ll experience all the coming transformative sessions with works including by Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Reynolds and Greg Krech.

A categorical imperative is a moral principle an individual should follow regardless of circumstances.

Viktor Frankl’s essay “Logotherapy in a Nutshell” is contained in Man’s Search for Meaning. In the essay, Frankl states his categorical imperative: "Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"

Did Richard Curtis, the writer and director of the evocative and brilliant romantic comedy About Time, read Frankl?

In About Time, Domhnall Gleeson plays Tim, a young man from a family whose male members can time travel.

Initially, Tim uses time travel to return to particular days to alter events, such as meeting a woman, played by Amy Adams, who becomes his wife.  Later in the movie, Tim’s father, played by Bill Nighy, advises Tim to use time travel only to relive the same day, not by altering events, but by being more present.

Tim’s father counsels, “Live every day again almost exactly the same, the first time with all the tensions and worries that stop us from noticing how sweet the world can be, but the second time noticing.”

Tim follows his father’s advice and notices how often he is not present for ordinary life events. Commuting to work and buying his lunch are colorless events. Tim is a lawyer; even a victory in the courtroom is a muted experience when he is not mentally present.

Tim learns to bring peace to life’s moments rather than expecting life to bring peace to him. He stops time traveling. Instead, Tim explains, “I just try to live every day as if I’ve deliberately come back to this one day. To enjoy it as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.”

What about us non-time-travelers? How does practicing Frankl’s categorical imperative afford us a more meaningful life?

Frankl explained why living “as if you were living already for the second time” is a categorical imperative:

It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man's sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended. Such a precept confronts him with life's finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself.

When Frankl was sent to a concentration camp, he was a practicing psychiatrist in Vienna. He was developing his theory that the primary human motivation is the will to make meaning in one’s life. In 1942, when Frankl received a rare visa to flee to America, he stayed in Austria because that is where he found meaning—caring for his patients and parents. In an interview he gave when he was 90, Frankl responded to a question about the premise of logotherapy:

Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient’s being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others . . . . You see, any human being is originally - he may forget it, or repress this - but originally he is a being reaching out for meanings to be fulfilled or persons to be loved.

Frankl described his role as a therapist this way:

The role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist's role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.

Frankl guides individuals to broaden their vision of what is possible in their lives: “Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness; therefore, it must leave to him the option for what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible.”

A logotherapist will not tell you what to do. Frankl explains, “That is why a logotherapist is the least tempted of all psychotherapists to impose value judgments on his patients, for he will never permit the patient to pass to the doctor the responsibility of judging.”

So, what barriers block our vision of potential meaning in our lives?

Tim’s father had an answer to this question: We have allowed our “tensions and worries” to be the focus of our thinking and our lives. Our ego constructs stories about our grievances and the self-identity we call me.  These stories clog our mental bandwidth and block our ability to make meaning. We won’t notice possibilities when we let our ego tell us for what, to what, or to whom we are responsible.

The theme of About Time and the goal of logotherapy is to transcend our self-concept, allowing the beauty of who we are and meaning to be revealed. “Other psychologies begin by asking, ‘What do I want from life? Why am I unhappy?’ Logotherapy asks, ‘What does life at this moment demand of me?’”

For the ego, asking what life demands of me is an absurd question. The ego is all about the futile attempt to control life to get what it wants. Others are merely means to the ego’s ends. The ego wants life to affirm it; when it doesn’t, others are to blame and deserve to be attacked.

Frankl wouldn’t judge us for our me-ness. And we shouldn’t judge ourselves either. Noticing the ego’s narrow vision is a step into a more open field.

With noticing comes more. We begin to see how much our ego’s vision costs us, often in not-so-obvious ways.

We learn in the field. Frankl writes, “By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.”

What we are looking for can only be achieved through self-transcendence. Frankl advises,

The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

We can be like Tim and notice how often we are not fully present for ordinary life events. We can notice when we are caught up in our stories of me. Practicing Frankl’s categorical imperative helps us transcend our me-ness and broaden our vision.  

Try this simple experiment:  Look at an old family photograph. You can probably remember the events of that day. When the photograph was taken, you may have been caught up in your story—your concerns of the day.

Our self-concept, like clouds, dull our full experience of meaningful moments. We can practice subtracting what clouds our vision. By taking our focus off our me-ness, our vision broadens, and we can notice what life calls us to do in the present moment.

We can’t subtract by willpower, but we can be willing to transcend our self-concept.

Today, as you look at the photograph, your story probably isn’t there. In place of that old story, you might experience self-transcendence as an overwhelming feeling of meaning and Love. Love and rich meaning were the real backdrop of the moment captured by the photo.

Practice this. If you are not feeling Love in this moment, your attention may have been hijacked. Regain your power of decision-making. Most recently, Session 3 may assist.

About Time, Session 3: The Joy of Missing Out

There is no quick fix to the willful narrowing of our visual field, but there can be the willingness to never waiver from our efforts to broaden our vision. We can notice what life is calling us to do in this moment. We can respond by living this moment as if we have the necessary wisdom.

In an interview, Curtis said the “movie is saying that we should relish every normal day and live it just for the day itself, not for what the day might achieve.”

Yet, notice how eager we can be to blame instead of making meaning. Frankl quotes Edith Weisskopf-Joelson, who explained  that the logotherapeutic “notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience.”

I’ll end with one of the songs from the excellent soundtrack of About Time—"Gold in Them Hills” by Ron Sexsmith.

It is easy to see why Sexsmith’s song was selected. Its lyrics point to the movie’s theme, including:

And if we'd get up off our knees
Why then we'd see the forest for the trees
And we'd see the new sun rising
Over the hills on the horizon

So don't lose faith. Give the world a chance to say

A word or two, my friend. There's no telling how the day might end

“Give the world a chance to say” is a good reminder. Today, like all days, nothing has to go right to make life meaningful.

---

Thank you for your support and for considering these ideas with me.