The Thanksgiving holiday in the United States is a strange time for business professionals. Most of the year, the company instructs us to sacrifice for our careers. The holiday arrives, and we slow down for a few moments to enjoy the company of family and friends. Only then do we understand the cost of our sacrifices at the office. Children grow up becoming people we do not recognize, and our romantic partners may be distant and alienated because we prioritize work. The messiness of our family life is a world away from the orderliness of budget reports and status updates. It is the tradeoff we made to provide for our families.
I experience these feelings as much as the next person, but I always look forward to the holiday. Since childhood, I have treated the four-day Thanksgiving weekend like a small vacation and a chance to reset myself. It is a strategy that serves me well because spending time with family at the dinner table is much better from my perspective than sitting at a conference table with people pretending to be masters of the universe. Along with family time, part of my reset is expressing gratitude for what makes life meaningful. Today, I am going to take some time to do that.
With the change of season, I read Viktor E. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Frankl gives a blunt and unflinching look at his experiences as a concentration camp inmate at Theresienstadt and later Auschwitz. Frankl lost everything during the Holocaust. His wife, mother, father, and brother all died by execution or illness. Frankl himself suffered starvation and beatings daily until he was near death before liberation by Allied forces in 1945. He has spent nearly four years in the concentration camps.
What makes his story is the little details he reveals about life in the camps. The inmates treated their captivity like a full-time job and survival as a principal metric of success. Time would squash and stretch weirdly, with days becoming endless slogs of toil while weeks and months would drift by without consequence. It was looting the bodies of dead comrades for shoelaces, belts, and cigarettes. Captives looked forward to being last in line for soup because they would get a chance to receive a vegetable or scrap of meat in their bowl. Finally, Frankl observed that hunger and deprivation forced people to become their most essential selves. People who were decent and empathetic became more so, while selfish and cruel people became obvious. Confronted with death, humans are both the best and worst examples of how to be alive.
Frankl does not consider himself morally superior and attributes his survival to chance. He uses his experiences to form his understanding of psychoanalysis and philosophy. It is that understanding that is the basis of a form of treatment called logotherapy and Frankl’’s observation that three things give people meaning even in the darkest circumstances. These three things are:
- Creating work or doing a deed.
- Experiencing something or encountering someone else.
- By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.
The categories are deliberately vague because each person must discover what the work gives us; meaning or encounter provides value. What unites all humans is unavoidable suffering. People we love die from cancer. Old friends drift away, and the indifferent forces of the global economy can turn any of us into homeless beggars. We must find meaning in our world by being creative, loving someone or some experience, and finally learning to transcend the pain of unavoidable suffering. It is a blueprint for our absurd postmodern age.
This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for everything that helps provide meaning to my life.
- I am grateful to Capco for allowing me to help clients be more successful.
- I am grateful to my peers in the Agile Reformation, including Dimple Shah, Thomas Meloche, and Diana Williams from Project Brilliant, who supported my efforts to make business more sustainable, sane, and satisfying.
- I am grateful for my parents, who I can still enjoy time with and who encourage me the way only parents can.
- I am grateful for a woman who loves me despite myself and has become my partner in this chaotic life.
- The strange business environment of banking in 2023 has shown me who the saints are and exposed the sinners in a clarifying fashion. I am grateful for this moment of clarity.
- Cancer caused plenty of pain and unnecessary suffering and exposed me to what mattered, which was the people around me that I loved.
- The war in Ukraine and violence in Gaza have clarified how I feel about violence and authoritarianism. I am grateful for that lesson.
- Finally, I am grateful to the people who follow me on this blog, via social media, and in my video feed. Thank you for allowing me to share myself with you each day.
Any comparison of being a paid professional in the twenty-first-century global economy with the experience of prisoners in the extermination camps of World War Two is ludicrous and stupid. I can gain wisdom for my world from the experiences of another. Frankl feels like a person from a different time who has something to teach us today. So, as I survey my family and the tradeoffs I have made to support them, I am grateful that I can rely on the wisdom of the past to make sense of the present. In 2023, the sacrifices were worth it.
Now, pass the cranberry sauce, and see you next time.
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