Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 108 - Meaning
Welcome to Issue 108 of Deep Life Reflections, where each week I share my thoughts on what I’m enjoying and thinking about.
This week, we explore what truly drives us—not pleasure or power, but meaning.
Our journey begins with Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a seminal account of suffering and survival inside Nazi concentration camps. From there, we turn to 9/11: One Day in America, a powerful, human documentary about one of modern history’s darkest days. Together, these works suggest that meaning isn’t always something we chase. Sometimes, it reveals itself only when we stop resisting the life we’ve been given—and begin to shape it instead.
Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
Man’s Search for Meaning. By Viktor E. Frankl.
“One of the great books of our time.” – Harold S. Kushner
There are books that change how we think. Man’s Search for Meaning changes how we suffer.
Between 1942 and 1945, Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl endured the destructive apparatus of four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He survived. His parents, brother, and pregnant wife did not.
Frankl’s book is divided into two parts: first, the experiences and unimaginable suffering inside the camps; second, the philosophy of survival—physical, yes, but also mental and spiritual.
First published in 1946, the book has sold over 16 million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. But its impact isn’t measured in sales. A great book holds a single idea powerful enough to guide a life. This one holds several.
Frankl’s core insight is that humans are not driven by the pursuit of pleasure, as Freud believed, or power, as Alfred Adler thought. Instead, we are driven by the search for meaning—our most urgent task in life.
He saw three sources of meaning:
In work (doing something significant)
In love (caring deeply for another)
And in suffering (choosing how we endure what we cannot escape)
We do not choose our suffering, Frankl tells us. But we always have the choice of how to respond to it. This is where freedom lives. Even in a concentration camp.
One of the book’s most powerful moments comes when Frankl recognises this freedom. The Nazi guards could strip him of everything in his outer life: his name, his clothes, his body. But not his inner life—that intricate, intimate part that remains under lock and key somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of our mind. That remained his alone.
Frankl had arrived at the camp carrying the manuscript of his life’s work—early ideas that would later become his theory of logotherapy. It was confiscated and destroyed. So, he rewrote it. In his head. Line by line. Idea by idea. Sometimes tracing it in dry soil with a stick to keep the structure alive. A refusal to surrender the self.
He also kept his hope alive by the thought of seeing his wife again, and of one day lecturing to others about the psychological lessons of the camps. Several times in the book, he approvingly quotes the words of Nietzsche:
“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
The book isn’t without its critics. Some have argued that Frankl’s implication—that a positive mindset made one more likely to survive—can feel insensitive or even cruel. Clearly, many prisoners who desperately wanted to live, died. Frankl doesn’t deny this, but his emphasis is elsewhere: less with the question of why most died than why anyone survived at all. His subject is meaning. And how it might be preserved when everything else has been cut to the bone.
There’s a scene in Arthur Miller’s play Incident at Vichy. A man stands before a Nazi officer who holds up his life—everything he’s accomplished: his degrees, credentials, letters of recognition. The officer asks him, “Is this all you have?” The man nods. The officer glances at them, then throws them in the bin. “Good,” he says. “Now you have nothing.” For the man, whose identity has always depended on the recognition of others, it is an annihilation. But for Frankl, he’d recognise that moment is the beginning of a choice. The freedom to choose is the one thing that Nazi officer cannot take away.
And perhaps that’s where meaning lives—not in what we have, or what we achieve, but in how we carry ourselves when there’s nothing left to hold on to.
Even in suffering.
2. What I’m Watching
9/11: One Day in America. Documentary. Directed by Daniel Bogado.
“The only real antidote for life’s pain is inside us. It is the courage within, the ability to build your own fires and find your own peace.” ― Joseph Pfeifer, Ordinary Heroes: A Memoir of 9/11
There have been many quiet, dignified documentaries made about one of the darkest chapters of modern history. 9/11: One Day in America may be the most definitive.
Created in collaboration with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, this six-part series traces the events of that day through the eyes of those who lived it. The filmmakers sifted through nearly 1,000 hours of archival footage—some never seen before—and held 235 hours of interviews with 54 people.
From the start, it’s clear this is a documentary about human stories. Not politics. Not investigations. Not conspiracies. Just the people who lived—and sometimes died—through September 11, 2001, whether in New York, Washington or on the four hijacked planes.
The timelines are familiar. The footage and carnage still unreal and distressing—forever scorched into our minds. But the impact of the documentary isn’t what we see, but what we hear. Told entirely through personal testimony—20 years later, but with the rawness of yesterday—these are stories of ordinary people making impossible decisions. Running into towers. Holding strangers’ hands. Crawling through smoke and tangled metal. And then returning home—often to tragedy.
Two stories in particular stay with me.
Joseph Pfeifer, an FDNY Battalion Chief, was among the first on scene. His calm leadership helped save many lives. His brother, also a firefighter, was not among them. The last time Joseph saw him, he was heading up the stairs of the burning World Trade Center. Months later, his body was found in the wreckage.
Another story comes from a former paramedic—who on 9/11 was in a bad place, felled by drink and drugs, emotionally shut down. On that morning, he barely noticed the attacks. But when his sister called, assuming he was out saving people, he felt shamed into action. He ventured out—not to help, but to tell her he’d at least tried. He ended up climbing down into a 50-foot pit of fire and wreckage to rescue trapped firefighters. To this day, he doesn’t call it bravery. “Something just put me there,” he says. “On that day.”
Like Frankl, some of these people didn’t plan to be brave. They didn’t even feel brave. But they responded anyway. They made a choice. The filmmakers add incredible weight to the documentary by showing the complexity of human thought and action. They weave in stories of luck, courage, resilience, fear, compassion, anger, guilt, and redemption. Somewhere in the chaos and trauma came clarity—even if it took years to surface.
At the end of the series, we see the 9/11 Memorial in New York. Each of the 2,996 people killed has a photo beside their name. The photos share one thing in common. All are smiling. That’s how the families want them remembered. Not as victims. As lives. Lives that mattered. Lives that had meaning.
I visited the World Trade Center in May 1998. My first time in New York. I stood on the roof and took a roll of black and white photos. I still have them. From the ground, I remember staring up at the towers, thinking how immovable they felt—steel pillars disappearing into the clear spring sky.
In July 2014, I returned. I visited the 9/11 Memorial, standing in the spot where those towers once stood.
Reading the names of those who died.
Or more accurately, those who lived.
3. What I’m Contemplating
Last week, I attended a talk by former Paralympian Jessica Smith. Jessica and I were both ambassadors for ASICS, promoting the value of a healthy body and healthy mind. But this was the first time I’d heard her full story.
Jessica was born without her left arm. For years, she hid it—physically and emotionally. She spoke to a room full of students at American University in Dubai (AUD), the same audience I addressed last year, and told them how becoming an advocate for disability was the last thing she wanted. She didn’t want to be different. She didn’t want to be seen.
But slowly, over time, she made peace with the thing she had spent years pushing away. And in that peace, she found a mission. Not to “inspire,” but to speak plainly and powerfully about what it means to live in a world not built for you.
Jessica spoke about the 1.3 billion people living with disability (about 16% of the global population). About how AI systems encode bias. How public spaces often exclude by default. How we need to stop treating disability as something that needs fixing. Most of all, she reminded the room that difference doesn’t mean deficit.
She didn’t choose her circumstances. But she chose what to do with them.
Like Frankl, Jessica shows that meaning isn’t always something we pursue. Sometimes, it comes when we stop resisting the life we’ve been given—and begin to shape it instead.
4. A Quote to note
“In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
- Viktor Frankl
5. A Question for you
What’s the one idea, belief, or memory you’d fight to keep alive, even if everything else were taken?
May, 1998.
One of my black-and-white photos from that spring day in New York, —looking up at the towers that once felt immovable.
Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.
James
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