“The existential vacuum manifests itself primarily in a state of boredom. We can now understand Schopenhauer when he says that mankind is apparently condemned forever to vacillate between the two extremes of excitement and boredom. It is a fact that today boredom causes, and certainly confronts psychiatrists with, more problems to solve than excitement. These problems are becoming increasingly serious, since growing automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the amount of leisure time available to the average worker. Unfortunately, many of them will not know what to do with all this newly acquired free time.”
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
There is a Hole within us. It is there all the time, but until we go through what Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy, calls the “existential vacuum,” we cannot see it.
Before we have the experience of satiety and boredom, of feeling bored for no reason, we have been filling this hole with various activities and entertainments from the outer world. One day, however, we realize that it cannot be filled. Then we see it. And we understand that it is the door to death.
Although the first encounter with this Hole is very painful, if we begin to fill it by drawing meaning in our life from our relationship with that which does not die, the emptiness gradually begins to change. And it turns into a feeling of fullness that is not of this world.
Kameliya
