Suffering And The Search For Meaning

Suffering is a deeply personal problem. Why is this happening to me? Guiding readers through the seven most significant theodicies, Richard Rice uses theory and personal stories to help each of us form a response to suffering that is both intellectually satisfying and personally authentic.

Over 16 million copies sold worldwide 'Every human being should read this book' Simon Sinek One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.

“Emphasizes the importance of helping people to find meaning in their lives and thus to live at their fullest potential.” —Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, MD, author of On Death and Dying In our age of depersonalization, Frankl teaches the value of living to the fullest. Upon his death in 1997, Viktor E. Frankl was lauded as one of the most influential thinkers of our time. The Unheard Cry for Meaning marked his return to the humanism that made Man’s Search for Meaning a bestseller around the world. In these selected essays, written between 1947 and 1977, Dr. Frankl illustrates the vital importance of the human dimension in psychotherapy. Using a wide range of subjects—including sex, morality, modern literature, competitive athletics, and philosophy—he raises a lone voice against the pseudo-humanism that has invaded popular psychology and psychoanalysis. By exploring mankind’s remarkable qualities, he brilliantly celebrates each individual’s unique potential, while preserving the invaluable traditions of both Freudian analysis and behaviorism.

Find hope even in these dark times with this rediscovered masterpiece, a companion to his international bestseller Man’s Search for Meaning. Eleven months after he was liberated from the Nazi concentration camps, Viktor E. Frankl held a series of public lectures in Vienna. The psychiatrist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience, and the importance of embracing life even in the face of great adversity. Published here for the very first time in English, Frankl’s words resonate as strongly today—as the world faces a coronavirus pandemic, social isolation, and great economic uncertainty—as they did in 1946. He offers an insightful exploration of the maxim “Live as if you were living for the second time,” and he unfolds his basic conviction that every crisis contains opportunity. Despite the unspeakable horrors of the camps, Frankl learned from the strength of his fellow inmates that it is always possible to “say yes to life”—a profound and timeless lesson for us all.

“This book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life. With sharp insights and lucid prose, Paul Bloom makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. It’s an exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife One of Behavioral Scientist's "Notable Books of 2021" From the author of Against Empathy, a different kind of happiness book, one that shows us how suffering is an essential source of both pleasure and meaning in our lives Why do we so often seek out physical pain and emotional turmoil? We go to movies that make us cry, or scream, or gag. We poke at sores, eat spicy foods, immerse ourselves in hot baths, run marathons. Some of us even seek out pain and humiliation in sexual role-play. Where do these seemingly perverse appetites come from? Drawing on groundbreaking findings from psychology and brain science, The Sweet Spot shows how the right kind of suffering sets the stage for enhanced pleasure. Pain can distract us from our anxieties and help us transcend the self. Choosing to suffer can serve social goals; it can display how tough we are or, conversely, can function as a cry for help. Feelings of fear and sadness are part of the pleasure of immersing ourselves in play and fantasy and can provide certain moral satisfactions. And effort, struggle, and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow. But suffering plays a deeper role as well. We are not natural hedonists—a good life involves more than pleasure. People seek lives of meaning and significance; we aspire to rich relationships and satisfying pursuits, and this requires some amount of struggle, anxiety, and loss. Brilliantly argued, witty, and humane, Paul Bloom shows how a life without chosen suffering would be empty—and worse than that, boring.

The ultimate guide for parents who dream of having a little less chaos and a lot more time for the good things in life Written by mother of five, Nicole Avery, this book shows harried parents how, with just a bit of planning, family life can become easier to manage, less stressful, and decidedly more fun. "Dream on," you say? "I might as well try to herd cats as to get my kids to follow a lot of arbitrary rules!" And Nicole would agree, which is why Planning with Kids isn't like any other parenting guide out there. It was inspired by Nicole's blog of the same name, which, over the past three years, has garnered a huge audience of likeminded parents who have achieved nothing short of miraculous results following her advice. While other prescriptive guides offer mums and dads cook-cutter solutions to the challenges of raising kids, this handbook focuses on one simple, straightforward idea: by implementing a few simple strategies for how you do things, you'll make more time for you to be you and your kids to be kids. You'll find strategies for streamlining and enhancing everything from the routines of daily life, to family relationships, to budgeting and finances, playtime and much more! Contains a full section on menus and cooking, including recipes, supported online by a planning-with-family meal planner Divided into sections so that readers can dip-in and dip-out for information as they need it as their family expands and grows up!

How we can all be lifelong wonderers: restoring the sense of joy in discovery we felt as children. From an early age, children pepper adults with questions that ask why and how: Why do balloons float? How do plants grow from seeds? Why do birds have feathers? Young children have a powerful drive to learn about their world, wanting to know not just what something is but also how it got to be that way and how it works. Most adults, on the other hand, have little curiosity about whys and hows; we might unlock a door, for example, or boil an egg, with no idea of what happens to make such a thing possible. How can grown-ups recapture a child’s sense of wonder at the world? In this book, Frank Keil describes the cognitive dispositions that set children on their paths of discovery and explains how we can all become lifelong wonderers. Keil describes recent research on children’s minds that reveals an extraordinary set of emerging abilities that underpin their joy of discovery—their need to learn not just the facts but the underlying causal patterns at the very heart of science. This glorious sense of wonder, however, is stifled, beginning in elementary school. Later, with little interest in causal mechanisms, and motivated by intellectual blind spots, as adults we become vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation—ready to believe things that aren’t true. Of course, the polymaths among us have retained their sense of wonder, and Keil explains the habits of mind and ways of wondering that allow them—and can enable us—to experience the joy of asking why and how.

From the team that brought you The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, a daily devotional of Stoic meditations—an instant Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestseller. Why have history's greatest minds—from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with today's top performers from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities—embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers 366 days of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations from the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the playwright Seneca, or slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, as well as lesser-known luminaries like Zeno, Cleanthes, and Musonius Rufus. Every day of the year you'll find one of their pithy, powerful quotations, as well as historical anecdotes, provocative commentary, and a helpful glossary of Greek terms. By following these teachings over the course of a year (and, indeed, for years to come) you'll find the serenity, self-knowledge, and resilience you need to live well.

Viktor Frankl, bestselling author of Man's Search for Meaning, explains the psychological tools that enabled him to survive the Holocaust Viktor Frankl is known to millions as the author of Man's Search for Meaning, his harrowing Holocaust memoir. In this book, he goes more deeply into the ways of thinking that enabled him to survive imprisonment in a concentration camp and to find meaning in life in spite of all the odds. He expands upon his groundbreaking ideas and searches for answers about life, death, faith and suffering. Believing that there is much more to our existence than meets the eye, he says: 'No one will be able to make us believe that man is a sublimated animal once we can show that within him there is a repressed angel.' In Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning, Frankl explores our sometimes unconscious desire for inspiration or revelation. He explains how we can create meaning for ourselves and, ultimately, he reveals how life has more to offer us than we could ever imagine.

Defending the superiority of evidence-based reasoning over religious faith and philosophical thought experiments, Thagard argues that minds are brains and that reality is what science can discover. Brains come to know reality through a combination of perception and reasoning. Just as important, our brains evaluate aspects of reality through emotions that can produce both good and bad decisions. Our cognitive and emotional abilities allow us to understand reality, decide effectively, act morally, and pursue the vital needs of love, work, and play. Wisdom consists of knowing what matters, why it matters, and how to achieve it."--Jacket.