The Human Condition

What We All Have In Common

Viktor Frankl to whom we owe Logotherapy and Existential Analysis wrote extensively about the Tragic Triad which I partially evoked in the very opening of my April article Are You A Hamster In The Wrong Wheel?. The Tragic Triad refers to the three unavoidable realities every human will face at some point, and realistically more than once, throughout their life. These are: suffering, guilt and death (the latter being the transience, finitude of life).

The premise is that these cannot be eliminated or avoided — they are part of the fabric of being alive. They’re part of what we call the human condition. In other words, it is what it is, whether or not we agree to it.

At this point, I have probably already lost some readers. Because who wants to read about this, right? But shouldn’t you read on? Since we’re talking about yours and my very nature, that is also the one of every single soul you’ll ever meet in this incarnation.

Culturally, an enormous bias has taken hold against this reality, so much so that we attempt to live forgetting or avoiding the Tragic Triad altogether. The reason why this is a problem is because it leaves you unprepared, unarmed and ill-equipped to deal with something you simply can’t avoid whichever way you may attempt to.

Said differently, for as long as you’re alive, you can’t escape life. It will always find you, even in your off-grid remote countryside living or in your spiritual retreat which you inwardly hope stands as an insurance policy against any aspect of the Tragic Triad – it’s not.

Of the three, death (transience and finitude) is the one subjected to the strongest repression and interestingly this can lead to an inauthentic existence. In a world where authenticity is currently worn as a badge of honour the way vulnerability was once when Brené Brown was on the rise, the widespread denial of death undermines this righteous attempt because life, instead of truly being authentic, is lived without real stakes or genuine self-questioning or self-inquiry.

Let me give you an illustration that I encounter whenever I scroll my Instagram feed. For a while now, seemingly in place of mental health and self-care, I have been confronted with content about longevity and bio-hacking. But don’t be misled, it is not about living a full and authentic life embracing its wholeness, it’s about cheating age and health with a consumerist response to the fear of death. It is repression dressed up as health consciousness with a hefty price tag attached to it which makes it accessible only to a few – as if we aren’t all going to age and die and possibly get sick.

Now, think for a minute of the personal development and coaching culture. They are entirely built on a promise to optimise or overcome the human condition, as if there was a secret antidote to it. Do you realise how ludicrous this is? And yet, as humans we keep falling for it because, as we have for centuries, we continue to be tempted to turn away from our condition – our fragility and precariousness. And this is just another version. Our modern world has simply industrialised and monetised this turning away. At first through distraction (the philosopher Pascal was the one to articulate this) and since, through so much more.

On some level, personal development and coaching have become the ideological competitors to therapy. The former have developed a culture built on strategy, performance, achievements, and the implicit assumption of unlimited time. They operate in a voluntarist model that sidesteps contingency entirely and bypasses rather than engages with existential reality.

But here is the breaking news, contingency is irreducible. The human condition is characterised by it — the unforeseen, failure, breakdown, disproportion between ideals and reality. This cannot be engineered away and personal development systematically denies this. Yet it is a flourishing industry whilst therapeutic culture remains underdeveloped, a minority choice, still largely stigmatised and misunderstood.

If I was to phrase it differently again to help make it land, the above is why we end up with book titles like “The secret”, or “Why bad things happen to good people”. Truth is, reality doesn’t owe you coherence. However, a good therapist can help you when confronted with this. For instance, logotherapy and existential analysis as developed by Frankl, work with the raw material of the human condition. They work directly with suffering, limitation, failure and finitude — and consider this honesty a prerequisite for genuinely supporting anyone. You can finally walk away from this unsustainable cultural injunction to success and flawlessness and drop the masks.

What logotherapy proposes is not a way out of the Tragic Triad but a way through it. The idea is that even in the face of unavoidable hardships, meaning can still be found and life can still be lived with dignity and purpose. What Frankl explains is that the Tragic Triad confronts us with the question of whether life can retain meaning in spite of — and sometimes through — these three realities. His broader answer involves three categories of values through which we respond to life:

• Pathos — Creative values (what we give to the world)
• Eros — Experiential values (what we receive from the world)
• Ethos — Attitudinal values (the stance we take toward unavoidable suffering)

It is that third one — attitudinal values — that most directly addresses the Tragic Triad but it’s also the hardest to grasp.

To accompany, I’ll give you the example of a French book I read recently which goes in depth over the principle of 4 Pleasures a Day, Minimum! By Evelyne Bissone Jeufroy. It is intelligent because it is a psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic perspective on the importance of hedonia in life. It is not personal development, though the principle has been used through this lens too. On the contrary, as presented in the book, it is something a therapist works on with people who are very unwell, who might tell you: “I am where I am because my life has been nothing but work, frustration, constraint, unhappiness parcelled out week by week, a sense of obligation, etc. And I don’t know what it means to take pleasure in living”.

For those people, and not just them, it is a way of implementing a change of attitude, helping them find a taste for life, to cultivate a life that has not been appreciated, or that has been a kind of misfortune. Or it can simply help you mindfully change your attitude toward everyday pleasures when you start enquiring about what these are and truly embrace them or maybe ask yourself which ones should enter your life.

The point I am stressing is that life is not only success, ascendancy, accomplishment, achievement, health, glamour, instagram-able. Life can also be failure, pain, suffering, complications, illness, tragedy, injustice. We have to start acknowledging this and living with this in mind without being ashamed or feeling negative or hiding it. This is where therapy and a good therapist become your allies. If anything, that is a true safe space for all this to start to be spoken about freely and openly as this isn’t an anomaly, this is the human condition.

On a broader view, not only do we need to lead by example (another strong logotherapeutic notion by the way) but we also need to educate children about the human condition in general and their own. It’s a requirement to truly value life and have empathy for others. We all have a responsibility in this — it’s not easy, and whichever way we look at it, this is a minority path. Therefore it takes courage as it involves taking a stance against a conditioned human tide. But by now, it is an informed choice.

Remember, you make choices every day. When one chooses, one does not merely opt for something, but one also chooses oneself (or not). Do you choose in avoidance of your true nature or in full embrace of it?

Main – Photo by Michael Cheval