Last year around this time I finished the classic book: "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl. Frankl spends the first half of the book sharing from his experience in a concentration camp and goes on to explain the importance of man finding meaning in all forms of existence- even suffering. There is a reason that this book is on the top 10 list for most influential books by the Library of Congress. Frankl is brilliant. I recommend this book if you haven't read it and thought I would give you a little sampling of his brilliance.
This video of Frankl is worth listening to a couple of times if you have trouble understanding him. In this clip, he explains why we need to believe in others. He essentially says that every man is on a journey to find purpose and meaning, and that our gift to our fellow man is to believe in him. He says when we take man as he actually is, we make him worse, but when we are idealists and take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be. I love this.
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More wisdom from Frankl:
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”