I had been teaching Man’s Search for Meaning for more than twenty years, and over time I became increasingly haunted by a contradiction I could no longer ignore.
As an intellectual exercise, teaching Frankl came easily to me. In the classroom, I could lecture confidently about suffering, moral courage, existential responsibility, and the human capacity to create meaning under catastrophic conditions. I knew the book so thoroughly that the lessons practically assembled themselves. I could guide students through Frankl’s arguments with the polished assurance of a veteran preacher delivering a favorite sermon.
But outside the classroom, matters became considerably murkier.
The older I grew, the more I suspected I lacked the moral authority to teach the book at all.
Frankl’s memoir is not merely literature. It is a rebuke. It quietly interrogates the reader’s vanity, self-pity, cowardice, and spiritual laziness. The book demands that human beings rise above grievance and become worthy of their suffering. And whenever I compared Frankl’s moral heroism to my own personality defects—my vanity, self-absorption, resentment, melodrama, and appetite for comfort—I found myself thinking:
Talk is cheap.
Very cheap.
It is easy to discuss transcendence while standing safely before a whiteboard in air-conditioned suburban America. It is another matter entirely to embody the principles one teaches.
Yet despite my growing sense of fraudulence, I remained deeply invested in the book. I enjoyed the subtle glow that came from being perceived as a devoted disciple of Viktor Frankl. Teaching the text allowed me to borrow, however temporarily, some reflected aura of moral seriousness.
Then came Conner Patrick.
And the entire arrangement began to collapse.
What made Conner’s disdain for Man’s Search for Meaning so devastating was that in nearly thirty years of teaching, he was by far the finest writer I had ever encountered.
Not the most promising.
Not the most talented “for his age.”
The best.
He was only eighteen years old, an English major with no discernible career ambitions, yet his prose possessed an effortless authority that made nearly every other student writer seem linguistically undernourished by comparison.
Most young writers who wish to appear intelligent assault the reader with thesaurus vocabulary and bloated academic jargon. Conner did the opposite. His writing flowed with such ease and precision that reading his essays felt like watching someone stroll through a vast orchard of Language Trees casually plucking the exact perfect word at precisely the right moment.
No strain.
No showing off.
No sweat visible on the machinery.
The words simply arrived naturally in his hands.
His prose was vastly superior to mine, and I knew it.
At one point I told him:
“I’ve got a V-6 engine under my hood. Reliable enough. But you—you’ve got a V-12. I can’t compete with that.”
I also confessed I would be genuinely shocked if he did not eventually become a published writer.
Conner himself looked less like an aspiring literary prodigy than a mountain man accidentally stranded on a community-college campus. He stood about six-foot-four and weighed well over 280 pounds. He wore faded jeans, hiking boots, and flannel shirts that made him appear permanently prepared either to split firewood or disappear into the Pacific Northwest wilderness for several years.
A scraggly beard partially concealed the freckles on his cherubic cheeks, while a wool herringbone golfer’s cap sat low over his curly reddish-brown hair. Most days he carried a guitar into class as though wandering accidentally between folk concert and existential crisis.
Socially, he was pleasant enough. He chatted easily with classmates and generally projected the relaxed friendliness of a gifted person not yet fully aware of the intimidation he inspired.
But every so often I would catch his blue eyes narrowing slightly while observing other people, and in those moments I glimpsed something colder beneath the surface—an exhaustion with humanity itself, a private contempt that flickered across his face before disappearing again.
It was the look of someone already disappointed by the species at eighteen.
Conner would often linger after class long after the other students had drifted out into the hallway, and we would sit talking about his essays, literature, or his older sister Jennifer, who had taken my class the previous year and apparently decided I was competent enough to recommend to her younger brother.
One of Conner’s essays featured a bald high-school football coach drinking with old friends inside a bar, and it became immediately obvious to me that the character was a lightly fictionalized version of my younger self. Conner had scavenged fragments from personal anecdotes I had casually shared in class and stitched them together into a kind of alternate-universe doppelgänger—one far more reckless, abrasive, and dangerous than I had ever possessed the courage to become.
The other students loved the essay.
I did too, though reading it gave me the uncanny sensation of watching someone steal my reflection and improve upon it.
The important thing was this: Conner knew I respected his intelligence, and because of that respect he felt completely comfortable mocking me.
More significantly, he felt comfortable disagreeing with me.
This became painfully evident shortly after my first lecture on Man’s Search for Meaning, during which I explained the semester’s final capstone essay assignment. Students would argue either that Viktor Frankl made a convincing case for meaning as the antidote to existential despair, or that his argument ultimately failed to persuade them.
After class, Conner remained seated at his desk while the others filed out.
Then he looked at me and said:
“You don’t really believe in this shit, do you?”
The bluntness of the question startled me.
“What?” I replied stupidly.
He sighed impatiently, as though disappointed I was forcing him to state the obvious.
“Come on, man. You know you don’t believe in this shit.”
What unnerved me most was that part of me immediately recognized he might be right.
Still, out of instinctive self-defense, I answered:
“Well actually, I tend to be more agnostic when it comes to the subject of meaning.”
“Seriously?”
He was flipping through Frankl’s book in his enormous hands while staring at the pages with open contempt.
“Take away the impressive Holocaust narrative and what are you left with?” he said. “Just a bunch of homilies about positive thinking. It’s basically Chicken Soup for the Soul for intellectuals.”
Ordinarily, disagreement never bothered me. I encouraged students to challenge texts. But Conner’s criticism struck differently because he was not merely attacking Frankl.
He was questioning my judgment.
According to Conner, I had assigned sentimental tripe disguised as philosophy. Worse, I had emotionally manipulated students into treating cliché as wisdom because I personally needed the book to be true.
I suddenly felt defensive in a way I hated.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Conner,” I admitted. “When I first read Frankl at eighteen, the section where he’s marching with the prisoners at dawn and thinking about the spirit of his wife—I cried for like five hours.”
Conner winced sympathetically, though not respectfully.
“I’m glad you got something out of it,” he said. “And Frankl seems like a great guy. But all this stuff about meaning is bullshit. You know as well as I do there is no meaning.”
“Is that what I’m supposed to tell my daughters?”
“You can tell them the truth or you can tell them lies. It’s your choice.”
“I want my daughters to grow up, get educated, fall in love, build meaningful lives. That gives me meaning. Does that make me stupid?”
“You’re confusing meaning with survival,” he replied instantly. “Your love for your daughters is biological. Instinctive. I understand that. But that’s not meaning in the grand Frankl sense.”
“So Frankl’s delusional?”
“Of course he’s delusional,” Conner said calmly. “That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with him. Look, the guy went through unimaginable horror. He had to convince himself the suffering meant something or he would’ve psychologically collapsed. Most people do that. Meaning is basically an emotional survival mechanism people invent so they don’t lose their minds.”
But it wasn’t merely his argument that destabilized me.
It was the way he looked at me while making it.
Conner spoke as though he regarded us as secret ideological allies—as if beneath my classroom performance, my lectures, my carefully curated professor persona, there existed another version of me fully aware that life was fundamentally meaningless.
And the horrifying thing was that part of me felt seen.
As instructors, especially after decades in the classroom, we like to imagine ourselves as stable intellectual authorities. We tell ourselves we are people of conviction who can withstand disagreement without wavering.
Usually I could.
But in Conner’s presence, I often felt like a man trying to lecture confidently while standing atop loose sand during an earthquake.
Then he leaned back in his chair and delivered the coup de grâce.
“Why are you teaching this crap?” he asked. “Does it make you feel better stuffing meaning down your students’ throats? Are you having some kind of midlife crisis and trying to lecture yourself out of despair?”
“This is a critical thinking class,” I protested weakly. “I want students thinking for themselves.”
“But you’re a hypocrite,” he replied immediately. “You tell us to think critically and detach emotionally from arguments. But you can’t do that with Frankl because you worship him. You’re emotionally compromised.”
Then he held up the book dismissively.
“Take away your admiration for his heroism and your sentimental memory of crying over his wife, and what do you have left? A bunch of clichés about finding meaning. And you know as well as I do that suffering doesn’t mean anything. Most of life is random pain that people desperately try to decorate with philosophy afterward.”
Then, as if determined to drive the knife deeper, Conner began explaining why he found Frankl’s philosophy emotionally manipulative and intellectually fraudulent.
His mother, he said, was deeply religious and believed God had called her to become a foster parent for infants damaged by drugs and alcohol.
“Ever since I was a little kid,” he told me, “there have been crack babies in my house.”
He said the phrase without sentimentality or self-pity. Just exhaustion.
“They don’t recover,” he continued. “They’re permanently damaged. Some of them sleep all night with their eyes open. Some make these awful squawking noises like prehistoric birds. A lot of them can barely function. It’s a nightmare.”
Then his tone hardened.
“And what has my mother gained from this so-called higher purpose? Jennifer and I basically lost our childhoods. My mom neglected us because she was so obsessed with saving these babies for God. Half the time she expected us to help raise them.”
He leaned back in his chair and laughed bitterly.
“That’s what meaning looks like in real life. Endless stress, resentment, dysfunction, and guilt wrapped in religious self-congratulation.”
According to Conner, his mother’s “calling” was either pathological altruism, spiritual narcissism, or some toxic combination of both.
“Honestly,” he said, “Frankl shouldn’t be proud of this kind of shit. I grew up surrounded by people justifying misery in the name of meaning.”
As had become the custom lately, the class ended on Conner’s terms, not mine. His words hung in the room long after the students gathered their backpacks and shuffled toward the door. I stood there disarmed, mute, and inwardly collapsing beneath the awful suspicion that he had exposed me for what I truly was: a middle-aged professor borrowing moral authority from books whose standards he himself could not meet. I felt less like a teacher than a theological used-car salesman trying to unload existential optimism with bald tires and a cracked transmission.
I drove home that evening emotionally flattened.
What disturbed me most was not merely Conner’s argument but my inability to answer it convincingly.
For days afterward, I replayed our exchanges obsessively in my head the way a defeated boxer rewatches footage of a championship loss searching for the precise moment his legs gave out beneath him. Somewhere, I kept telling myself, there had to exist a devastating rebuttal capable of puncturing Conner’s nihilism once and for all. Surely Frankl’s philosophy could not be dismantled so easily by an eighteen-year-old English major dressed like a depressed lumberjack.
By the next class meeting, however, I had concluded that the only intellectually honest response was to drag Conner’s objections directly into the open and let the entire class watch the philosophical knife fight unfold publicly.
I asked his permission beforehand.
He approved immediately and with almost indecent enthusiasm.
The little bastard was delighted by the prospect of becoming the classroom heretic.
So during the following lecture I summarized his objections for everyone.
“Conner wants us,” I began carefully, “to temporarily set aside Frankl’s heroism and focus strictly on the argument itself. He makes two claims. First, much suffering appears entirely senseless. Second, what people call meaning may simply be a coping mechanism human beings invent to survive psychologically.”
I paused and glanced toward Conner.
He sat in the back row smiling broadly with the self-satisfaction of an arsonist admiring his own fire.
“Now let’s concede something important right away,” I continued. “Massive amounts of suffering do appear meaningless. Consider something like the Indian Ocean tsunami. Hundreds of thousands dead. Entire families erased in minutes. There is no obvious moral lesson embedded in catastrophe on that scale.”
The room remained quiet.
“But,” I continued, “perhaps meaning exists on a spectrum. Perhaps human beings occupy what we might call a Meaning Scale.”
The students leaned forward.
“At one end,” I explained, “there is spiritual decrepitude. Imagine a severe addict whose entire existence collapses into appetite and self-destruction. He burns bridges with friends and family. He isolates himself. He loses all connection to higher aspirations. His life contracts inward toward emptiness.”
The students nodded.
“At the other end,” I continued, “are people who devote themselves to craft, service, discipline, love, or meaningful work. Through sacrifice and commitment they cultivate a higher version of themselves. That movement toward flourishing—that movement toward transcendence—is what I would call meaning.”
Then I made the tactical error of looking directly at Conner.
His lips curled upward immediately.
“It’s great when people flourish,” he said, “but don’t confuse flourishing with meaning.”
He folded his enormous arms across his chest like a Viking philosopher preparing to sack a monastery.
“I know a sixteen-year-old evangelist who’s amazing at converting people to his faith. He’s disciplined, charismatic, passionate—everything you’re describing.”
Then Conner paused theatrically.
“But his older brother used to be an evangelist too. Now he tours around giving lectures about why religion is nonsense. He helps believers become atheists. He’s flourishing too. They can’t both possess some objective thing called meaning.”
He shrugged.
“They’re just pursuing narratives that energize them emotionally.”
Then came the kill shot.
“Meaning isn’t objective reality,” he said. “It’s emotional fuel. Complete bullshit.”
The room fell silent.
But Conner was only warming up.
“There’s another problem with your argument,” he continued. “You’re committing the exact kind of either-or fallacy you’ve warned us about all semester.”
Now he was openly enjoying himself.
“You’ve created this cartoon universe where people are either spiritually disintegrating addicts or enlightened flourishing saints. But real people are contradictory. Plenty of great writers produced brilliant art while simultaneously destroying themselves with alcoholism. Human beings can flourish and decay at the same time.”
Then he lowered his voice slightly.
“You already know this. You’re just too emotionally attached to Frankl to admit it.”
That sentence struck me with horrifying accuracy because part of me feared he was right.
Then Conner leaned forward and delivered the existential haymaker.
“Who wants to believe we’ve been dumped into a meaningless universe?” he asked quietly. “Who wants to admit we’re basically distracting ourselves with careers, hobbies, entertainment, and relationships until we die?”
Again I felt that awful sensation of standing on shifting sand.
I could feel myself sliding toward his worldview against my will.
Panicking internally, I reached desperately for one of my emergency pedagogical flotation devices: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
In a DVD interview, Gene Wilder had explained that the movie was fundamentally about boundaries and self-restraint, so I lunged at this idea like a drowning man grabbing driftwood.
“Boundaries give us meaning,” I blurted out. “Boundaries teach discipline. They protect us from excess and chaos. Children raised with healthy boundaries are happier than children without them. Boundaries point us toward meaning.”
Conner shook his head slowly.
“Boundaries matter,” he conceded. “But they’re survival mechanisms. Not meaning.”
Still flailing for life support, I snapped: “Take away meaning and what’s left? A nihilistic free-for-all? A Darwinian nightmare where the strong brutalize the weak?”
Conner smiled lazily.
“Relax, McMahon. Civilization isn’t going to collapse because people stop reading Viktor Frankl. We cooperate because cooperation benefits survival. Morality is adaptive behavior. That still isn’t meaning.”
“So we’re just products of evolution?”
“Pretty much. Can’t handle it?”
“If what you’re saying is true,” I said, “most people would collapse into despair.”
“Not at all,” he replied calmly. “Most people are perfectly happy believing comforting delusions. Religion. Cosmic purpose. Destiny. Frankl just packages existential anesthesia for intellectuals.”
Then he grinned.
“If grown adults want to believe in Santa Claus forever, more power to them.”
At this point I decided to change strategy.
“Can I ask you something personal, Mr. Patrick?”
“Go for it.”
“Why are you even in college?”
He shrugged.
“Something to do.”
“You have no plan?”
“Not really.”
“Wouldn’t having a plan be better than not having one?”
“Not necessarily,” he replied instantly. “I know plenty of students who followed ‘the plan’ only to realize they hate their major and hate their future. A lot of plans are disasters. Sometimes not having a plan is healthier.”
At that moment the discussion no longer resembled a classroom debate. It felt like an arm-wrestling contest between a steroid-bloated carnival strongman and a tuberculosis patient fresh from convalescence. Conner’s arguments kept slamming my hand closer and closer toward the table while I strained uselessly beneath the fluorescent lights pretending I still had a fighting chance.
I instinctively touched the front of my damp shirt expecting blood.
It was only sweat.
“But goals matter,” I insisted weakly. “Goals help us live more fully. As Nietzsche says—and Frankl quotes him constantly—‘He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.’”
Conner smirked.
“Yes, but the Why may itself be delusional. Fascists have Whys. Cult leaders have Whys. Having motivation doesn’t magically create objective meaning.”
Then he delivered the final insult with almost affectionate cruelty.
“Honestly, McMahon, you assigned us a book full of platitudes and clichés. Your brain’s gone soft in your old age, bro. You may want to start looking at retirement.”
By now I could sense the emotional tide of the classroom shifting toward him. Students were smiling at Conner with the admiration usually reserved for charismatic revolutionaries moments before mutiny.
Conner sensed it too.
Then, astonishingly, he stood up and addressed the class.
“Okay, everybody,” he announced. “Show’s over. McMahon and I planned this whole thing beforehand. Rehearsed script. We wanted to demonstrate Socratic dialogue.”
The students erupted.
Several called it one of the greatest classes they had ever witnessed. One student said he regretted not recording the exchange and uploading it to YouTube. Another compared us to one of those buddy-comedy duos where two men spend the entire film insulting each other but secretly cannot function apart.
The giant wall clock showed that the class was over.
Students slowly shuffled out of the classroom buzzing with excitement.
Conner remained seated.
“What the hell was that?” I demanded once we were alone. “You were tearing me apart argument by argument. Then suddenly you rescue me?”
He shrugged casually.
“Well, first of all, I like you.”
“What the hell do you do to professors you don’t like?”
He laughed. Then he said, “To your credit, you tried to do something ambitious and failed. But at least you tried. Most professors just hide behind the same fossilized lecture notes for thirty years. You fought me. That takes guts. No one beats me in an argument–ever. You’ve got balls, McMahon.”
“So you spared me because I’ve got balls?”
“That’s part of it,” he admitted. “But also, I didn’t know anything before I took your class. You taught me some new ways to think critically. I wasn’t going to use the weapons you gave me to publicly humiliate you.”
Then he smiled.
“I don’t like many people, but I like you.”
I shook my head.
“Thirty years teaching, and I’ve never lost an argument like that. You handed me my bloody head on a stake.”
“Which means,” he replied triumphantly, “it’s finally time for you to admit I’m right and Frankl’s wrong.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Come on, man. I saved you.”
“You make compelling points,” I admitted. “But I still have some stubborn kernel of faith that meaning exists. If I denied that completely, I’d be lying.”
Conner nodded thoughtfully.
“Fair enough,” he said. “But next time, watch yourself in class.”
Then he grinned.
“Because next time I’m still going to kick your ass.”
Cinemorphosis 