Viktor Frankl & Tragic Optimism

The magic of local optima

If you want to be proud of your life, you should be a tragic optimist.

I’ve always been embarrassed about my optimistic tendencies, but in Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl gave me a better frame. Lessons from a concentration camp seem worth listening to.

He broke down the terms nicely:

tragic - operating in the tragedies and sufferings of life

optimist - coming from the latin word optimus which roughly means, “best”.

So, in tragedies, do the best you can.

It made me think of optimization problems in calculus where you’re looking for the optimum answer. You’re always warned to avoid local optima and go for the global optimum.

But Frankl recognizes that we’re stuck with the best we can do, rather than the best that can be done.

Reading that made me think of this graph:

In each moment, the situation could be great, or could be terrible. We can make a decision anywhere along the way.

We’ve got to look for the local optimum, considering our abilities, temperaments and resources.

Maybe, if we can keep playing and choosing well, we’ll hit the global optimum! Surely there will have been a lot of grace and help from others in the process.

The reality is, there’s a ceiling on my decision quality, but there’s also a floor.

You’re not guaranteed to succeed by trying, but you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t.