Stronger

After reading Viktor Frankl's story I woke up this morning with the thought "society is like a concentration camp" as it tries to take away our identity and reduce us to a number, even if it's only by isolating us. Physically we are free, psychologically we might as well be in a concentration camp. I think he inspired "V for Vendetta," because he also said that you can take everything away from you until only one thing is left ("an inch"): your free will to choose what attitude you take towards your situation, whether you let yourself be reduced to an animal or retain your dignity as human being. In the camp there were "swine" and "saints", he wrote, but most just become apathetic, like sheep.
Only the people who found a meaning to their existence found the strength to survive the camp. For him it was to rewrite the script that was snatched from him (he made notes during his typhus in order not to succumb to delirium), but afterwards he gave his patients more of an ideal meaning (e.g. you survived your love so she wouldn't have to suffer the loss you're going through). It changes nothing, and yet it makes a difference. I've also heard a saying that "there's only an inch between samsara and nirvana": which choice you make, to live consciously or as the living dead.
If you're a good person, that will always live deep down beneath all your suffering. Whatever happens to you, that one choice always remains. Despite the starvation that ate at his body and brain, Viktor came out of the camp stronger, because your will is untouchable, and all else can be restored from that will — hence, some people can recover from brain damage through exercises.
Once you have nothing else left, making that choice becomes unavoidable? Therefore, I no longer despair when I have no prospects in life, on the contrary, I rejoice in it, because after 2008 I know that at the end of that road happiness awaits, and that it consists but of that one inch difference in attitude.
I don't mean to trivialize suffering by saying this. In fact, to create your own values in life is one of the hardest goals to achieve, and for Nietzsche, it makes you an Ubermensch if you can do it. But once you can do that, you can do just about anything else within the realm of human potential.