A coach I respect suggested I re-read Viktor Frankl. It’s been 8 years, but I didn’t ask why. I suspect it was because of whatever we were discussing at the time.
When someone who has been paying attention to you for a while suggests you read something again, the smart move is to read it again. The reason tends to become clear on its own.
Man’s Search for Meaning sat on my shelf the way books do after you have read them once, felt appropriately moved, underlined a few passages, and quietly moved on to the next thing. I picked it up again and noticed something I had missed the first time, or perhaps something that only becomes visible from a new angle. Such as the view from being months away from the start of your seventh decade with a clearer view of what the previous six had become.
Frankl, who survived Auschwitz and three other Nazi concentration camps, spent the rest of his life writing about what he observed there: he witnessed that the people who endured were not necessarily the strongest or the most resourceful. They were the ones who had something to live for. Meaning was the mechanism. Without it, people deteriorated more quickly than their physical circumstances warranted.
This essay is about the reverse of that. I believe there is a condition that is the photographic negative of what Frankl described. Less dramatic, less visible, and considerably more common among the people reading this — and it has been quietly gathering strength in me and in almost everyone I know who is navigating their sixties and seventies with any degree of clarity.
I am referring to the inertia of unhappiness and of regret.
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You reach a point in age when you can see the shape of your life with unusual clarity. Not just what happened, but what you did with it. The choices you made when things were hard. The ones you made when they were easy. The things you said, and the things you said instead of what you meant. All clearly visible in the rearview mirror.
Alongside that clarity comes a growing audit of the life unlived.
The relationship you allowed to erode while you were busy building something else.
The creative work you kept meaning to start.
The conversation you kept putting off until the person it was meant for ran out of time to hear it.
The version of yourself you were always going to become once things settled down, which, of course, they never did, because ‘settling down’ was never really the plan.
The logical response to recognizing an unlived life is to start living it. You still have time. You likely have the resources. Career obligations have ended. The children have grown. By almost any objective measure, this is the moment. If you choose it.
And yet, how and what can replace all of that?
The regret itself becomes the reason not to start. The thinking goes:
I should have done this twenty years ago. The fact that I didn’t means either that I wasn’t capable of it or that it wasn’t meant for me.
“Starting now would only prove how long I waited. Anyway, what’s the point at this stage?”
It is a spectacular piece of circular logic. Regret over possibly not having lived fully becomes the justification for continuing not to live fully. The audit produces paralysis, which in turn fuels further regret and dissatisfaction.
I have been in that cycle — as my readers know. I suspect many of the people reading this have been there too or are in it right now.
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Here is where Frankl becomes useful, and why I think my coach knew what she was doing.
Later in his professional life, Frankl believed that most people, after loss, trauma, or the end of something that had organized their identity, approach a changed life by asking: who am I now? It is an entirely reasonable question. It is also, Frankl argued, the wrong one.
The question that turns inward tends to stay inward. I have spent a significant portion of my sixties asking who I am now, and I can report that the yield has been modest.
You examine yourself thoroughly. You revise some opinions. You remain largely where you were at the start of the exam.
Frankl’s question was different. Not who am I now, but what is life asking of me?
In my case, I led a small company and a group of men and women. I co-founded and built a great business. We grew, and we helped 50 people build meaningful careers.
And then I really believed I was done. Nothing left to prove, and no one needed my leadership. The business was so successful and so respected that it carried its own weight right into the hands of an friendly acquirer who added value and leveraged our little business into a truly great enterprise.
All without me at the helm.
What changed my response to it was a conversation about regret — a real one with a real person who was sitting with the same inertia I described above. In the middle of it, I heard myself say something I hadn’t planned to say: the regret is not evidence that it’s too late. It’s evidence that it still matters. If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t be carrying it with you all these years.
Which, I now realize, is Frankl’s argument, expressed in less elegant language. The fact that something causes you pain is not evidence that it is out of reach. It is evidence that it remains alive within you.
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Let me say something directly about the “it’s too late now” feeling, because it deserves further explanation.
It is real. It is not irrational. It is genuinely late for some things. I will not compete in the Tour de France. This is not a source of distress, because I never had the talent or wanted to. The point stands. Some windows close. Pretending they don’t is its own form of avoidance.
But the feeling is an extraordinarily poor judge of which doors close. It does not distinguish between the conversation that can no longer happen because the person is gone and the conversation that has not yet happened because you fear how it might go. It treats both as finished.
They are not the same thing. Using the genuine loss as cover for the avoidable ones is the specific mechanism through which the inertia of regret and unhappiness sustains itself. It is, in the most literal sense, a waste.
Frankl was not sentimental about this. He had seen what genuine loss looked like. He did not confuse it with the self-imposed kind. He was, if anything, impatient with it. With the particular impatience of someone who understood the difference between a cage and a door you had chosen not to open.
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Most writing about Frankl reaches for grand examples, the opus, the mission, the legacy project. I think that reach is part of the problem.
The unlived life most people in their sixties and seventies carry is not a symphony they never wrote. It is smaller and more specific.
It is the friend they have meant to call for six months. The apology they have been composing in their head for three years. The grandchild they are waiting to get to know better, as if these experiences are something that happens to you rather than something you made happen.
These are not small things dressed up as large ones. They are large things in plain clothes. And they are almost always available now — not later, not when things settle, not after the next obligation resolves.
I think about the ‘friends’ who simply dropped out of view. Was it me? I think about the mentors I never truly acknowledged. I think about the relationships I burned or simply ignored until they quietly left.
I have made a handful of the calls I had been putting off. Some went well. One went considerably better than I expected. A few were uncomfortable in ways that turned out to matter less than I had imagined. One never even called back, preferring no resolution to whatever misunderstanding had caused the rift.
None of them required me to wait until I felt ready.
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What life is asking of me now is not a comfortable question. It doesn’t allow you to remain in the audit of what has been. It turns you, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, toward what still lies ahead.
The regret is real. The losses are real. Some of the doors are now closed, which is genuinely sad. It is worth grieving them.
But some of them are just doors.
Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, first published in 1946, remains one of the most important books written about the relationship between suffering and purpose. If you have not read it, or read it once and moved on, it is worth returning to. It reads differently at different stages of life. That is one of the signs of a serious book.
I realize there is a book I have never read and will make sure I read it .thank you