but that’s another topic altogether, I kind of just want to talk about what you could consider an 8th survival need: purpose
Now I personally read a crapload of anthropological and psychological material, and we've all heard about how people who have "something to do" or someone to take care of tend to live longer, but when I read this my jaw just dropped to the floor:
In March 1945 in one of the German concentration camps (I believe it was
Auschwitz they were in at the time) Victor E. Frankl encountered a man
who told him that he had dreamed the war would be over on March 30th
(and this man truly believed his dream in sort of a prophetic way.)
There
being no news to indicate such a thing would happen as the date drew
nearer, come March 29 the man suddenly and unexpectedly developed a high
fever. March 30 he lost consciousness. March 31 he was dead.
If
one isolated case is not enough to convince you of the lethality of
hopelessness and purposelessness, since it can be attributed to
coincidence, another interesting fact to support this was that the death
tolls tended to rise dramatically between the months December and
January. There was no significant change in food supplies, no outbreaks
of disease, no significant temperature drops. Nothing out of the
ordinary.
Frankl testifies the men simply died because they had hoped to be home by Christmas.
