Origin essay
The ride to Sundance.
In 2023, I asked an Uber driver to tell me his life story. His answer became The Frankl Project.
Afghanistan
A life I did not expect to meet in an Uber
He grew up in Afghanistan, learned English from American movies, joined up with U.S. Special Forces, and spent a decade fighting in the mountains. He recalled standing with a friend overlooking a Utah mall. His friend said, “It’s okay, nobody knows what we did here.” A hell of a thing to hear from your Uber driver.
Many of his American and Afghan friends struggled with crippling guilt and depression. Some had died by suicide. He had been suicidal himself.
The sentence
“After that, I was alright.”
He said he had read Man’s Search for Meaning five times and was now “alright.” My response was: “Huh. I did the same thing.”
I had repeatedly imagined myself inside Frankl’s experience. The comparison did not make my pain imaginary. It changed the scale and meaning through which I carried it. Hearing another veteran describe the same book and the same repetition made a private experience look like a possible shared practice.
The wager
What if other people could learn the lens?
The Frankl Project begins with that question. Its proposition is not that every reader will have the same experience or that pain can be argued away. It is that Frankl’s way of seeing is learnable, repetition matters, and a community can help ideas survive contact with real life.
So the invitation is deliberately concrete: read or listen to the book five times. Do it with attention. Do it with other people. Report what changes. Bring the idea to someone else.