What did Viktor Frankl mean by 'what is life asking of me'?

He meant that the useful question runs from life to you. Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps, and in Man's Search for Meaning he describes the shift the prisoners had to make. What they expected from life stopped mattering. What mattered was what life expected of them, a question each day and each hour put to them.

For Frankl, you answer with action: how you behave, and whether you take on the job of meeting the problem in front of you. The same book introduces logotherapy, his approach built on the conviction that people are moved more by meaning than by pleasure.

That comparison is my reading of Frankl, so weigh it as mine. Why me points backward, and in a crisis it rarely has an answer, so it tends to circle. What is this asking of me points at the next hour. It has answers you can act on, even small ones: make the call, eat something, tell one person the truth.

Frankl cites an idea of Nietzsche's more than once: a person who knows why they're living can endure almost any conditions. Asking what the moment wants from you is one way to find that why when the old ones have been knocked out.

Yes, without comparing the two. Frankl's circumstances were extreme, and the question doesn't depend on them. Pointed at a lost job, it might ask for the conversation you've been avoiding with your partner, or for a straight answer to your kids about money. Pointed at a bad scan, it might ask who you want with you at the next appointment.

What it doesn't ask is that you be grateful for the loss, or decide it happened for a reason. Finding something to do inside a hard thing is different from calling the hard thing good.

Sometimes the question turns dark, and what life seems to be asking is that you stop. If you're thinking about ending your life, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, US).

Related: What to say when you're in crisis and someone asks how you are