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Having a "meaning" that you have given to yourself, that you truly believe in, and that is used to guide your life as a "meaning" should is, I think the bedrock
by nxc18 10y ago
Having a "meaning" that you have given to yourself, that you truly believe in, and that is used to guide your life as a "meaning" should is, I think the bedrock of happiness, productivity and mental stability.
Certainly, in a world where everything needs to be questioned and nothing faithfully believed, it helps to have a meaningful central anchor on which to moor your self and your actions.
It is amazing to me that so many people go about their lives and couldn't reliably answer basic questions like, "why are you still doing this(life)?", "what is your purpose?", "how do you justify the value of your continued existence?" Alas, you can't ask those questions too often as they have a tendency to induce some dark thought patterns. However, having a well-constructed sense of meaning/purpose hardens you against those questions and also the many other problematic questions in life and it would do many well to answer them.
- projektir 10y agoIt's amazing to me that anyone could answer those questions: there's nothing basic about them and I have yet to see any kind of solid source of knowledge.
- clock_tower 10y agoThis will probably sound sophomoric, but I like Aristotle's answer to the question of purpose: that a living creature's purpose is to live the kind of life characteristic of its species, to the extent that it's able to. Whether or not there's more than that is a matter of philosophy and theology, but I think he does well enough proving that this is a bare minimum level of purpose for all living beings...
- projektir 10y agoThat seems to be an assigned purpose, where the will is attributed to some other process. If a creature starts talking about having purpose, that usually means the creature's own purpose, not purpose assigned to it by something else. I imagine nxc1 had the latter in mind, not the former.