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> In lieu of meaning, I mostly adopted the attitude of Alan Watts. Existence, he says, is fundamentally playful. It's less like a journey, and more like a piece
by disadvantage 3y ago
> In lieu of meaning, I mostly adopted the attitude of Alan Watts. Existence, he says, is fundamentally playful. It's less like a journey, and more like a piece of music or a dance. And the point of dancing isn't to arrive at a particular spot on the floor; the point of dancing is simply to dance. Vonnegut expresses a similar sentiment when he says, "We are here on Earth to fart around."
Ikigai[0] is worth exploring if you find yourself questioning the grand meaning of things:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
> The Oxford English Dictionary defines ikigai as "a motivating force; something or someone that gives a person a sense of purpose or a reason for living". More generally it may refer to something that brings pleasure or fulfilment.[1]
> The term compounds two Japanese words: iki (生き, meaning 'life; alive') and kai (甲斐, meaning '(an) effect; (a) result; (a) fruit; (a) worth; (a) use; (a) benefit; (no, little) avail') (sequentially voiced as gai), to arrive at 'a reason for living [being alive]; a meaning for [to] life; what [something that] makes life worth living; a 'raison d'être'.
Personally though I've found the pursuit of this philosophy very hard to integrate into life. It's one of life's hard problems. It means somehow intersecting 'play' with 'work', but as many people say: 'work is something people don't do voluntarily'. Hence its name: 'work', we don't naturally want to do it. But if you can make work as a form of play, you already are living in Ikigai.
- qsantos 3y agoThere is nothing special about 生きがい (ikigai). It's just Japanese for “reason for living”. There is a wider phenomenon where people attribute deep meaning to mundane Japanese words, such as 改善 (kaizen, improvement), 引きこもり (hikikomori, recluse), or even 看板 (kanban, board). This sounds like a case of exoticism.
- naasking 3y ago> It means somehow intersecting 'play' with 'work', but as many people say: 'work is something people don't do voluntarily'. I don't think that's true. Lots of work can be fun and satisfying as well. I think the distinction between work and play is more about purpose. Work has a purpose, a specific goal that we're working towards, and play does not.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoI don’t think making work a form of play is feasible (perhaps easy is a better word) for most people, simply because of the nature of their job. Without some creative and exploratory aspect, it’s just menial, boring, devoid of any stimulation. I am lucky enough that my work is such, but I got extremely lucky and basically made it my reality.
- speak_plainly 3y agoI think the way to look at it perhaps is that there is an element of challenge in play and an opportunity to win. So a job can be boring and menial but you have the opportunity to be the best in the world at what you're doing and you can treat every day as a challenge and opportunity at excellence, and in turn any job can be fun. You could easily look at chess as menial, boring, and devoid of any stimulation but it's possible to find fun in that. Everyone should stop taking everything so seriously and challenge themselves to be the best.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoI believe that I am the kind of person who can find something interesting in [nearly] everything, chess is interesting in that it is [functionally] infinitely and thus can be infinitely creative. This creativity doesn't exist in Sisyphean tasks. It's one thing to say one must imagine Sisyphus was happy, and another to be Sisyphus, and be happy, or rather, to be content.
- lisper 3y ago> We are here on Earth to fart around. Except that we're not. We are here on earth to make copies of our DNA. There are some ancillary effects of this (like sex and eating and the internet) but it's not like life doesn't have a purpose at all. It's just not a particularly hifallutin' one.
- fatfingerd 3y agoYou won't fill the role of farting around for much more than a day, a month or a century without taking certain respective steps.
- unyttigfjelltol 3y agoOr is there a better abstraction? We're here because intelligence is good, an organizational force. We're here to do that as approximately as we can.
- lisper 3y agoOh how I wish that were true, but unfortunately at the end of the day Darwin is running the show. Intelligence exists not because it's "good" but because genes that build brains that can solve problems reproduce better than genes that don't.
- maxbond 3y ago> Oh how I wish that were true, but unfortunately at the end of the day Darwin is running the show. This is just essentialism. We can draw that line at any arbitrary point. I can say Darwin isn't running the show, Einstein is. You can try to point out the ways biology effects our lives and argue that it should hold a more privileged position, and I can wave it away and insist you're being sentimental. "I wish that were true, but we're just rocks that happen to think and reproduce, nothing more." And just as credibly, I can say that things are at the level of human abstraction and that life is about farting around. I can point out how profoundly conceptions at this level effect our lives, and argue that it should hold a privileged position. You're free to set your standard and the arbitrary point you prefer, but that doesn't devalue anyone else's decision. It's just a philosophy that doesn't resonate with you because you have a different perspective, that might make it less useful to you but it isn't really a mark against it. I don't eat steak and have no desire to, but I don't argue when people say that steak is delicious.
- HKH2 3y ago> But if you can make work as a form of play, you already are living in Ikigai. Work sets you free, right?