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8. Find your purpose and live it. One benefit of religion may be that it gives people a sense of meaning and purpose. Without a magical deity to give you purpos
by shurcooL 12y ago
8. Find your purpose and live it. One benefit of religion may be that it gives people a sense of meaning and purpose. Without a magical deity to give you purpose, though, you'll have to find out for yourself what drives you. It may take a while to find it though, and you may have to dip your hands and mind into many fields. But once you find a path that strongly motivates you and fulfills you, take it. (Of course, you might not find one purpose but many.) Having a strong sense of meaning and purpose has a wide range of positive effects.41 The 'find a purpose' recommendation also offers an illustration of how methods may differ in importance for people. 'Find a purpose' is not always emphasized in happiness literature, but for my own brain chemistry I suspect that finding motivating purposes has made more difference in my life than anything else on this list.
I think that's the biggest factor of my happiness. I have a long-term open source project that I believe in and I work on it in all my spare time. Little by little, it's getting closer to one day being very useful in many ways.
- tabrischen 12y agoThat's exciting, very happy for you. Can you share more about this?
- shurcooL 12y agoThanks. :) It's an experimental software development tool, largely inspired by Bret Victor's talks. It's similar to projects like Light Table, Zed editor, but it's nowhere near as complete and focuses on a single programming language (Go). I worked on it full time for a year after finishing my master's degree, culminating in a first place winning demo submission to the LIVE 2013 contest [1]. By then, I ran out of money so I got a full time job and continue to work on Conception in my limited free time. By now, I'm working on a pure Go implementation of Conception [2], which is a lot more advanced in some ways, but is still needs a lot more work before it's actually usable and helpful to other people. Someday, when the time is right, I want to get back into it full time, because it really requires a lot of work. [1] http://liveprogramming.github.io/liveblog/2013/04/live-programming-contest-winners/ http://liveprogramming.github.io/liveblog/2013/04/live-progr... [2] https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go/commits/master https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go/commits/master