It is a fact as far as I am concerned, I experienced it.
People have hallucinations, but it is not fact. You believe it is fact, and that works for you, but no proof that it happened in reality. A spirit has no body( so I am told, they are not material).Hence it is in a person’s mind. A hallucination seems real to the person having it and if they choose to believe it then I have no quarrel with that. Just don’t accept it as fact. It seems to make your life better for you so dream on.
My life has great meaning to me. When you are young it sometimes seems like a lot of work about nothing but as you get older you get wiser.
You get to see the fruits of a life well spent. To see your kids grow up and a whole life of interesting adventures that create a personal storybook. You get to experience great love and other strong emotions. You have to take some hard losses and they make you stronger.
If you have a belief in a higher power you see that everything works out just as it was meant to. You stop fighting and accept life on life’s terms. You rid yourself of hatred and begin to love your enemies and it frees you. You fear less and love more. You laugh instead of cry.
If you have a heavy cross to carry, you carry it with dignity. You never give up because this life is too precious. There is so much beauty in the everyday you hope for a few more. Everywhere you look you see the beauty and not the ugliness. The ugliness is there but it is a waste of time to focus on it to long.
All of this makes me grateful to have been given the chance at life.
My life means something to me and I think it means something to people that have known me on this earth. I am just a thread in the larger tapestry. Without me there would be a hole or a gap. I have a purpose to serve although I may never understand it.
I don’t know if this is what you were looking for? I have seen this thread for a while and although I know the meaning of my life it is a hard thing to explain in words. I don’t think I even scratched the surface but words seem insufficient to explain what my life means to me.
I see people fighting over whether their life has meaning. Mine is not debatable. my life has had great meaning to me.
Is there any meaning to life? or is it really just nothing?
coito ergo sum
I understand that’s the motto on Wilt Chamberlain’s family crest…
How depressing. If your life is a mess - not enough money, too much illness, whatever, you are supposed to think somehow you deserved this? Even worse, if you are born into a rich family and have a life of ease, you are supposed to think you deserved that too?
I figure we get dealt our hands randomly, and all we can do is play what we have. They guy who gets dealt the 2,4,6 8 and 10 of random suits is not going to win the pot, but he is no worse a person than the guy who gets dealt four aces. You are saying that the deck is stacked - I wouldn’t stay in a game like that.
There’s no apparent meaning to life, and it sucks.
That’s the answer that no-one ever gives, but it’s the true one, IMO, and I don’t like to sugarcoat things.
As for stuff like you get to choose what meaning your life has, I think this is using the word “meaning” in a different way from how it’s really intended in the phrase “meaning of life”. It’s pretty obvious that individuals can decide which objectives to attempt to fulfil in their lifetime (though we don’t get to choose which ones are achievable).
But the phrase “meaning of life” is, to me, really asking: is there a grand, profound reason for us all being here, indeed, for the whole universe being here? To which the answer is: none that we know of.
Oh, and it sucks, IMO, because maybe a point to it all would be some way out of existential angst. As it is, the scenario of “human born into 20th century earth” is a pretty limited one…and then you die.
This thread is full of people saying just that.
I think it’s the “…and it sucks” part he thinks he hasn’t seen enough of.
For me, it’s just obvious - if there’s no meaning to life, how could the meaning of life have meaning? It doesn’t. Either we decay or we have a spiritual existence or another physical one after death. Whatever it is, it doesn’t change for me that *this *lifetime is marking time. The only meaning of this life is to give it meaning, I guess.
It’s not an easy thing to articulate, but I don’t think it’s sugar coating anything.
What sucks - the fact that there is no meaning to life, or life itself?
The first doesn’t bother me - I’d rather be a free actor in a play with no meaning than a puppet for some higher power. As for the second, my life has been pretty good, so for me it doesn’t suck, though for some people it does.
I don’t see it as either-or. A hypothetical reason need not involve us being obligated to do anything.
And I’m just speaking in the abstract; I’m an atheist, and I don’t think I would find the scenario of there being a god any better than the current, apparently meaningless one.
Yes, some people’s lives suck, and most people’s lives have many unpleasant aspects, but that wasn’t what I was getting at. I meant more than the big picture sucks; existential angst etc.
For example, I don’t like the fact that life is so short. And I think the arguments people use to try to find comfort (e.g. We treasure life because it’s so short. e.g. Who wants to live forever?), aren’t very good.
I’ve never heard it called a ‘crest’ before.
“Welcome to Jamaica, mon. Have a nice day!”
Female, Age 27
I’m an existentialist, so I’m pretty much on board with most of what has been stated with regard to the personal construction of meaning.
My life philosophy has been shaped extensively by my own personal experiences, my interest in social psychology and behaviorism, and the ideas of the Buddha, Friedrich Nietzsche and Viktor Frankl. In my life, I have suffered a lot. A great deal of my own perspective on the idea of personal meaning stems from my attempt to create meaning out of my own suffering. I recognize that not everyone’s personal experience is so defined by pain, but for whatever reason, that is the lens through which I see the world. There are those in the world who have suffered more greatly than I, and there are those who have been even more obsessed with the question of suffering than I. I take my cue from them.
This is pretty much it, in a nutshell. Then neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl as I see it was the embodiment of this concept.
What he found: It all boils down to the creation of meaning–the particular meaning doesn’t matter, all that matters is that some meaning is being assigned to the suffering. For him, this meaning was to remember and share what he had learned with the world at large.
This is an eminently quotable man, but here is one of my favorites:
*For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. *
For Frankl, and for me, the purpose of life is to become, as Nietzsche put it, ‘‘worthy of one’s suffering.’’ For whatever reason, we suffer. It’s not fair, it’s arbitrary and not at all equal in distribution, there is no intrinsic higher meaning to it, but it is what it is. We can either lay down and die or we can find meaning and purpose in it, rise up to meet it, embrace it, accept it, dance with it, become an expert on it, and help others deal with it when it happens to them.
I don’t think the evidence you presented indicates that we don’t make choices. It only indicates that we make choices before we are consciously aware of them.
There’s an interesting book entitled Moral Minds, written by Marc Hauser. It draws on neurospychology, linguistics, social psychology and philosophy to make the argument that moral orientation is an unconscious physical mechanism. As far as we can tell from neuropsychological research, moral decisions follow this course:
- A judgment is made.
- Emotion is experienced.
- The emotion is rationalized with logic.
This suggests that what we feel is right and wrong is more or less out of our hands. There is something within us that decides right from wrong before we even experience an emotion about it. And the logic that attempts to explain the ‘‘something within’’ is just a way to make us think our position is reasonable.
I’ll get back to this in a minute.
I agree we are all generally self-centered, stubborn little cynic that I am, but I am not convinced that the former statement necessarily follows from the latter. For me, life is about transcending the ‘‘seek pleasure, avoid pain’’ delusion. For me, the root of suffering is in buying into this notion that this is our only function as humans. It is when I am caught up in this cycle of desire and aversion that I am most likely to suffer miserably. I believe pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice. The notion that we ought to seek pleasure and avoid pain is one of the greatest lies I have had to overcome in my own search for life’s meaning. There are circumstances where pain is inevitable and pleasure is impossible. Meaning is found there. When you can experience pain and still feel at peace, that is real happiness, a kind of happiness that transcends the pleasure principle.
This. I used to be a devout Christian. When I was first exposed to Nietzsche, I was terrified at the implications of a world without moral absolutes. Freedom is scary – at first. Soon I began to realize I was living in a world of my own creation, within a spectrum of infinite possible meanings, and if I didn’t like one way of looking at something, I could always reject it for a paradigm that better fit my practical needs. There is nothing in the world to compare to that kind of freedom.
I’m always curious to see what stage people are in. I’m sure that all kinds of people of many races, ages and of both sexes are invariably at any stage of the existence question.
I find that people tend to cycle through the stages and end up in existentialism, because it gives them some kind of closure.
But I find the existentialist approach much too religious. It’s kind of like a solution assigned to a problem that cannot be answered.
You didn’t find freedom. you just accepted like many other people that there isn’t anything set in stone and doing anything is solely based on your decisions.
Your realization doesn’t make you free. You always were this way. You just happened to think about it. If that gives you some kind of meaning or purpose you are being religious.
I also disagree with the point that nothing compares to the freedom of knowledge. I’m sure this is nirvana and moksha and all that wonderful stuff.
But truth be told, if you have power you are more free than anyone. You are not subject to rules or indications other than that of your physical environment and the constraints of mortality.
Someday maybe people will stop settling for the ambiguity these religio-secular mutations of common thinking have to offer. It’s no different than anything else with a central dogma. Might as well go back to Christianity. At least their dogma is clear cut despite being as ridiculous and irresolute as existentialism.
I think I’m done trying to tackle this subject. All signs point to one thing. Meaning like, doesn’t exists man. It’s a made up idea that you can adhere to like you can adhere to anything.
If you find the need to have meaning, don’t be so shocked when you see people that need to adhere to religion or God. They’re just like you, just picked something else. And your prejudiced for thinking your irrationality is better than theirs.
And that’s not freedom?
Well, fuck me, then, I guess I’m religious. I don’t have any particular hangups about admitting I’m an irrational human being just like every other irrational human being out there. As discussed extensively in Descartes’ Error, the human brain needs emotion in order to function properly. The part of us that is not rational is not a weakness, it is a necessity.
I was being a bit hyperbolic in an attempt to underscore the importance that moment had in my life. It was pretty magical.
So what you’re saying is, if someone is ignorant, and then is relieved of his/her ignorance, any strong feelings about this sudden bit of insight should be categorized as religious? And if that bit of knowledge merits use as a guiding principle, that too is religious? Seems like you’re defining religion a little broadly to me.
But power is totally subjective. That’s the point Frankl was trying to make. We always have some degree of power, even if it’s just that we choose how we will behave in a given circumstance.
Do you really think it’s possible to live life without meaning? It’s human nature to assign meaning to life. Even the nihilists are creating some meaning by rejecting meaning. Argue over the terminology all you want; it’s just semantics.
Life is about experience and what we make of it. If you peruse this message board you will find thousands of examples of people having experiences and trying to derive meaning from those experiences. It’s not something you can get away from, ever.
Yes, exactly. That is exactly the point. But eventually you have to start building something concrete to replace what you tore down. I don’t think many existentialists would disagree with me there.
I never said anything about judging people who believe in God. It worked for me until it didn’t, that’s all. I generally have a pretty positive view of religion.
I get the feeling this is little more than an intellectual exercise for you. This is not the case for me. I’m talking about the bleak fucking realities of life, kid. When you think your life could not possibly get worse, and then somehow, miraculously, it does, how do you find the strength to go on? These ‘‘religio-secular mutations of common thinking’’ you look down your nose upon are the reason I’m standing here today. It might behoove you to consider *the reason *they are so common.
Um, real happiness is pleasurable. Perhaps you somewhere got the idea I was only talking about physical pleasure? No, I’m classifying everything you get a positive reaction to as pleasure, and everything you react negatively to as pain. It appears you find the idea that you’ve transcended the ‘‘seek pleasure, avoid pain’’ ‘delusion’ pleasurable, for example.
Ah. I was interpreting pain/pleasure in the more hedonistic, reactionary sense. All I was meaning to say is that some of life’s situations downright suck, and some people feel that happiness is impossible in sucky situations. I have found that not to be the case. I definitely feel a difference between, ‘‘Oooh, I really want this to be happening!’’ and ‘‘Even though I’d rather not have this happen, I’m okay.’’ I suppose both are a kind of pleasure, but I really think of them as different states of mind. One is conditional on circumstance, the other isn’t.
Again begbert2 we’ve had debates in the past about whether every action we do is motivated by increasing happiness / decreasing unhappiness.
For the purpose of people reading this thread, I just want to say: not everyone believes that the brain works that way.
I think it’s a rather naive model given the sliding scale of both how conscious our actions are, and how much planning goes into an action and that’s before we go into the specifics of what motivates us.
For the purposes of this thread, I just want to say it’s easily as good an explanation for our behavior as anything else anybody has proposed here or elsewhere.
Of course, reasons aren’t necessarily meanings - or ultimate goals, assuming for a moment that that’s what the term ‘meaning’ means in this context. If we play a board game, there is an explicit ultimate goal, but players might devote themselves instead to confounding other players without the expectation that they themselves will win as a result because they’re pissed at the guy or because they just want to keep things interesting, or they might just screw around for the sheer entertainment of doing so. So explaining why humans act as they do as actually a pretty poor predictor of what life’s ‘meaning’ is, even if I am right about it.
If life is a game with an externally-imposed ultimate goal, then one of two conditions prevail: some religion is right, or nobody knows the ultimate goal. I’m betting on the pastafarians myself; what do they say the purpose of life is again?
If life doesn’t have an externally-imposed ultimate goal, then, well, that’s that. Guess we’d better all shoot ourselves in the head then! Though if you excuse me I’ll go off and have some fun instead, because that seems more fun, and you know me and pleasure.