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002—What is a Meaningful Life?

Thank you to my friend for listening to me reading my essay out loud to them to see if it’s okay.

Disclaimer: No research has been done to back up my claims and views in this essay. It’s based only on what I’ve happened to read/see and my own experiences. Take everything with a grain of salt. However, I do hope this essay will help you.

Note: A lot of what I’m discussing here, I learned from Jordan Peterson. Yeah. Him. If you know him, you probably either demonize him or put him on a pedestal. It seems that the people that are neither and just critically examine what he says without assuming that he has some kind of evil agenda or that he’s a savior sent by God are rare or are just not vocal on the internet. I don’t know if the two extremes are justified, but they certainly are understandable. Look him up and you’ll get it. I would ask you not to watch the videos that are titled to obviously get praise and views from the right and hate (and views) from the left (I dislike both sides) because of the way they frame him, and I like to think that the best of what he has to offer is truly in his lectures on Youtube. But it’s up to you. Either way, I hope you check out said lectures. I’ve only seen about half of his 2017 Maps of Meaning lectures, but they’ve helped me improve my life a lot. Honestly, you could probably just watch those lectures and ignore this blog entirely. But hey, if this gets you watching them, that’d good enough for me. I did try my best to add all I could though. So I hope that’s something that’ll help you.

You value certain things over others. And you have to. It’s what lets you move and act, and it’s what gives you, or would give you, a sense of purpose. You give importance to some things over others, believe this rather than that. So you have a hierarchy of values. And because you have that hierarchy of values, you can orient yourself towards a goal, and so you have some idea as to what you should do. And, well, your environment is there. You have reality around you, the physical environment, strangers, acquaintances, friends, the social climate, the culture that society is ensconced within, etc. And because you have that goal, you can decide how to navigate that reality.

If your value system were flat, that is to say you didn’t have one, ‘cause what’s valuable when nothing is above anything else in importance, there’d be no difference between going about your daily life and the truck about to hit you, as far as you can tell. So it’s really important that you get that right. Because if your value system is skewed, in disarray, or just has something bad or inadequate at the top of it, you’re going to be leading yourself to some very dark places. And it can lead you all the way to Hell. So that hierarchy of values is in itself meaningful. And it’s what makes things, actions, events, symbols, and thought meaningful.

So the problem now is what should we believe in? That’s hard. You can’t even answer that without first having an already present value system, because then what should or shouldn’t be believed in wouldn’t matter. Thankfully, living beings aren’t born blank slates. We value life as made evident by the very fact that we’re alive and act to keep it that way. It’s precursory to everything else. And we want to get the most out of it. So you could say that you want to believe in something that will let you navigate reality such that you get the most out of life.

And I think this is the same idea which religions operate upon. That’s what the idea of an afterlife or enlightenment is, as well as why there’s a good and a bad place. It’s the belief that you can do something with your life that will transcend death, and because of that, what you do with your life matters. Because death and suffering are the ultimate arguments against the existence of meaning, and they’re really strong arguments. Those two can destabilize your perception of reality and make the reality you thought you knew and was working fine just minutes ago seem suddenly made of chaos. How do you justify to yourself that your life is worth anything when it’s full of so much suffering and will eventually end in death? And it gets harder to do that the worse of a place you’re in. How do you get yourself to believe with all your being that you should strive to get somewhere better? That you should become better? It seems that you need to be able to believe in something more valuable than life.

The question of what a meaningful life is seems to be a question of purpose. What should you aim your life towards? To what end? Because whatever you believe in, that’s what you’re headed towards. Whatever set of things (values, virtues, etc.) you hold to be of the highest importance, that’s the thing that your life is oriented towards. So I think you should orient your life towards the most noble goal you can see yourself reaching. That seems to be what most belief systems do anyway. You don’t have to reach it immediately, of course. Part of reaching for that goal will be taking the necessary steps to better yourself over the course of the rest of your life.

What this is in its totality is a belief of what the Good is. What would the Good be? Hell if I know. No one can tell you what the Good is, and every belief system will have its own idea of what it is. And even then they can only tell you, at best, what the Good’s effect is or what following it will result in. And they can only give you a general estimation of what it will result in. It seems to be a self-evident thing, along with all other forms of perfection (like Beauty and Love). That’s not too important. What’s important is that we do know what good things are. And we can tell when we’re not doing good if we pay attention. We feel weaker. We cause unnecessary suffering. We lie to minimize the damage but damage our relationship in the long-term. Likewise, we can tell when we’re doing something What that seems to mean, at the very least, is that although you could come up with an infinite number of value systems placing different things at the top, some value systems are more suitable for guiding people to living properly.

And you might say something like you believe helping others to be a good thing but you don’t do it anyway, as a counterexample. Well, maybe you don’t really believe it. Maybe you just know it while not really having enough reason to follow through with it. Because to believe in something also means to be committed to it. This is something I learned from an audio recording of Alan Watts when he talks about acting and deciding needing to be simultaneous (though I don’t know if my interpretation of it is correct, so please correct me if you think it’s not; I also barely know anything about Buddhism so seriously, take this with a lot of salt). What I understood from it, perhaps as a derivation of part of what he said, is that there’s no difference between believing and acting on a belief. That’s what commitment is. Although you may not be physically applying the belief onto a concrete situation at the moment, if you are committed you are already oriented such that you are presently someone who will act on the belief whenever applicable. Commitment is believing that you should act a certain way.

Another possibility is that maybe you “believe” it, but maybe you value something else more. The possibility of embarrassment or disappointment seems to be something some people have a strong urgency to pay attention to. And it can get in the way of being productive. If that’s how it is for you, then perhaps you value the avoidance of the possibility of failure too much and put it way over the possibility of gaining something meaningful from trying. Completely understandable. And it’s certainly the right thing to value when the risk is far too much for the reward. But if the possibility of a failure that will do little to no lasting damage causes you to avoid trying altogether, then maybe you should reexamine your values.

In either case (feel free to point out more and I’ll try to address them) we come to what I believe is the hardest problem to overcome. I don’t think it’s too hard to know how to live properly. You can learn, and generally we can all approximate that some things are better for us than others. After that, it would be a matter of adjusting and improving yourself and what you know as you notice more and more about yourself. Then it will come with time. The hardest problem, I believe, is getting yourself to believe that you should live properly in the first place. And this is what I intend to discuss in my next essay.

That’s it for now. I hope this helps you guys.

(I had written this as a side note to something that I eventually deleted. But it’s relatively long for a side note so I didn’t wanna delete it and kept it here anyway)

This is something I learned in Metaphysics.

Why is it reasonable to believe that God exists? The line of reasoning goes that finite beings don’t possess self-sufficient reason for their existence. I think the easiest way to understand this is with the Law of Conservation of Energy and Mass. Finite beings come from already present matter. And so for all matter to even exist, it must be that an infinite being, which does possess self-sufficient reason for their existence (and yeah, I know, defies the Law of Conservation anyway…), made them exist. And that infinite being must be unique because it can’t be that there are two infinities as these two infinities would be the same thing. That infinite being would be God.

But this is only if we presuppose that reason is self-evident. Why should we? Well, you can’t answer that because you’d have to use reason. Reason is its own reason for being necessary. And who’s the perfection of all? God. God is reason. So why must it be that God exists? Because God. (Man, I hope I explained that correctly). So it’s possible, when not presupposing that reason is self-evident, that existence is absurd and has no meaning.

As far as I know, there’s no argument for ruling out the second possibility. I myself can only give an argument for why you’d want to believe in the first possibility rather than the second. And it’s that the second possibility is to believe that you might as well be dead. There’s nothing to gain from it, as gain is only gain in the context of the presupposition that there is meaning to existence. And, you know, we seem to believe that there is meaning to existence anyway, even if one don’t necessarily believe that God exists. Because if we truly believed, with body and mind, that there’s no such thing as meaning, then we’d just not move until we died because the perpetuation of life through action would have no meaning to us.

Second, why would God’s existence as our creator give us meaning? Well, for this, we go to the four causes. Particularly, Final Causality. Also, Efficient Causality. But to be quite honest, this is already taking more words than I initially thought. I am not explaining Efficient Causality as well. I don’t even want to explain the whole of Final Causality. In any case, I don’t believe I need to for the purpose of this discussion.

The important thing to know is that everything, because it exists (and exists because something caused it to exist), has a final cause, a purpose in a way. A useful analogy is that of creator and creation. A carpenter doesn’t make a chair without the purpose of having it to be sat on. Even if you were to create something to just stand there and be useless, that in itself is a purpose. That it was made to exist means that it is “heading toward” some kind of end. So while things can be “useless” in the conventional sense, they cannot be purposeless. It must be that everything has a final cause, because without a final cause, there would be no sufficient reason for a particular cause to result in a particular action. Without a final cause, everything would again be absurd and meaningless. And so with us being created by God, we must have a final cause that we are acting toward. What that is, no one knows. But, if reason is presupposed to be self-sufficient, our existence and actions do have purpose and meaning.

(This isn’t Theology, by the way. I’m not talking about any specific God of any specific religion.)

I really hope I explained all this correctly or at least well enough to be understood. I’m really not the best person to be learning about this from. The book we used for our class was Metaphysics by Coreth, I think. If you wanna learn more, you could use that.

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