1.
Life is fundamentally about meanings meaning meanings.
2.
To live meaningfully, one needs to cultivate virtuous cycles where one activity cultivates the next thing cultivates the next thing, which eventually cycles back on itself to enhance it.
Together, they form a dependency graph.
1. You go to work in X so that you gain satisfaction, happiness and money so that...
2. You can have a family.
3. You can have a "life".
4. You can have free time.
5. You can have hobbies.
You can expand Points 2,3,4,5 as much as you wish, hopefully until you can link it back to neighbors.
The more it loops onto itself, the more meaningful you will feel your life is. Of course, each thing requires a "profit" - an intrinsic value (eg. happiness, or anticipation, representing potential happiness) gained solely from that activity itself.
Of course, it depends on the amount of working memory you have and many other psychological factors, but the general principle is this.
An interesting case (and not necessarily exception) is the monolithic life. People who live, sleep and eat so that they can work so that they can live, sleep and eat. This is all well and fine if your work is meaningful or your food tastes great or you love sleeping. The moment you don't enjoy your work or you don't get paid enough, the whole cycle breaks down and one's life is thrown into chaos.
And that's when it helps for one to understand how it all works.
Living wisely is about having the foresight required to plan, build and align the future to create these virtuous cycles.
And all meanings that make us feel that life is meaningful are fundamentally tied to positive feelings.
Many people start off with good templates for these. And as much as I'd like to believe that the world is somewhat fair, that's almost as good as a head-start in life gets.
3.
I feel that my own life is somewhat working. In fact, instead of offering a supporting example, you'll see an exception to the rule. But I believe I can do much better.
Here's mine.
1. I work because I like my work and work environment. I also like some pay, which I invest for the future. Honestly I'd work without pay too, but the world runs on money and I need it.
2. I swim because I love the feeling of water enveloping me. It makes me feel loved. As I'm aware of the people (read bodies) around me, I'm aware of the kind of bodies and fitness standards that society generally likes. And my biological drives then persuade me to do it for that. Conscious me hates that but my biology loves it.
3. I run because I love the sound of wind whistling past my face and into my ears. It is a kind of connection to the prehistoric hunters that I originated from.
One regularity when attempting to see my life through the lens of meaning is that I do a thing because I like doing it. The side effect is almost always because the world requires this or that.
Which begs the question.
Where did meaning come from?
Like any evolutionary psychologist would answer, the reasons for all psychological things is that it facilitates the passing of one's genes to the next generation.
Putting that into context here, meaning is really a soft framework for the highly flexible human (in comparison to animals) to find their way around the world, while still serving the interests of gene propagation.
Certain schools of thought in Eastern philosophy don't think that way. They think life doesn't necessarily need to be meaningful (across time). What matters is the present. Feeling happy in the present. This is basically a call to return to our animal past, when we weren't able to cognitively understand the past and future.
I used to think this was really anti-human. But maybe in the end, a time we will all come to face, the now is really all that matters. And so, perhaps living a meaningful life is more important to the young than the old.
But as always, whatever you say about life, the opposite is often true too.
Does this make sense to you?
