Another way of looking at what meaning is all about is simply through one word: why? Why are you doing this? Why is this the thing? Why is what’s going on going on? why? This is a question that can really answer what is the meaning of what I’m doing.
This is something that can work from the big life picture overall: why am I pursuing this path in life? All the way down to just my actions today: why am I doing this specific thing today? So if you are working on, let’s say you’re doing some boring job you don’t care about, but you’re just paying the bills.
OK, so you are doing this, why? Why are you doing this boring thing, working for somebody else, you don’t care about it, but the why is that you are paying the bills.
You are supporting yourself, maybe supporting your family, supporting what you want to do in life.
So you are doing this thing that you don’t like, why? In order to connect with the bigger thing that you do believe in. […]
As long as you believe in those things that that money is buying for you, you believe in your life, your family, your dreams of what you want to do, how you want to live, even just simple survival to have simple time with your family, and your job is helping to pay for that, so there’s a meaning there.
There’s a meaning for that suffering if you believe that you are going to get something that you need out of it.
That’s the idea of meaning.
It’s one way of looking at the idea of meaning.
And if you did not have that, if you are suffering without a sense of the meaning of why, then it must be pretty empty.
It’s got to be pretty hard to keep that going if you’re just working this terrible job when you don’t feel that you’re getting anything out of it at all.
It’s like working that terrible job without getting paid, or without even thinking about the fact that oh, you’re doing this because you’re going to get paid, and you need that.
And it seems like it’s easy to fall into this sort of routine of forgetting why, forgetting why you’re doing things, because we just fall into a habit, and you’re just passing the time automatically, going through life on autopilot, and just doing the things because that’s what you do, when it’s easy to forget about the purpose for why we’re doing it.
So this simple example of suffering through a job in order to get money to live the life that we want: that’s a simple example of finding the why for what you are doing.
But imagine you could take this and apply it to anything in life.
Anything that you’re doing, it needs to have some kind of why to it.
Now if it’s simply enjoying the moment, and if it’s intrinsically rewarding, maybe that’s the best why of all.
To do something for its own sake is maybe the best situation to be in.
And if we can find work to do that we intrinsically love, people to be with that we intrinsically love, everything, we can simply live our lives for the living of life itself, and that is- I don’t see anything wrong with that.
That sounds great.
That sounds great, to be able to simply live life for its own sake, and life generates and provides its own meaning, and we don’t need anything else.
And so if that’s a meaningful life, then I don’t think we necessarily need to have anything more than that.
But it seems that, as simple as that is, there’s so many things that are cutting ourselves off from that.
It’s simple to say that well, we simply can live a life that we enjoy for its own sake and that we believe in for its own sake, but how do we get there? And I guess that’s where the complications come in.
The complexity of being simple.
But it seems like when it comes to our lives, that we’re not always going to be enjoying things.
I mean, clearly life is not going to be this idyllic picnic in the park.
There’s always going to be suffering in life.
And it’s the harder the suffering, the deeper the pain, the more we need to know why, in order to make it meaningful, to make it something that we can bear, that we can endure, and maybe even gladly take on, if we believe that were connected to some that is meaningful, there is a why for what we’re going through, because it’s one step of something bigger.
So whatever it takes, on whatever scale of life, we can always ask ourselves why.
And I believe somewhere there are answers that we can find for why we do anything.
And in fact, if we don’t have any at all, perhaps we can start doing something else.
Because it seems like everything can have a meaning to it, either that we find or we create.
And it seems like it begins by asking ourselves why.
Why am I doing this right now?
#askwhy #why #meaningful