When it comes to meaningful life, finding meaning in life, one of the themes that keeps coming back is this idea of connecting to something bigger, plugging into something that is bigger than ourselves and our everyday lives.
And so this could be, of course, family, community, some sense of humanity, being plugged into some kind of a cause or a mission.
Something that transcends ourselves, that takes us out of a focus on our personal lives, our individual lives, and shifts our attention and focus onto something that is bigger, something that is beyond our own life.
And it seems like this has an effect of maybe you could even say making us feel immortal, making us feel like we’re past the limits of our own lives which will inevitably end, because we feel this connection with the bigger thing.
So we all find different ways to do this, and some combination of them. […]
And in my case, I find one thing that I tend to is that, because I love history, and I always found it endlessly fascinating, and so it always seemed like, no matter what happens in my own life, as long as I can just be a witness to history, just observe it as it’s happening, and just the curiosity to know how history will unfold in the upcoming years: that in itself is reason enough for me to enjoy being alive, because it’s just so interesting.
After looking at all the history that’s led up to this point in time, where will things go next?
It’s like watching this unfolding story, or really a complex of endless stories all mixed together, that is to me alone enough to just, if I was just to watch the world, watch the world unfold, even if nothing’s happening in my life… […]
Obviously, I want more from my life than simply being a spectator.
But I do find I have this tendency. […]
Whenever the news is particularly significant, it really can can pull me in.
The news is like a very, very zoomed-in picture of history, where you only get these very surface events, and you never really get deep into the story. […]
But when more significant events are happening, then the news is something that really can pull me in.
It happened when Covid first broke out.
I was shocked by the news of the sudden worldwide lockdowns, and then so I was just plugged in.
Like wow, what’s going to happen?
And so much of my focus was on it.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is now really the most shocking news story that I’ve experienced since that time.
And so it puts me in this state of really being plugged into the news.
And you can see I have my Kyiv cameras there on the TV.
And this feeling like wow, history is unfolding.
I’m seeing an historical event that’s really changing right now.
The state of history is really taking a new step into a new chapter.
And so it renews that sense that I can plug myself into the sense of unfolding history.
I can plug myself into this bigger thing.
So I can feel this effect of how I want to get plugged into it, but then on the other hand, it also has very strong diminishing returns and limitations. […]
There’s only so much that it can do.
Because in the end, if I’m only going to be a spectator, it’s not going to be something that I can be completely absorbed into. […]
There’s nothing to say that I couldn’t somehow be a participant in the history.
And maybe that’s something that we are called to do in some way, or some of us are called to do.
If I were to go down that hole even further, I could perhaps put even more of my energy and focus into it.
But, although I can say that’s possible, I don’t feel like that is something that really works.
Not for everybody.
Not in most situations.
Because we can’t make the focus of our lives something external to ourselves.
We have to work with our own lives, and work with the area that we have control over.
We can’t be focused too much on being spectators.
Otherwise, because if we do, there’s simply not enough that we can do.
Even if we can have some kind of peripheral effect on some kind of external event, we can’t make that our focus, because we’re just stuck in this passive position, of just watching and hoping one way or the other.
We can take steps to influence things, but what we ultimately have control over is ourselves.
So anyway, all of this is to say that I’ve experienced this sense of this pull to be drawn into the world of news, to the news hole of just obsessively following all these world events, but at the same time reminded that it’s ultimately only my own life that I can control.
And ultimately, the meaning of my life cannot be found in some kind of external broader event, at least not directly for me.
But I’d be curious to hear what you think.
I think there is a case to be made, I think, for many people, possibly, this is a way to find meaning.
That we can be fully dedicated to a cause, or some kind of world event.
So I’d be curious to see what you think about this idea of being absorbed into the news, absorbed into history.
#newshole #history #worldevents