Meaningfulness.
Meaninglessness.
The meaning of meaning.
Wow, if I say this word enough times, it just stops meaning anything.
And yet this is part of the name of this channel.
It’s about somehow making life meaningful and living a meaningful life.
But what does that even mean? So this series is about that topic directly.
What does it mean to have a meaningful life, and how can we find this meaning? And maybe because this is the name of the channel, maybe everything should be about this, but really, I find for the most part it’s hard to approach this issue directly.
It’s so abstract.
And it seems like so much of what we do is sort of approaching it indirectly.
If we can stop the things that are blocking us from appreciating life and live our life in a way that really allows us to fully feel alive and appreciate life, then that is enough, I believe, to have this meaningful life, and that brings it out automatically.
So going into even looking at directly what does a meaningful life mean: that is getting a little bit more theoretical than is really ever necessary, I believe.
But there are those times when I wonder about this, and it still can be useful to go into it and really look at it directly.
What does this meaning- what’s it all about? What does this meaning mean? Hard for me to say this with a straight face, because it just almost seems laughably abstract.
But we can look for things that are meaningful for us through our daily life.
As we go through our day, we can find certain things that sort of trigger that feeling of meaningfulness, a feeling of satisfaction at some kind of level, beyond just feeling satisfied in the moment, but feeling like we are doing something that is right, that we are living our life in a way that is right and that feels good, that feels meaningful in that sort of fundamental way.
And there’s clues for that, I believe, all around us.
Each of us has those things that it brings out that feeling.
It’s so easy to pass our day just doing things that are required for the day, but then there are those moments where we feel like we’re connecting to something that’s deeper than that and living our lives in a way that is fundamentally connected to this bigger picture.
And maybe for some people it can feel that way all the time, or most the time, and that sounds wonderful.
And maybe for other people, maybe never have this feeling.
Certainly for me it’s been on and off, this feeling of being connected to something greater, and then the feeling that I’m living my life in a meaningful way.
But I believe that the clues are all around.
And even when I’ve been in the darkest states of feeling pointless, there are still those hints that come, hints of something that sort of suggests a better outlook, that suggests a more satisfying outlook on life.
And those hints are around for us to see.
But it seems like these are not things that are provided automatically to us.
If we simply follow the rules of the modern world and everyday normal life, it never really touches on the deepest levels of meaning.
You know, succeeding, proper social behaviour, professional success, social success: these things don’t touch the the deepest layer of meaning.
And so we can follow these rules, these procedures, to find success, but that by itself doesn’t address this need for a fundamental level of satisfaction, of feeling that our life has some kind of purpose.
It seems like that’s something that we have to find ourselves.
It’s not going to be provided by the society around us.
At least the society as I understand it.
Maybe for certain cultures and certain people’s interaction with their culture, they could feel that their culture provides that, and maybe that’s really the ideal situation, for a culture to provide that.
But I just haven’t found that myself, and I’d be curious to hear your experiences.
And in the end, we can look for ways to find meaning, and yet in the end, words once again fail, as they do so easily on this topic.
It’s so hard to put this in words.
And maybe even at the end of the day, there is no formulation of words that really answers this question.
So in the end it’s left with, as much as we can benefit from exploring this topic and trying to address meaning directly, it seems like at the end we simply have to live, and we can never fully explain or justify our lives in a nice package of words.
But we can only find that answer to a meaningful life by just starting and going ahead and living one.
#meaningfullife #meaningfulness #meaninglessness