Tag: mindfulness

What does it mean to live meaningfully? Should you pursue happiness or meaning?

What does it mean to live meaningfully?

Take note of your achievements. It can be anything. A successfully deep relationship, a benchmark in the gym or other areas of fitness, learning an instrument, winning a competition, writing a story or a book, or doing anything that you might categorize as worthwhile for that matter. What do all of these things have in common? Toil. perhaps the greatest philosophical misconception is that a life of toil is a life of misery, but this could not be further from the truth. I am not one to stamp the label of objectivity onto virtually anything but, on this matter, I am confident in my stamp of objectivity. There is nothing that you, or anyone else, has ever done that was worth doing that did not require toil, sacrifice, suffering or moments of deep unhappiness. This truth is one that does not need to be reiterated. Everyone knows this!! Even when you read this, you might go “Duh, this is pseudo-profound bullshit”, and maybe it is pseudo-profound bullshit, but this is my blog, so suck it up! I think people conflate pointless toil with toil. Yes, a life of pointless toil is meaningless. 9-5 every day so that “the man” can extort more people for money is miserable and this gives toil a bad rep.

The key to living a meaningful life is to carefully select your toil so that your efforts are not in vain. So, here is the rule: Choose the highest good you can think of and toil in pursuit of it until it kills you. Engage in a battle for something worth fighting for. Literally, or figuratively, it really doesn’t matter, but that is what maximizing the meaning in life looks like. Those are the things that are worth doing. The things you know to be good, the things you know you should be doing, but aren’t because the toil is a terribly heavy burden.

Should you pursue happiness or meaning?

The very question is nonsensical. If you deconstruct what most people mean when they say, “My goal in life is to be happy”, you’ll find that they either don’t really know what they mean when they say “happy”, or they’re description of happiness is actually meaning. If by happiness you mean relaxing on the beach with a drink in your hand, then you’re terribly misguided and are unable to identify what genuinely fulfills you. If by happiness, you mean fulfillment, then when you run from struggle, you are running from the happiness that you seek. “What you want most will be found where you least want to look” (a person, probably).

What of the stoic sage? What of the man who understands these truths and rightfully points out that you can engage with life meaningfully while also mitigating negative emotion maximally. It’s true, Rosa parks, MLK, Martin Luther (German Version), Ralph Nader, the founding fathers, could have just as well have been stoics while engaging in a battle for what they believed to be the highest good. Though, I doubt that to be the case, it does take a remarkable amount of disregard for others’ opinions, failure, and their own negative emotion to fight as they did. All stoic qualities.

This is where I will lose most stoics, and perhaps most people. It is good to train yourself away from senseless anger and whining. It is good to have gratitude. In fact, it is meaningful. It is difficult to do these things and will require sacrifice and toil to do them. However, I posit that there IS a limit to the nobility of this pursuit. The depth of your condition is equivalent to the depth of your experience. I will not shun grief. It serves me well to welcome suffering. To feel what others feel. To cry when it isn’t necessary, to take on the burden of existence in its fullest capacity. It increases the depth and breadth of my experience and thus the robustness of my condition. I welcome all there is to feel, not because I enjoy the terrible, but because I know it to be a part of existence. Really, it’s an accumulation of what there is to be felt. I want to be a collector of pieces that come together to paint the condition of sentience. The stoic sage wholly forsakes negative emotion as if it is a defect in our programming but that is half of the truth. Forsake senseless rage, anxiety and bitterness, yes. But negative emotion is vital to the comprehension of existence. It is for this reason that the stoic sage is misguided. Why the stoic sage, delighted and joyful, cannot understand the depth of meaning in what it is to exist. Stoicism should be a superficial pursuit alone. To rid you of your childish emotions and encourage maturity in times of turmoil. Any deeper eradication of emotion is a mistake. It is a loss of knowledge. It prohibits you from painting and understanding the full picture of existence.

What is the value of Stoicism? Is life more meaningful when you’re happy?

What is the value of stoicism?

I should preface this by saying that there is value in Stoicism. Not the hottest take, but it’s worth saying, given the context of this post. Negative visualization, the trichotomy of control, psychological fatalism, the internalization of goals are all of great utility to the individual. What I’m attempting to ascertain is where the utility ends. It is useful to not get angry at others stupidity, say, in traffic. It’s useful to recognize the finitude of all things so as to increase your gratitude for them. It is useful to understand that things are what they are, and to greatly concern yourself with something that is, is wasted effort and tranquility. It is useful to alter your goals so that you are striving only for what you know you can control.

The aim of the stoic sage is to achieve maximum inner tranquility. Much like a Buddhist monk, the stoic sage will be someone unaffected by the outside world. Content in all they have, infinitely grateful and minimally emotionally influenced by tragedy. If such a person could exist, they would be joyful and delighted irrespective of their circumstances. That is the aim of stoicism.

Is life more meaningful when you are happy?

Think of a time where you’ve been purely happy. Chances are, you’ve never experienced pure bliss and pure delight. How could you? Experiences are much more nuanced than that. Even at your own wedding, there will be sweetness and bitterness, happiness and sadness, and probably everything in between. So, you might be asking, what then is “pure happiness”? It is a perversion of the experience of man, an augmentation of the neurochemistry of your brain. It is drugs.

I have regretfully done many drugs, and most experiences can be rather nuanced in the emotions you feel. However, some are what I would describe as “pure happiness”. MDMA is one of these drugs. I must be clear. I do not refer to happiness in the sense that a man with a wife and kids refers to happiness. What he is referring to is meaning. He is not happy all of the time and so when he says that they make him the happiest he’s ever been, he is saying that his life is the most meaningful that it has ever been. I am talking about chemical happiness. pure joy, pure delight. The lack of negative emotion. This state, to the stoic sage, is the optimal state, though they would certainly advise against achieving it through chemical means.

I bring up drugs because it reveals a truth. I often find that, to know the truth/value of a statement, philosophy or assertion, one imagines it in its most extreme from. For example, if I assert that sacrificing for others is invariably noble, you might investigate that by imagining I give my life so that a murderer might be spared. That certainly calls the veracity of my claim into question. If a stoic says that pursuing happiness and the avoidance of negative emotion is the key to living a good life, I’m compelled to think back on a time where I have been a stoic sage. Unbothered by my circumstances, blissful and delighted. Obviously, being strung out on MDMA is different than training your mind to be happy irrespective of its circumstance, but I digress. I bring it up because the truth that it reveals is that happiness IS categorically different than meaning. It is for this reason that I might suggest that life isn’t more meaningful when you are happy, rather you are happier when life is meaningful, but what does it mean to live life meaningfully?