A Few Thoughts on The Meaning of Life.
The will to power.
You want power because you feel powerless. To get what you want, you need power. If your desire is small then the amount of power you need is likewise small. At a minimum, most people want power over themselves, so they dont feel like someone else is always controlling them.
Power is the means to an end. It is not the goal. However getting and holding power often becomes your dominant focus in life. Your actual goal becomes forgotten or de-prioritized.
The will to pleasure.
You seek to avoid pain and gain pleasure. Your choices are made along the generalized calculation; What will give me a good outcome for the lest amount of discomfort? This is more about the goal and less about the means. It is not a quest to always, at all costs, avoid pain and gain immediate gratification. Some hardship may be acceptable to gain the thing you want.
The problem here is that most people are bad at knowing what is good for them. They will make most choices based on short sighted calculations of pleasure and pain.
These two factors are important to keep in mind, but they are not at the core of the big questions.
Why am I here? What is the point of life?
The meaning of life may be found in religion or philosophy. You may have learned it without even knowing it. What you should do as a child, as a teen, as an adult, will be taught to you in some way or other. Society will offer you a pattern of how you should live your life. In the past this was often very dogmatic and heavily structured. What you must do to be a good man or woman was spelled out and drilled into you from a young age. Today, not so much.
There comes a time in everyone's life when they question the given meaning of life. Why accept what you have been taught? This is the realm of constructing meaning for your life, yourself.
The will to meaning.
What is important to you? How should you live life? These are choices they are not dictated by outside agencies. Although many things in the world will try to influence what you think and believe. They will try to convince you that they provide the answers, that their answers are true and unavoidable.
Many people feel the need for meaning in life. They sometimes go in search of it. But very few know they can construct meaning for themselves. It is not like building a complicated theory of everything. It is more like answering a simple question; Do you find what you do in life worthwhile?
Some lament the long hours we must work to survive. They want free time for other activities. Others fear free time, because it is filled with boardom, time they must kill. They enjoy being at work, even if they complain about it. They feel a seance of accomplishment, because the work is important to them or because it is a worthwhile step to get the thing they really want.
As Nietzche once said “He who has a why to live, can bear almost any how he lives.”
How do prisoners survive in horrible situations? Will power. If you have a reason to keep going, you can. But if you find life pointless, if you see no possible improvement, then you are doomed. Not doomed to die, but doomed to drift. You will forever be seeking one distraction, a thing to focus your interest on, so you dont have to face the meaningless life you live.
Enter the internet and its seemingly endless volumes of distraction. Maybe you can find the meaning of life on line. More likely you will just waist huge amounts of time.
“What man needs is not peace and ease. He needs struggle for a worthwhile goal. Only then will he feel accomplishment. The satisfaction of knowing that, succeed or fail, he was part of a noble activity.” is also a thing Nietzche said.
You are responsible for what you do.
But I had no choice. The circumstances left me with no options. I was forced into this situation.
There is always a choice, even if it sometimes is very unpleasant. You may avoid the “right” choice because it seems to carry too much pain and not enough pleasure. You may avoid it because the chance of success is very low and the current unhealthy situation is manageable. You may feel there is no choice because you simply fail to see it. But ultimately you do have a choice.
You are also responsible for your attitude.
Lets be clear, emotions and attitudes are not the same thing. An emotion is a sudden response to stimulation. It is a short term feeling that comes upon you. Think of it like a spark. You can deal with the emotion, fan the flames or snuff it out. You are in control of how you react to your emotions. An attitude is a long term emotional state of being. One that you have even more control over.
A bad event will make you feel a certain way. This is hard to avoid, and may be unhealthy to avoid. But it is up to you how this emotion affects the rest of your day. It may seem like you have no choice, a negative emotion will cause a negative attitude, and ruin the rest of your day. But this is not a law of nature. Environment influences attitude, it does not dictate it. You can chose to maintain a calm and pleasant attitude even during stressful emotional situations.
Conclusions.
People want to avoid pain and gain pleasure, but they are willing to accept pain if the activity or the end result is of value to them. People want power because they fear being in situations where they have no choices. Mostly they think about power over people and situations, but it is power over themselves that will be of more benefit to living a good life. Power over your own attitude.
When people are taught the meaning of life, they may be happy and productive if they never question it. Acting within the confines of religious or social expectations is not necessarily a bad way to live. But for many people today, the offered patterns, the old answers to the big question, are not acceptable. Life has no clear meaning.
So they must go out and find one. They must construct a meaning for their lives.
