What is the Meaning of Life?

This blog is not me ascribing so much as it is describing.  I'm looking around me at humanity and saying, "What do people say life is all about?  What meaning do people give their life?  Why do people get out of bed?"

Certainly I don't just write to describe, though.  I want this to be prescriptive, too.  May we be more intentional in our choices, in our actions, with our legacies.  Consider where you fit in and then where you'd like to see yourself.  What changes need to be made?  What are the baby steps to get there?

There are three sources of pleasure.

Only three things that give us joy in life.

I challenge you to add to this list.  And, yes, there is great room for overlap.

Experience--Life is about feeling deeply.  It's about seeing something new, going somewhere fresh, tasting a dish for the first time, feeling the caress of a lover in a new way or with a new lover, feeling an adrenaline rush.  This, to me, can also be about more cognitive things and not just your senses--it can be experiencing the wonder of deep, meaningful thought, creativity, self-expression, painting, singing, music, capturing beauty. There is also a profound emotional side to this source of pleasure.  Is there not a satisfaction is feeling righteous indignation?  Is there not a satisfaction sometimes in a "good cry"?  Absolutely!


What is the opposite of this source?  Pain.  So, part of a person's life who uses this source to find their life's meaning is to avoid pain.

What is the absence of this source like in person's life?  Desensitization.  Being cloyed.  Frigidity.  Anesthetization.

How can we maximize this source of joy and pleasure in our life?  Seek out activities that move us deeply.  Set aside time to experience new and old things.  Be in the moment.  Slow down.  Learn how to deal with distractions.  Just do it.  What's on your bucket list?  Do you even have a bucket list?  Stop what you're doing and make one!

Hope--The night before Christmas. The hour before seeing your love after an extended parting.  Packing for an exciting vacation.

Anticipation wells up into giddy splendor often. That's hope. What gets people through times of war, famine, death, poverty, suicidal thoughts? Hope. Without a future it is impossible to be thankful in any real sense and, therefore, it is impossible to be happy without hope. Hope keeps us alive when everything else is stripped away.

This source gets tied into our life purposes in many ways.  One of the greatest is in goal setting.  Goals are places we can anticipate being someday that fills us with hope.  Hope about becoming a more virtuous person, a more spiritual person, a person with a better lot in life.

Hope and love kiss when we spend our lives trying to promote a cause, a mission.  Saving the world, the whales, people's souls.  Making the world a better, more just, verdant and loving place.

What's the opposite of hope?  Dread. Fear.  Anxiety.  Angst.

What's its absence?  Apathy.  Powerlessness.  Being distracted from the future with past/present.

How can we maximize our pleasure gained from hope?  Setting goals for yourself and what you'd like to accomplish with your life.  What do you want to change about yourself?  Your health?  Your character?  Your occupation?  Your little part of the world that you live in?  The whole world?  How do you want to be remembered?  What are you passionate about?  What gets you angry?  I've heard and thinks its true that what makes you the angriest about the world might be what you're called to help fix. :)

Love--It's all about love.  We're a deeply communal species and because we couldn't survive without each other (evolutionarily) we can't survive without each other (existentially).

People that focus on this for their life's purpose tend to elevate the ideals of true love, soul mates, love at first sight or family, friends, community, affinity groups, church (separate from religion).

What's the opposite of love?  Hate.  What's it's absence?   Coma of the soul.  Anhedonia.  Indifference.  Apathy.  Bleak.  Bland.

How can we foster this purpose for life?  Set aside time.  Make new friends.  Connect with old.  Choose careers, living locations that facilitate spending quantity time with loved ones.  Schedule quality time for events, trips and memories.

Summary:

• Experiences
• Hedonism
• Neophilia
• Adrenaline junkies
• Philomath
• Artistry
• Hope
• Mission/cause
• Achievements
• Self-improvement
• Spiritual growth
• Love
• Family
• Romance
• Friends
• Community

Feedback please!

Irrational Things Atheists Believe

We all believe irrational things--things that are subjective and not empirically testable.  

Is this such a bad thing? Is it even possible to live without the scaffolding of these ideas and many, many others? What would life be like without these kind of ideas? Can noticing these ideas give us humility and more level playing field when dealing with/thinking about/talking to people that believe things that seem utterly foreign and ridiculous to us?

• Epistemological Beliefs
• Reality is Coherent--As Einstein famously put it, "God does not play dice."
• How we live like reality is coherent: 
• Science invests billions of dollars into research.  Many of our expectations about what life will be like on a given day are met.
• Reality Is Not an Illusion--Is what you see what you get?
• How we live like reality is not an illusion: 
• We find love and life meaningful.  
• Continuity of Reality-- "We have no logical reason to assume that anything we've learned from science will be true tomorrow." --Cameron Green
• How we live like reality has continuity: 
• We act according to our experience.
• Causal Relationships--One thing leads to another--cause and effect. How do we know that when one cue ball hits another that the two events are actually connected? The philosopher David Hume wrote much on this conundrum.  
• How we live like causal relationships are determinable:
• We administer medical treatments.  We write and read history books.
• Memory Is Accurate--How do we know our most trust and dearly held memories are accurate?  How do we know our brain didn't just make them up and they seem real?
• How we live like memory is accurate:
• We go up to and kiss our loved ones when we see them again.  We cherish fond childhood memories.  We recall and use information like directions to get to work.
• Senses Are Reasonable Facsimiles of Reality--How do we know that we can trust our senses?  How do we know they correspond to reality at all?
• How we live like our senses are accurate:
• We follow traffic signs and lights.
• You’re Not Completely Crazy--Is it so crazy to think we're not crazy?
• How we live like we aren't completely crazy:
• We make decisions and live by them.
• Solipsism Is False--How do we know others are thinking, feeling, volitional beings?
• How we live like solipsism is false:
• We care for the needs of others.

• Existential Beliefs 
• Life Has Value--Funerals suck.  War sucks.  Abuse sucks.  Why?  Because life is precious.
• Life Has Meaning--What we do with our lives has some value otherwise we wouldn't keep doing it.
• Identity/Consciousness/Mind--We believe in ourselves and others as a whole, independent being rather than a talking set of individual neurons and atoms.  Attributing a volitional personality to a human is the same thing on a different scale to giving the random occurrences of 'life' and 'the universe' to 'God'.  
• Contiguity--Many have said (controversially) that every atom in your body is replaced every ten (or seven) years. Assuming something close to that is true, how can it be said that we're the same person? Yet we still believe it every time we see an old friend! 
• Free Will--Our choices are our own and not a mechanistic predetermined byproduct of things outside of our control. 
• Love--It's more than a hormone. It's more than a pre-programmed mechanism to create and rear young. We believe and behave like love is real.

• Justice Beliefs
• Virtue/Vice and Good/Evil--Every time we resist evil and do good we show that we believe in moral obligation/virtue/vice/good/evil.

Brenner Emmanuel Michel's "Hercules Between Virtue and Vice"

My point:


Of course all of the above has rightly been questioned and doubted by philosophical luminaries, but I bring it up to point out that both you and I have sacred ideas and that we all hold things true without proof everyday. That, by in large, is a very, very good thing. You may well cognitively doubt every idea above, but you still believe them functionally if you use them. Just as many believers deal with doubts about their religion's teachings so can an atheist doubt the list above, but still be counted as a believer on the basis of how they live--actions speak louder than words.


What is religion at its most very basic? Ideas. Ideas about life, morality, metaphysics, origins...etc. Just in the same way that believing life has value has existential and social utility so can other religious ideas--even if we deeply doubt their veracity. Ideas are tools--tools that can help improve our lives by being the scaffolding on which to build a life. What I'd like to show with the above list of things is that there is common ground between atheists and theists to discuss ideas, values and meanings. We all are subjective. We all are biased. We all operate with ideas that are unfounded. We all have memes.  It's a level playing field between atheists and theists in this regard. We all make assumption leaps and some of these ideas are vital to living a fulfilling life.

Pictures from here, here and here.