Assigning Meaning
When you break everything down in life, you soon learn that nothing in life has an inherent meaning. I might've said this before, but now I'll take it a step further.
The only fool-proof way to have meaning to anything in your life is to assign a meaning to it. By the time you're the age you currently are, reading this, you've already assigned meaning to many things; fairly universal objects you've assigned meaning to would be money, time, your mortality, family, possibly spirituality, etc. But what about those things you don't quite have down so much as these? A common phrase I hear is "I'm [so many] years old and I still don't know what I want."
The truth is you'll never know. In fact, you'll never know anything for sure in your lifetime.1 Scary thought, possibly, but in this case it is a matter of choosing-- realizing that ultimately, all the decisions you make come down to you. Confidence is such an envied personality trait because it take a certain kind of individual to be so certain of oneself. Anyone who has this trait has had the balls to disregard external forces for one second, make a decision on what he/she likes, and just go with it. The same is required when deciding what you want.
On a personal note, when you break existence down as much as I have, you get to the point where you have all the pieces spread out before you and the only thing left to do is find out what to do with them, because they do you no good on their own. This is probably where the cliché "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade"2 comes from.3
Some people are content working 9 to 5 all their life, retiring, and dying at a "reasonable" age. Some would rather do what they want to regardless of the standard. Some want kids, some don't want to get married. Some people believe in a higher power, some don't. These are all examples of different assigned meanings, each one specific to the individual who created them; it's in our nature.
1 For example, a discipline such as science involves using precedent and a created method to produce meaning out of rationalizations and logic; essentially nothing says the results produced are correct besides a set of guidelines.
2 In fact, life itself is lemons and, really, lemonade is simply one option.
3 It's always interesting how clichés usually have some kind of ridiculously true meaning to them but aren't ever explained. So when used when giving advice or something similar, the effect is next to nothing due to the fact that the phrase only scratches the surface.
Positive and Negative
This is life in a nutshell: you and the world. Inside you, there are two classifications of thought: positive and negative. Inside the world, you have an infinite amount of you's, each with an infinite amount of thoughts that fit these two classifications except you don't have control of these you's (we'll call them external you's).
You are like a points system. Positive thoughts give you a point and negative thoughts take away two points-- one for the negativity and one because the effortless nature of negative thoughts dictates that you have room for one more negative thought. Naturally, this is a recursively repeating downward spiral.
Negative thoughts don't get the credit they deserve in our world; in fact, they almost always sneak completely below the radar. On an individual basis, negative thoughts are the creators of depressing music; they're the birth of sad movies, paintings, and stories. They're the synthesis of your own negative thoughts and/or negative thoughts from external you's (and only these two things). On a broader scale, they're what most religions would define as "evil." And they come so easily because they are humanity's "default" setting. They are the things that happen to you that make you change yourself (for the worse), rather than enforce your current behavior. In psychology, they're appropriately named negative punishment. In philosophy, they're named subconscious motivations. These are the things that "just happen" early on and by the time you reach adolescence they have become a part of you.
Positive thoughts are the ones that build you up. They are the birth of smiles. They are the birth of laughter. They are a product of freedom from yourself and the world around you. Most of the time, however, they are so fleeting that they only last in these short moments of joy and laughter. And it is the nature of these transient thoughts that makes them the most rare of thoughts that can be thunk-- it makes positivity so rare that it can hardly be said to exist in our world at all.
So, ultimately, you have two ways to view life (since it is all relative to you): positive or negative. If positive thoughts are more appealing, know that they need to be fought for. If you're in the opposite side of the spectrum, step outside of you and view yourself as if you are really an external you. You simply need to realize where you are in relation to where you want to be.
At the end of the day, all that needs to be remembered is this: life is simple. People are complicated. Complication always overpowers simplicity, which is why our world/life "is" so complex. It doesn't have to be for you.
The Human Experience
We should all think twice about our existence. Not everything that is accepted by the crowd is true. The measurement of time and space could simply be a product of our intellect, just as state lines or manufacturing processes for Twinkies are. Our universe could be a tiny electrical spark in someone's mind-- a fleeting thought. We could contain an infinite amount of universes in our own minds. There's too much we don't know about the world we live in to not give what we "know" a second glance. Think. Step outside the norms and "proofs" and consider something only few dare to share with the world.
It's not comfortable. And it's not easy. But it's liberation. It's the closest you can come to heaven without dying. Embrace the thoughts and understand the power you hold simply in your mass of neural connections stored in what you know as your skull. Embrace something you don't know or what is not widely accepted and you will be unbound from the world you know as reality.
You're not the most important thing in the world. You may not have an inherent meaning. But meaning gets assigned as it is learned and experienced, simply by existing as an intellectual being. Run with this and don't let the dark places in your mind overpower the positive, because they will always be the first to occur to you. Nothing bad will ever happen to you in life unless you view it as such.
This is all part of the human experience-- stay thirsty, my friends.
Archives
- July 2010 (1)
- April 2010 (2)
- March 2010 (3)
- February 2010 (4)
- January 2010 (9)
- December 2009 (3)
- November 2009 (5)
- October 2009 (2)
- September 2009 (1)
- August 2009 (1)
- July 2009 (2)
- June 2009 (1)
- May 2009 (1)
- April 2009 (3)
- March 2009 (7)
- February 2009 (3)
- January 2009 (5)
- December 2008 (3)
- November 2008 (2)
- October 2008 (6)
- September 2008 (3)
- August 2008 (8)
- July 2008 (6)
- June 2008 (6)
- May 2008 (3)
- March 2008 (2)
- November 2007 (1)
- September 2007 (3)
- August 2007 (4)
Categories
- Blurbs (3)
- Concepts (1)
- Day-to-Day (2)
- Driving (1)
- Experiences (2)
- Experiments (1)
- Ideas (4)
- Overcoming Time (1)
- Internet (6)
- Miscellaneous (4)
- Music (1)
- Personal (7)
- Philosophy (6)
- Photography (4)
- Projects (9)
- Quotes (2)
- Rants (5)
- Realizations (7)
- Reflections (5)
- Stream of Consciousness (1)
- Thoughts (35)
- Life (6)
- Uncategorized (6)
- Writings (1)
