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.
Why Not to be Fake
My teacher in philosophy today finally put it into words for me. First, at the base of "you," you have your values. When evaluating why your values are good or bad, right or wrong, you have to look at the sources and why those are good sources. Sources for your values are environmental factors, such as your parents, religion, society, and other authoritative figures. Well, when thinking critically about why you should blindly follow what those sources have said about why you should believe them, you need to look at your beliefs and desires. Besides, this is what comprises your basic values.
When evaluating why a belief you hold is good, the only criteria it should match is being either true or false. Would anyone say that they want to willingly believe something that is false? When evaluating if your desires are good or bad, you should see if those desires will help you to be consistently happy and live well.
Now we could say one very basic desire of ours (among other things) is to have friends/relationships. And by having those relationships, we will be happy and be able to live well. However, we like to say we desire money and status as well (because these will make us happy). This is one of those common American ideas that is widely accepted. Because if we have money, for example, we'll be able to have friends and trophy wives, etc. But why will those friends like us? It's also commonly accepted that those friends will be our friends and like us solely because of this feature we present to them that is nothing more than superficial: a wealthy person. And if this is the case, how can you truly be happy? You're not showing them what your personality is really like, because they're probably not going to care that much about getting to know you. And when the money and everything that people "like" about you goes away, you're left with who you are. And if they never liked you for who you really are, how can that relationship continue work? Even if that all didn't disappear, how long would those "friends" stay around? Unless we truly like another person, what purpose do we have in staying around them, or again, even forming a connection with them.
So, it seems, the way to remedy this would to be yourself. Because being "fake" or doing whatever you need to do to "fit in" and "be cool" and "get people to like you" is doing the exact same thing as in the money situation: giving the people you "desire" to be around you a facade that doesn't accurately represent who you really are. So why be fake? It doesn't make sense to say that you will truly be happy by providing people with a different version of you that they "like" or that is the most-easily compatible with them. Because happiness shouldn't be fleeting, as in winning the lottery; true happiness should last.
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Magic
We humans seem to like magic. The unknown. Mysteries. Santa, the tooth fairy; as a child we don't know where the presents they bring come from, but we sure as anything enjoy getting them. And when the day comes where you find out Santa isn't real, Christmas becomes a monotonous present-receiving event. There's no cookies to leave out for mom and dad because, well, they aren't the Santa you had always pictured as a child. Not only that, but you lose the urge to stay up as late as you could to find out just who Santa was. The unknowing is gone, so what's the point of even holding an interest in it?
I realized this a lot today. After my car overheated and my mechanic told me it was my thermostat, I went online to see what exactly this thermostat does for my car and why it might've broke. I read about how it all functions and that if I got one of these little thermostat deals, I could put it in boiling water, and after it warmed up it would just open-- without any apparent cause. I thought that was pretty damn neat, and it made me want to go out and get one so I could test it out for myself! But I read on, and learned that there was simply wax in a cylinder on this thermostat that melts at a certain temperature, expands, and in turn opens up the little valve. A moment later, I had no strong will to go get one to experiment with. It took all the mystery out of it. Although my natural human thirst for knowledge was quenched, I didn't get to figure it out for myself. I didn't get to investigate, or even have it remain a mystery in my head until the time when I could finally test it out on my own.
Knowledge seems to be a double-edged sword. If you lived your whole life believing in God and then were presented the evidence that fully persuaded you he didn't exist, you would have preferred not to have heard it. You'd rather live in a world where, even if you didn't believe in him, there was always a slight chance; a glimmer of hope.
What I'm getting at is that sometimes, in this world that we live in, we need a little ignorance. We need some mystery because it's easier to accept that there's an invisible supreme-being high in the sky than it is to accept the fact that we don't know the origin of our own existence.
However, I think that if we humans have the mental capacity to wonder about our own existence, and have the innate desire to figure and learn on our own, then we have the mental capacity to find an answer to anything in this world. And if we could actually unlock the power in our brains, the other 90% we don't use, we could accomplish those things. But I feel if we didn't have to put so much energy into living in an always-on, money-ruled, stress- and worry-filled society, we'd have that much more power to devote to actually unlocking our God-given (for lack of better words) mental abilities. And who knows, maybe then we wouldn't need a Santa.
Meaning of Life
Pretend for a second that life doesn't have a meaning. That from birth, you are born into a world, an environment, that has no purpose. If you were to assign a meaning to life at this point, it would simply be to exist. And you could probably live off of that for a good 12 years or so. But around that time, you need something more fulfilling. Life just isn't as simple anymore.
You start searching. Some people find that religion gives them a purpose; a goal above all else that is, generally, to be good and in turn have a happy afterlife. Some people have been brought up to already "know" what their purpose is, such as becoming a football star or keeping up the family tradition of being train conductors. Then, seemingly the biggest group of people, assimilate into the ones around them who haven't found a thing, or might not even know they should/could be looking for one. And these people may handle it differently, whether it's drugs or dressing in black and finding solace in themselves and others who feel the same way. The point is that many people handle this differently but share a common cause: the search for a purpose. This would seem to support the idea that there is no "meaning" or purpose to life and that, in fact, it has to be discovered.
And I think that's what life is all about. We as humans need a purpose to keep us motivated to survive in this world, and although there might not be a purpose from birth, with the right knowledge you can make your purpose and, in turn, give your life a meaning.
Anticipation of the future
Our favorite thing to do. Sometimes it helps us to be happy, anticipating a good day ahead or good things for the future. Sometimes it drives us nuts with the anticipation of the worst possible scenario we can come up with in our heads. But why? We need answers. Hello religion, hello natural scientific inquiry, hello mom ("I need some advice"). The unknown, certain unknowns, make us crazy. Just by the unknown's very nature it can do this. It's damned weird if you ask me.
So why does it drive us so crazy? Well, I'm smart... I'm missing some pieces and don't understand something... So following that logic, what the hell is "wrong" with me? Nothing. You just don't have the knowledge of this particular subject you're inquiring about and if you had a few less expectations in your life well you wouldn't have this problem. But since you do, sit down and be patient. There's no use wasting your current time thinking about the future, especially when it has expectations tied to it.
What do I mean by this. We could agree that we humans don't know everything. We don't even know time. Then again, we created it. But regardless of that, every moment that passes (note a moment isn't a set amount of "time") moves into the past. We think we know the past through our minds, through memories, smells and sights and sounds linked to memories, but we really don't know it. For all we know we could have dreamt it.
The future. We can only imagine it. In some special cases, we can dream it, but that's about it. We can anticipate and come up with things that coincide with our desires, whether good or bad, to prepare ourselves so that perhaps the blow of this event happening is less hard, whether this is intentional or not.
So what are we left with? The present. It is the only thing we can be sure about. We can know that right now, you are reading the word "word" and hearing the low hum of a computer fan and smelling whatever smell might be in the air and touching a computer mouse perhaps. It is absolute-- it is completely positive. So, coming full-circle here, why spend the most certain moments of your life trying to draw conclusions from the most undetermined? Live not only for the moment, but for the present.
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