The Problem Of The Meaning Of Life

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The main tragedy of man is that he does not know who he is, where he is from and where he is going, and in the impossibility of avoiding death. Nature has taken care of giving us meaning, this is survival and reproduction, and for those who are busy with this process every day, there are no special questions about the meaning of life. And if it does, then here you are, there are religions. The essence of some of them is in the same survival and reproduction: the holidays of the harvest, the union of God and the Goddess about it. The essence of others is that now you need to earn your bread in the sweat of your brow, be fruitful and multiply, and then there will be a rest from all this, if you behave well, well, you need to love your neighbor, of course, so as not to kill each other. There is another option to imagine that the whole world is an illusion and not bother.

People themselves are forced to invent their own meaning in order not to fall into depression, and for the most part people do well in this: serving the state, being needed, sacrificing oneself, being good, getting approval, being important, overshadowing others, power over others, power over yourself. Perhaps the desire for power, the desire to control human destinies, to save or kill - is also part of the need to control the process of life and death, even if not your own, so someone else's.

If there are people with mismatched meanings, then they are aggressive towards each other, not so much because of mutual violation of boundaries, but because of an unconscious fear of losing their meaning and, accordingly, the main support. Because of the same fear, they try to impose their vision of the world on others, condemning someone else's point of view. And this fear can be understood: imagine that you are standing over an abyss on a plank, and someone is trying to shake it. If someone else's meaning violates your boundaries, you can defend them, for example, if someone is dedicated to conquering the world or local invasion of your life, then admitting the existence of someone else's meaning is one thing, but changing your life to fit his vision is quite another.

Is the choice of individual meaning an escape from reality? I believe that in the event that other people's choices are denied, then yes, this is an escape, like any expression of fanaticism. Indeed, the reality is that the common sense for all, except for the obvious, given by nature, has not been proven, although many claim to be the ultimate truth.

It is possible to remain stable when faced with the existence of other people's meanings, calmly preserving your own, if you find the courage to realize the absence of an objective meaning in life and the right of everyone to make their own choice.