Posted by:
Gay Philosopher
(
)
Date: October 12, 2013 08:47PM
I'd like to share a few thoughts that have been rumbling around in my mind.
Conscious life consists of people, passions, and plot. It is our entanglements with other people to engage in various plots that produce affects that we then interpret as meaningful. But affects can also impel us to act, so they become a form of kindling to fuel the fire of meaning in life, whose absence is found in the coldness and boredom of isolation. Therefore, the ultimate fountain of meaning is one's own culture.
But the culture that we're born into can, because we modify ourselves through experience and directed learning, become ill-fitting, thus prompting us, often at great personal cost, to distance ourselves from it and adopt another. One example of this is children born to Pentacostals that abandon the faith of their parents for atheism. Once one moves forward, there can be no going back. "You can't go home again."
Meaninglessness obtains when one is removed from the necessity of even mundane interactions with other humans, and thus from plots and the ordinary churn of affects that we interpret as "living." One's biological needs are met, but one has effectively stopped functioning within society as a productive member. One merely passively consumes cream soda manufactured by others, eats meals prepared by others, browses books written by others, says hello and expresses superficial thanks to strangers for serving him, and drifts through life as an observer rather than a participant emotionally embroiled in a plot with a goal.
This is a rare condition. It's difficult to feel that life is meaningless when one is active in it. But if one is disabled--for instance, hospitalized due to depression, or unemployed--one has been removed from the game board. One is no longer a player. While one may intensely yearn to be, circumstances actively bar one's readmission. It is then that meaninglessness becomes possible, for one has lost one's social inclusion among valued (either positively or negatively--both create meaning) peers and opportunity to engage in goal-seeking (plot) to move toward a desired end. The endpoints don't matter so much in themselves, only the sequences of action--with awe-inspiring vistas and occasionally thrilling bursts of speed--that the individual experiences in the process of moving toward them. Otherwise, one drifts randomly and then founders, without having ever charted a course to his own destination or tried to arrive there.
Meaninglessness is the experiencing of mostly aversive emotions, including boredom, rejection, anger, envy, helplessness, anxiety, depression, fear, and others. Meaning is the experiencing of mostly positive emotions. The farther removed that one becomes from people, plot, and passions (positive emotions that promote action to achieve goals), the more likely it is that one will experience meaninglessness. The challenge is to stay close enough to the herd to warm oneself while, like Schopenhauer's porcupines, not to get too close so as to prevent oneself from being pricked:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog's_dilemma.
Are the people that you're around those that you want to be around? Who is the most important person in your life and why? Do you have enemies, and if so, why are they your enemies? What do they threaten, and how? Which stories are you engaged in? Write brief descriptions of them down; there aren't many. What passions do you feel day by day? How often do you feel aversive emotions, and under what circumstances? Which stories do you badly want to participate in, perhaps as the central character? What's impeding you? Do you have a clear direction in life and an overarching goal, or are you going with the flow, allowing sociocultural currents to carry you where they will without your active resistance or engagement?
Most fundamentally: What do you want? What do you most hope for? What do you most fear, and why? How likely are either to happen? At the end of your life, what do you want to be able to say that you've experienced or achieved in order to call it meaningful? How will you know if you've succeeded or failed? How will others know, and by which measuring stick should your life be evaluated?
Ask yourself: By 30, what do I want, and expect to have? By 40? 50? 60? 70? 80? Remember this: time is running out, however imperceptible that may seem now. It will accelerate as you go. Choose wisely how to spend your time. It's the one thing that you can never have back. Each moment matters. Choose wisely and act decisively. Never surrender your dreams, for the greater the meaninglessness, the greater the incapacity and barriers to returning to the game board.
Our time is now.
Steve