
Living a Meaningful Life - bootload
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170131-the-secret-to-living-a-meaningful-life
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vog
This article silently assumes that a "meaningful life" means:

\- making good choices of the projects you work on

\- making those projects succeed, or at least ensure pushing them forward

So it reduces this broad topic "meaningful life" to the aspects of personal
time management, project management and motivation management. In short, the
article appears to be very work-centric (but including paid work as well as
volunteer work).

Within this work-centric view, the article is great. But given the article's
title, I would have expected a broader treatment of the whole topic.

~~~
anigbrowl
Not so surprising, since most people enjoy the satisfaction of having their
plans work out, achieving goals and so on - and consumerism, the dominant
'philosophy' of western liberalism, is all about the accumulation of
satisfying experiences.

Of course, this doesn't sound all that great when it's reduced to its bare
bones. That's why extremist ideologues often find great political success by
promoting a stark message: a life filled with suffering and struggle offers
more _meaning_ then one where there's never any danger or anxiety. Hitler told
the German people quite frankly that they'd have to go through fire to realize
his vision, and that sounded good to enough people that he was able to make
good on the promise. Likewise, millions of Slavs were willing to sacrifice
themselves against hopeless odds (as it seemed at the time) to repel the Nazi
invasion of the USSR. Indeed, once a country goes to war there invariably
seems to be a great outpouring of enthusiasm because the inherently pointless
quotidian struggles of work, survival, acquisition and consumption are
replaced with the much more exciting and arousing struggles for _life and
death_ , for which economic competition is only the proxy.

I believe there are two basic reasons for this. One, most people don't enjoy
thinking for its own sake all that much, but when you're in a survival
situation you can dispense with all that tedious mentation and really live in
the moment. For people who have lived a qualitatively meaningless life up to
that point, this is tremendously liberating. The other reason is that life is
never sweeter than when death is close, and danger is highly correlated with
sexual arousal for evolutionary reasons - hence the epidemic of rape during
wartime. When time horizons are short, prohibited actions are no longer
consequential, and the normal moral calculus is abandoned, then expression
triumphs over repression.

In sum, we're not really cut out for long-term thinking and abstract mentation
for its own sake appeals to only a tiny minority. There is great value to
living in the moment but most people don't know how to do it, and so their
frustration builds up, to the detriment of the social body which must
eventually express the excess -much as a boil is tolerable until it becomes a
cyst and needs to be lanced.

This is the reason that attempts to create a totally safe society are doomed -
the safer you make it, the more of a prison it becomes. I'd rather not write
an essay about this, but there's a reason that aristocratic societies allowed
and created formal rules for dueling.

~~~
mmirate
> we're not really cut out for long-term thinking and abstract mentation for
> its own sake appeals to only a tiny minority. There is great value to living
> in the moment but most people don't know how to do it

That's the most convincing argument in favor of eugenics that I've ever heard.
It's a shame that we can't easily test for affinity for long-term, abstract
thinking; nor for ability to live in the moment.

~~~
qntty
Well that's reassuring since it doesn't appear to be an argument for eugenics
at all.

~~~
mmirate
It is. If I read the great-grandparent correctly, violence is only needed as
an outlet because the majority of humans don't have a particular combination
of attributes; therefore, one solution to that brand of inevitable violence,
is to artificially select for precisely those attributes.

~~~
konschubert
You seem to forget that the act of selecting is an act of violence by itself.

~~~
mmirate
Hence my particular turn-of-phrase: " _that brand of_ inevitable violence
[described by anigbrowl]". Yes, I probably should have included that bracketed
clause.

(aside: AFAICT, needing violence to remove violence is as much an
inevitability as needing guns to remove guns.)

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culturestate
If anyone's interested, there's a great book called _Designing Your Life_ [1]
which delves more deeply into the basic concept from this piece (identify
what's most important to you and measure your progress toward those goals).
It's based on a Stanford course of a similar name, and is an excellent read.

1\. [https://smile.amazon.com/Designing-Your-Life-Well-Lived-
Joyf...](https://smile.amazon.com/Designing-Your-Life-Well-Lived-
Joyful/dp/1101875321/)

------
crispinb
Given a certain background of assumptions about meaningfulness, the article
offers up some sufficiently plausible tactics. The assumptions though lean
heavily on values unique to this particular civilisation. With its value-free
description of merely individual pet 'projects', I suspect (but can't of
course know) that it would be incomprehensible to the vast majority of humans
that have ever lived.

Given how rapidly our planet's ecosystems are collapsing under that same
civilisation's depredations, this might be an unwise hostage to fortune.

------
Sindrome
"extravert" \- lol!

~~~
appdeco
Did you read the link? apparently it's the technically correct spelling. Never
knew about this, always see it with an 'O'

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saiya-jin
1) Imagine yourself on dying bed - what would you regret/be proud of in your
past life? Strive to go that way.

2) Bring good to humanity, and don't do evil. If nothing else, if raising
kids, be a good parent and role model - don't bring more unbalanced, fucked
up, childhood-issue-riddled people into this world. Too many of those around
already.

~~~
dominotw
> Imagine yourself on dying bed

Do people really do retrospectives of their lives on their death beds? Seems
like a really odd thing to do during final hours of life. I am sure everyone
no matter how meaningful their lives are, is going to have regrets.

I just hope I am mentally well enough during my final days to enjoy it, not do
an inventory of regrets vs accomplishments.

~~~
midgetjones
And physically well enough to exact revenge on those that wronged me.

Edit: That came out much darker than I meant it to.

~~~
aswanson
Was it meant to be humorous? Because I got a chuckle out of it...

~~~
rapfaria
He just read The Count of Monte Cristo

