Intro

I think talking about what is meaningful relative to an individual is useful; however, talking about a globally accepted definition of meaning for all humans in the world, especially that of a non culturally unified homogenous world, is kind of pointless.

Meaning is a very very useful human construct, like many other things, that is quite effective regardless of whether individuals themselves are aware of said construct in their head. We can play fast and loose with definitions, but let’s just say meaning is something that feels right, produces life satisfaction, and erases doubt/anxiety about decision making. It is like a God who whispers into your ear, reassuring you that what you are doing is right and will not lead you down a dopamine deficient or addictive path.

Meaning in no way shape or form guarantees that someone performs actions that are morally right, in whatever moral framework you want to use. It can definitely lead one to do very bad or good things. Putting that aside as well, I would like to discuss how to find meaning in your own life, from the perspective of someone who definitely does not know what they are talking about. Let us begin.

Finding Meaning

We can talk about desire and maybe trying to break free from having desires, but I think practically you should formulate a plan to live a life full of overlapping desires and all the pains of that; if you really don’t like desires, please seek other sources that talk about that. The path to pursuing a hard and personally intrinsically valuable goal I think will be net good and provide meaning for your life. There’s going to be bumps, but you can, with enough personal mental gymnastics, edit those out of your working memory for practically all of the time that you feel your attention exists. It’s probably a good idea to scatter within your busy life of pursuing some major goal(s), side missions – your motivations for these do not have to be morally correct, unless you care enough about that stuff.

Simply put, distract yourself with worthwhile goals. They should be good for you and the people around you who you care about if you achieve them. Don’t overdo it, unless you can continue to tell yourself that you can take it and actually do perform under whatever load you choose to take upon yourself. Rush but don’t rush.

I think it’s too complicated to talk about emergent meaning in groups for me at the moment, there’s so much dynamics in there. I see it as leading individuals to do great things that they couldn’t have done by themselves, or leading them to do terrible things that they wouldn’t have been able to do by themselves. You should try to integrate yourself into the entities that have values/trajectory that best aligns with your own desired trajectory into the good future(s), rather than the bad future(s). How much you care about the concept of loyalty to an organization you’re embedded in and your willingness to leave, respectively or not, for a better opportunity, depends on you lol. I can’t make universal claims here. I think you should have loyalty if you believe something deserves it, that will depend on your perception of the actions done by the entity in its past record.

So, integrate yourself in an entity that seems good and does things that you like and allows you to do things that you want to do without any catches. It’s important to find a community of like minded people who you can work with and speak freely to. Avoid echo chambers, blah blah.

Setting these things up is important, because it doesn’t allow you to ruminate; you can set aside good thinking time, but it’s much easier to go into bad thinking time if you’re that type of person…and I might be that type of person…so I’m biased. Maybe try to start a good family as well idk man, please your genetics or something, maybe then you’ll feel better y’know. k

Retaining Meaning

I don’t know man, you might spend so much time trying and thinking about “how”, you don’t know what to do after and. Let’s just say you shouldn’t think about it like this, retaining meaning. I keep forgetting that at the moment of writing I’m a young college student who still has so much yet to experience and learn from, that I feel embarrassed to write something like this. But whatever, I think by the time you “attain” meaning, you’ll probably want to keep doing the same things that got you here in order to retain said meaning. Resting on your laurels or whatever y’know is bad.

Citations

I don’t know what to cite. I will say that I have read a variety of things that influenced me, so I’m not making any claims that these are “original” ideas or “original” combinations of previously said ideas. You can go out and find the prime thinker of novel ideas. I’m sure you’ll find ‘em. I’m gonna need to age another couple of years and get those years of knowledge embedded into my being in order to realize why I should care about properly knowing who thought what first and how different what was originally said is what I heard.