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| Another article on meeeeeaaaaaniiiiing, this one from Quartz: The secret to a meaningful life is simpler than you think  Some people seem to spend their whole lives dissatisfied, in search of a purpose. But philosopher Iddo Landau suggests that all of us have everything we need for a meaningful existence. Let's see... money, check; humor, check; beer, check... yep, he's right. Even if he does sound like he got his name from a Star Wars background character. According to Landau, a philosophy professor at Haifa University in Israel and author of the 2017 book Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World... I'm pretty sure ads don't do anything to make our lives meaningful, unless we're the ones profiting from them. ...people are mistaken when they feel their lives are meaningless. The error is based on their failure to recognize what does matter, instead becoming overly focused on what they believe is missing from their existence. That's a lot of words to say what I've known for a very long time, which is that contentment stems not from having what you want, but from wanting what you have. In other words, Landau thinks that people who feel purposeless actually misunderstand what meaning is. "But I know! And I can tell you, for just $29.95 for the hardcover or $29.45 for the Kindle edition!" Look, I'm not really ragging on someone trying to make money. Just the practice of disguising ads as articles. I know I link a lot of them in here, but that's because a) this is a writing website, and it's a book promotion and b) some of the very few articles that don't require a subscription or are otherwise behind a paywall are that way because they are ads. Those who do think meaning can be discerned, however, fall into four groups, according to Thaddeus Metz, writing in the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy. Some are god-centered and believe only a deity can provide purpose. Others ascribe to a soul-centered view, thinking something of us must continue beyond our lives, an essence after physical existence, which gives life meaning. Then there are two camps of “naturalists” seeking meaning in a purely physical world as known by science, who fall into “subjectivist” and “objectivist” categories. Now, that, I find interesting, though it does strike me as just another example of humans' obsession with putting everything into nice little boxes with neat little labels. The first two categories there are pretty self-explanatory, I think, and the article explains the difference between subjectivist and objectivist naturalism. For those who feel purposeless, Landau suggests a reframing is in order. He writes, “A meaningful life is one in which there is a sufficient number of aspects of sufficient value, and a meaningless life is one in which there is not a sufficient number of aspects of sufficient value.” Yeah, well, personally, I'd add: "And no one else gets to say whether someone's life has a sufficient number of aspects of sufficient value." Landau argues that anyone who believes life can be meaningless also assumes the importance of value. In other words, if you think life can be meaningless, then you believe that there is such a thing as value. You’re not neutral on the topic. While I feel that this is probably true, I also think it's trivial. It's almost exactly like saying "If you think something is worthless, then you believe in the existence of worth." It relates to my musings on how a hole is always defined by what it's a hole in, rather than some arbitrary volume that we call a "hole." Some might protest that Landau’s being simplistic. Some might make things more complicated than they need to be. In fact, there are even less complex approaches to meaningfulness. In Philosophy Now, Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London in the UK, provides an extremely simple answer: “The meaning of life is not being dead.” Oooh, another Monty Python fan. Casey Woodling, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, proposes in Philosophy Now that the question of meaningfulness itself offers an answer. “What makes a human life have meaning or significance is not the mere living of a life, but reflecting on the living of a life,” he writes. Yeah, well, I have a different take on that: a human life is not much different from a cat life or a beetle life. Birth, life, maybe reproduction, death. Do beetles care about meaning? I doubt it. Cats? Almost certainly not, judging by the ones who live with me. So why are we so profoundly concerned with it? Just because only we (as far as we know) have the capacity to communicate it to others? The next section kind of agrees with me there: In the Eastern philosophical tradition, there’s yet another simple answer to the difficult question of life’s meaning... [Lao Tzu] suggests meaning comes from being a product of the world itself. No effort is necessary. Well, I'm certainly not here to resolve all the philosophical differences between East and West. Or to sell you anything. I just find this stuff interesting. Does it have value? That's up to you. |
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