What do you keep living for? Is there a specific person, goal, or idea that you work for? Is there no meaning to life in your opinion?
Context: I’ve been reading Camus and Sartre, and thinking about how their ideas interact with hard determinism.
Isn’t the idea of a meaning of life irrelevant if you believe that the universe is deterministic?
Meaning: try to do no harm, give love where I can, and hopefully leave the world a little better where I touched upon.
Why I keep living (bit of a TW):
TW
My own death doesn’t really bother me, but the logic follows that one’s passing radiates pain outwards to those who are still alive. So, to minimize pain to my loved ones, especially my animals who wouldn’t know why I was gone.
Also experiencing video games.
Yeah I think I’m in the same boat as you here to be honest, as I can still acknowledge that a negative emotional impact on those I care about also negatively impacts my emotions, so that provides me with some grounding in the topic. Loose grounding though, especially if you take the idea that there is no meaning to its limits.
That’s fair.
I’m of the worldview that while technically there is no “meaning,” doesn’t mean there’s no effect (even if it’s infinitesimal). Just because there’s no purpose in pushing a ball across a table, it still moves when you touch it.
It also places, in philosophical framing, that humans are the creators and arbiters of the concept of our own “meaning.” The fact that we ask of it, and in some cases find there is no such thing from external forces, suggests that it comes from us. However you go from there is the beauty of the notion.
Bit of a side tangent lol but thank you for sharing and engaging :) /gen
Do you have memories as a kid where it was pure fun and no expectations? I honestly think that there are 4 types of personalities that people lean towards:
Dogs, dog owners, dog guardians and cats
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The dogs just want to have fun, work hard for their owners and play in the back yard.
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The dog and cat owners can be cruel, great, fun, abusive, etc., but always have rules that the dog is constantly trying to guess what they are. The cat doesn’t care.
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The dog and cat guardians are gudes to everyone around them
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The cats are what everyone knows about cats.
The dogs and the dog/cat guardians look for meaning in their life.
Honest to god, the most tangible and practical definition that I’ve gotten to, so far, is that meaning comes about, when you strive to do good. Simple as that. Sure, there are a lot of ways to do ‘that’ in the world, but it should all work to some degree.
Strive to make the world better and to do good.
That’s really interesting, where would you say you source your idea of good from? I think I personally have a hard time grounding any sense of morality as I’m not sold on the idea that someone could be truly responsible for an action. I don’t mean this as a criticism, I am just interested in your viewpoint for what is good or bad.
The LLM out here tryna parse morality lol love your user name.
Wack of me to comment here but I’d like to hear more about your logic for the perpetual passing of accountability! It’s true enough that our lived experience is basically dependency hell. I guess for chiming in I owe you my “source of good” haha it changes the further you zoom out but it starts at collective harm reduction and burrows all the way down to showing up for the people you care about.
Even when they lack the perspective to see themselves as the perpetrator. We roll that boulder up the hill lol
I think you’ve got a really interesting take on morality, but for me it really falls down on the biological level. Robert Sapolsky was the writer who convinced me, and his argument goes something like this: no neuron in the brain ever fires of its own accord - its always caused by something that we can agree is out of our control, namely our environment, upbringing, culture, genes, etc. Even if these don’t directly cause neurons to fire, then they create the factors which do - hormone secretion, what neural pathways form as our brains develop. And we can say that our consciousness is bounded by our material brains because of the changes to people who undergo lobotomies or similarly experience losses to parts of their brain, for example Phineas Gage. So, based on this, as our experience of consciousness is tied to the firing of neurons in our physical brains, and that is out of our control, we can say that we don’t truly have agency. This means that no one is ever truly free to make a decision or not, and that, to my mind at least, means it cannot have been their fault if they did something wrong.
Good counter question, thanks.
I am still trying to figure out, in what way I can know that something is actually true and good, besides that is just sounds and feels true. It’s not certain that I am the right agent to decide what is true in the moment. I am partly an animal, after all.
I understand light from the sun, compared to darkness, and I understand how saying something can reflect the real world as factually true, compared to something that is not, ie. telling a lie.
But, that ‘being good is a virtue’, and what ‘good’ and ‘virtue’ mean whan applied, is not so clear.
I clearly have a sufficient and functional understanding of the above, (innate, instinctual and/or learned?), which is why my first comment still works, but I feel like I should be able to verify that my idea of ‘good’ is still true.
Do you people have any good pointers to that?
Honestly I feel a lot like you. In daily life, I’ll think things are good or bad, but when I press myself on it I can’t come up with a reason why. It feels so hard to come up with a morality system beyond that without grounding it objectively somewhere, but I just don’t see how that’s possible. I appreciate your thoughts!
Zoom in. I don’t care much for the troubles in the world. I vote, but that’s that. I care for my family and friends and for my personal development. In that order. Lately it’s been mostly the latter. That is all right for a while, but eventually I’ll have to put things back in the right order.
What do you keep living for?
I want to see what happens in the future.
Is there a specific person, goal, or idea that you work for?
My primary goal is to retire and not have to work anymore.
Is there no meaning to life in your opinion?
There is no external meaning. People can provide their own meaning.
