Skip to main content

happiness, life

I always thought that the pursuit of happiness ( as enshrined in the constitution of the united states) was the noblest of goals and is what everyone should aim towards. I am not so sure anymore. In the last couple of years the more I think about happiness, the more I realise that a meaningful life is not necessarily a happy one. So it depends what you want from your life. Do you want to look back on your deathbed and say "I have lived a happy life" or would you rather say "I have lived a meaningful life and am leaving something behind and have made the world a better place". Do you want to just exist? or you want to create? if you want to create then the goal of happiness is not the right goal for you. For out of misery, melancholia comes some of the best art in this world. Out of suffering comes new ideas, world changing ideas. Not don't mistake my ideas - I am not suggesting suffering is what you should aspire to. In fact there are kinds of suffering that are actually just bad - they do no good. the physical kind of sufferings are such - hunger, physical pain, disease - nothing good comes out of it. What I am talking about is the suffering of the mind propagated by anguish over existence and the meaning of it all. The kind of suffering that makes you question your life and your choices and your existence itself.

Life is not simple, perhaps it was meant to be by Nature to be simple. By simple I don't mean easy - by simple I mean a defined life where we know what is expected. If it were up to Nature then the purpose of our life is perhaps straightforward - survive and reproduce for the greater good of the species. But, we humans have long left that behind. These rules of nature and life no longer apply to us. Hence it is our obligation, our duty to look beyond merely surviving. If not, what is the difference between us and animals. The least we should do is contemplate the meaning of life, try to find it - try to work out what it all means for you. Even if you don't succeed in finding the true meaning of our life I think it is our obligation as humans to at the least try to find it. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should one be thankful since the “probability” that one exists is so low ?

  Should one be thankful since the “probability” that one exists is so low ? Not really - thinking of probability in these terms is meaningless when we don’t understand a lot of things - eg consciousness, qualia, creativity etc. It’s like buying a KitKat and asking what is the probability that this exact KitKat is in my hand right now out of the billions that have been manufactured and why KitKat and not katkit (ie why did they name it KitKat) etc. Such probabilities are meaningless. I understand where this line of thinking comes from - wanting people to appreciate life more given how “improbable” it is that we are here. But that’s not the reason to appreciate life in my opinion and this kind of reasoning - first of all is not useful and secondly doesn’t have much meaning as I said. There are reasons to appreciate life of course even though we don’t understand a lot of them yet (since philosophy, including moral philosophy hasn’t ma...
Post a Comment
Read more

True Essence

My yoga teacher, who knows a lot about me and my story, recently asked me "what do you like about yourself, what is your true essence?". I gave the usual answer that I have been giving myself for most of my life - that I am kind, generous, helpful etc. etc. That was not the answer he was looking for. He said those things are in relation to other people i.e. these traits are what I think other people perceive me as. But what is really MY true essence and what do I like about MYSELF. He gave me a week to think about it. That did get me thinking. I talked to some friends about it over the week. I realised how much of my self-perception is dictated by other people. And it has been like that all my life. What I think of myself is really what I think others think of me. Or what I want others to think of me. But if I take other people out of the equation, what am I? What is my true essence? The more I thought, the more I realised that my true essence is creativity. Looking back...
1 comment
Read more