Unlock the Secret to a Meaningful Life: Lessons from ‘What Life Could Mean to You’

The Dichotomy Of Life & Our Existential Angst

When our minds and hearts can’t put a finger on our deepest insecurities, a feeling called the existential angst is born. Unlike many of our seemingly fleeting emotions like sadness, hate and hurt, this feeling seems to linger around longer. It shows up as deep anxiety when we’re faced with uncertainty, and makes us battle our instincts and our intellect with gusto.

Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher, wrote, ‘Man is the only animal which causes pain to others with no other objective than causing pain… No animal ever torments another for the sake of tormenting: but man does so, and it is this which constitutes the diabolical nature which is far worse than the merely bestial’.

And that’s to say that for no apparent reason, we humans, choose to complicate our lives with purposefully inflicting suffering. One minute we’re reveling in food, entertainment and gossip, the next hour, we’re dwelling in life’s deepest mysteries, “Why are we here, what’s our purpose?” And these aha moments can even occur in the 4 boring seconds before the next Netflix recommendation starts playing.

The Meaning of Life

As suggested in the book: What Life Could Mean To You?

“The person who meets the problems of human life successfully acts as if he recognized, fully and spontaneously, that the fundamental meaning of life is interest in and co-operation with other people. Everything he does seems to be guided by the interests of his fellow beings, and where he encounters difficulties, he tries to overcome them in ways that do not impinge on the welfare of others…

“We are not determined by our experiences but are self-determined by the meaning we give to them; and when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life, we are almost certain to be misguided to some degree. Meanings are not determined by situations. We determine ourselves by the meanings we ascribe to situations.”

From Wiki:
Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of inferiority, the inferiority complex, is recognized as an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development.

Meaning Of Life Meme

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Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be

“The anxiety of meaninglessness is anxiety about the loss of an ultimate concern, of a meaning which gives meaning to all meanings. This anxiety is aroused by the loss of a spiritual center, of an answer, however symbolic and indirect, to the question of the meaning of existence. . .

“The anxiety of emptiness is aroused by the threat of nonbeing to the special contents of the spiritual life. A belief breaks down through external events or inner processes: one is cut off from creative participation in a sphere of culture, one feels frustrated about something which one had passionately affirmed, one is driven from devotion to one object to devotion to another and again on to another, because the meaning of each of them vanishes and the creative eros is transformed into indifference or aversion. Everything is tried and nothing satisfies. The contents of the tradition, however excellent, however praised, however loved once, lose their power to give content today. And present culture is even less able to provide the content. Anxiously one turns away from all concrete contents and looks for an ultimate meaning, only to discover that it was precisely the loss of a spiritual center which took away the meaning from the special contents of the spiritual life. But a spiritual center cannot be produced intentionally, and the attempt to produce it only produces deeper anxiety. The anxiety of emptiness drives us to the abyss of meaninglessness.”

Alan Watts, The Wisdom Of Insecurity

“…the “brainy” economy designed to produce…happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse — providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places.

His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity — shock treatments — as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings.

The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire…Generally speaking, the civilized man does not know what he wants. He works for success, fame, a happy marriage, fun, to help other people, or to be a “real person.” But these are not real wants because they are not actual things. They are the by-products, the flavors and atmospheres of real things — shadows which have no existence apart from some substance. Money is the perfect symbol of all such desires, being a mere symbol of real wealth, and to make it one’s goal is the most blatant example of confusing measurements with reality.”

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