> What is the meaning of life? The question always makes my mind go blank. Then a negative answer comes. It has none.
Having no answer is not negative. You deem it negative because you have decided it should have a meaning.
People think nihilism and absurdism to be very pessimistic philosophies, for the sole reason that they do not want to accept that life has no absolute meaning. Even the idea of leaving your mark to the world is short-sighted selfcentredness, because in a long enough timescale people will even forget about Einstein.
No, what is pessimistic and aberrant is this very human notion that life must have meaning. Just embrace the reality of it. There is none. No one really cares or judge you at the end. It is such a happy and freeing platform to build your life around, rather than going through life silently cursing a God that by not existing, forgot to give you meaning.
Go through your own spiritual ego death. Then go do whatever you feel like doing, free from any shackles.
> People think nihilism and absurdism to be very pessimistic philosophies, for the sole reason that they do not want to accept that life has no absolute meaning.
My working definition of nihilism is not "life without meaning". Rather, it is "life without values." Values, here, means personal values. That which we seek to acquire and keep.
While some may have their own definitions that are at odds with mine, my view of nihilism is that it is a philosophy of self-sacrifice, because a nihilist (at least a logically consistent nihilist) does not value life, let alone anything else.
We have many examples of nihilist philosophies that are prevalent today. To give one: a particular variant of "envrionmentalism." Don't get me wrong, not all variants are nihilistic. But there is a specific variant that views humans as inherently destructive and at odds with "nature", and genuinely believes that humans ought to go extinct for the sake "nature", which is everything non-human. This is nihilistic because human life is what makes value possible in the first place, therefore without life you can't value anything, let alone "the planet."
> Then go do whatever you feel like doing, free from any shackles.
This is not nihilism, it is hedonism. There is a value there, albeit irrational ones (what if I feel like robbing a bank, or doing heroin? How will that work out for me?) But it is not without values, it values whims and pleasure without context.
Anyway I'm sure this is going to open up a big can of worms in the form of replies. I look forward to reading some of them but will probably opt to just do this single "drive by" comment since philosophical discussions are almost necessarily verbose and time consuming.
I mean you can happily define any term however you want.
It will cause certain kinds of issues though... but just because the community organized documentation of our massively open source project called philosophy says (very roughly):
let Nihilism: &str = "Life is without an (intrinsic|external), fixed basis for meaning."
you can absolutely redefine it in your personal REPO to mean.
let Nihilism: &str = "Life is without a personal basis for value."
But... I mean, your definition is very strange and is not aligned with the community docs, in many ways it is quite antithetical and will cause any dependent arguments or clauses to have runtime errors.
But I mean, if you want to pick a nihilism variant/alt (My favorite nihilism is Mereological Nihilism) and elevate it to be your primary definition of Nihilism that's ok!
No, hedonism is seeking pleasure. That is not what I said.
What you feel like doing is the stuff that makes you tick. The stuff that makes you get out of bed in the morning. For some, it's pleasure, for others, it's work, painting, surfing, seal-clubbing, whatever.
> what if I feel like robbing a bank, or doing heroin?
Then do that. People that feel like robbing banks, already are doing it, so what is the problem? Reminds me of the misconception from religious people that atheism means having no morals whatsoever, that it means murdering babies all day long. It won't be "philosophy" nor "religion" that stops you from doing harm, if that's what drives you.
I much prefer to believe that the vast majority of people have good intentions, and have loftier goals for themselves than pursuing hedonism.
That's an interesting distinction that clarifies the terms for me. Could you say that nihilism is rejecting values imposed upon the individual, while hedonism is asserting the right to arbitrary pleasure? One is a removal of values, the other is adding values. It seems to me that, in most cultures, some degree of nihilism is a prerequisite for hedonism.
> > Then go do whatever you feel like doing, free from any shackles.
> This is not nihilism, it is hedonism.
Only if you are driven by selfish desires, but that’s not the only way of operating even when there’s no external/“absolute” definition of meaning. See “selfless action”, “karma yoga” and “dharma” on page 45 of the spiritual life manual.
He's using the words "negative" and "positive" in a different sense than a value judgment "good/bad" -- negative meaning "no", "negaton", "nothing", and positive meaning "something". In philosophy this is the standard usage of the word "negative/positive", in contrast to common language.
> People think nihilism and absurdism to be very pessimistic philosophies
Well they are, and embracing them rather than entertaining them is probably a good way to get the soul-sickness.
What you're describing sounds closer to Existentialism. It gets put into this group sometimes too, but I don't think that's correct. My interpretation is that it's a more optimistic alternative where meaning exists, but it is fundamentally subjective & completely personal.
Embracing existentialism may feel like a heavy burden for some, but others will find it liberating since the emphasis is on personal responsibility. Like nihilism and absurdism, it requires no special faith in external things. But like Stoic or Zen traditions, it's actually pretty empowering. Responsibility for your life and its philosophy is a gift and a curse though, because there's so much work to do and that can feel overwhelming.
No one is coming for us, we have to save ourselves.
Actually I find this to be exactly the opposite (absurdism is pessimistic) because of the way our(my?) brains are wired to have existential thoughts, I think existential thoughts are fundamental in a way that formalized existentialism is not.
When I was a theist I would sometimes lay awake at night wondering if maybe I was wrong and everything was meaningless!
Once I was NOT a theist I would sometimes lay awake at night wondering if maybe I was wrong and everything has meaning!
Believe that everything is meaningless, truly believe it and you realize how little is known. Oh, sure I still believe everything is absurd... but late at night... what if everything is full of meaning? My knowledge is unfortunately not exhaustive.
I think no matter how deeply you investigate reality, and how many hypothesis and traditions self select out as untenable or plain false, intellectual humility is the real basis for happiness.
I also now suppose that increasing knowledge and "unknown reduction" is basically the foundational basis for morality as a species as well.
And I think this may actually be a decent and grounded basis for moral reasoning and moral realism.
I don't know a single religion that actually says we should pursue real ignorance, that uplifts ignorance as a state to pursue and increase. Unlearning "false" knowledge, sure, unlearning "habits", sure, but stupidity and ignorance, Pignorance if you will, are never viewed as the state we should pursue.
So I think the basis of morality and moral reasoning is a system that maximizes the number of avenues of pursuing knowledge. The greater the number of free (not in the deterministic/freewill sense) moral agents we can have running in our universe over time the more likely we are to find something if it is out there (over time.), and if not? Well, that's for a future generation to worry about if they ever manage to square the circle.
I suspect you have misinterpreted the meaning (a-ha :P ) of the word "negative", here. It was not (I claim) used to imply "pessimistic, depressing, upsetting", but rather - literally - to mean "an answer which is 'no, null, empty, not-a-thing'".
I'll freely admit that I didn't read to the _end_ of the article - but I got about halfway through, and I didn't detect any sense of disappointment from the author regarding their "negative" answer (nor, conversely, a yearning for a "positive" answer).
>People think nihilism and absurdism to be very pessimistic philosophies, for the sole reason that they do not want to accept that life has no absolute meaning.
Actually, I think this because a suspicious number of people who ID as open nihilists/absurdists when the Discord turns philosophical feel the need to say things like "but it's not like I'm depressed because life has no absolute meaning".
Maybe, but they often do turn out to be depressed. And claiming the arrow of causality does not exist actually isn't a proof that it doesn't exist. Plenty of obese people claim their daily caloric surplus has no relationship to their health problems, and they are just incorrect.
On the other hand, when I consider the moral realists I know, most of them seem to be quite happy people. I almost never hear someone say "But I'm not depressed because good is objective". Sometimes they might get sad or frustrated because they feel they suck at chasing it, but that's a level up.
In the most interesting case, I know of someone who started as a depressed non realist, read a bunch of middlebrow philosophy books, realized the moral realists actually had much stronger arguments than r/nihilism led them to believe, became a moral realist, and actually stopped being depressed. That would be me, myself. So that suggests a pretty strong arrow of causality to me.
I used to consider myself an "optimistic nihilist". But now, I understand the meaning of my life (by way of my biological programming) is producing offspring and ensuring they get to the point where they can produce offspring. They bring me great joy (AKA the right combination of bio-chemicals + electrical signals, ego death be damned).
So now, my meaning of life is my children. Any other "meaning" is something I make up and pretend (Eg. do a startup). And I'm at complete peace with all of that. And I'm still a very optimistic person.
In this use the negative means answering in the negation. E.g Q: "Would you like some tea?" A: "I wouldn't mind!". You are answering 'yes', negatively, i.e. in the negation, by responding that you would _not_ mind to have some tea.
It does not mean anything about the nature of the answer itself.
…is unanswerable not because life has no meaning, but because the answer is personal.
Part of growing up is to answer the question for yourself.
For me, part of the meaning of life is to walk in the woods and see as much as I can.
Part of the meaning of life is to understand the trauma of my family of origin and take steps forward with my daughter. Part of the meaning of life is to be ambitious and creative and build something lasting and useful, but to not do so in isolation, to be integrated in culture and people I respect.
Exactly zero of those may apply to you or anyone else. I’ve been here for 42 years and those are things that seem steady to me.
But another person could find radically different meaning.
That’s what I think these attempts to define life’s meaning in an essay are doomed to fail. The meaning of life is not a thing in the world. It’s a process we each can embark on, if we so choose.
Words have meaning. Meaning is that which points to something besides itself. Zen is a finger pointing at the moon, do not mistake the finger for the moon.
What is the "meaning" of a mountain? What a silly question. The only reason the "meaning of life" seems coherent is because we wrap our very sense of existence in words.
Let go of words and definitions and just be. At rest in all that is.
Of all the Great Sophomoric Questions, "what is the meaning of life" is the most sophomoric of all. The paradigm case of the sophomoric question.
An observation, not a criticism! The author is a professor of philosophy, it is in fact his professional duty to engage with and teach the Great Sophomoric Questions.
And nearly all of us were sophomores, once or twice. Some of us, presumably, are sophomores right this instant.
Fortunately for all of us, after millennia of searching enquiry, this question, finally, has a definitive answer: the Meaning of Life is a 1983 musical sketch comedy, by the inimitable British troupe of Oxbridge philosophers, Monty Python.
While better known for their invention of the most popular programming language in data science, we owe the Pythons a great debt for at last settling this question, once and for all.
Shoot, and here I am with my immediate reaction to "What is the meaning of life?" as "To do right by my fellow man".
I guess I'll never be one of the cool kids who can honestly answer this question with a deafening silence. Oh, well. I'd rather be happy doing right by my fellow man because that's the point of it all than sitting in a corner ruminating on whether my intuition is misguided.
Can't argue against the first point, that distinction is probably true. But contra "hard to locate": Take vision. Suppose you see a cat. Your vision is subjective in a sense... but there's a pretty strong correlation to there actually being a cat.
In fact, all of our senses work like that. So it would be surprising if this other felt sense isn't also usually, approximately, but correctly, homing in on objective good.
Are there times when what we perceive to be true really is rarely the actual truth? Absolutely -- in deeply abstracted thinking, and over highly complex domains. That seems to me to be more of an argument against trusting the complicated chains of logic that lead one to deny the evidence of their moral senses, though. I've made enough "trivial" mistakes in math class that led to a totally wrong conclusion to be skeptical, and that was back when I could check the right answer with Wolfram|Alpha.
(My own deeply abstracted thinking suggests that your moral intuition homes in on objective good similarly to how the processes of markets home in on Pareto efficiency. See how silly that sounds? And yet I can't shake it. It's like making up a conspiracy theory to explain why water is wet!)
While I wholly agree with your prioritization - in fairness it is not impossible to take pragmatic helpful actions _while also_ ruminating on whether they are philosophically watertight.
What does this mean for small children, that lack the language and ability to understand abstract notions such as structure required for narratives?
What does this mean for mystics, who claim that the most important points in life are beyond narration? How about psychedelic experiences, which in a similar way escape from the constraints of storytelling?
In a society where the absolute majority of storytelling happens in advertising, doesn't it carry risks to hinge your personality and belief on this practice?
Edit: Ah.
"Galen John Strawson (born 1952) is a British analytic philosopher".
> What does this mean for small children, that lack the language and ability to understand abstract notions such as structure required for narratives?
It means nothing to them. I think they don't care about such trivialities as a meaning of life, they just live it and are happy splashing in a puddle of water (I still remember how happy I was in one pretty big puddle, there was a lot of splashing!).
> What does this mean for mystics, who claim that the most important points in life are beyond narration? How about psychedelic experiences, which in a similar way escape from the constraints of storytelling?
That's about searching of other narratives when your chosen one isn't working for you.
> In a society where the absolute majority of storytelling happens in advertising, doesn't it carry risks to hinge your personality and belief on this practice?
Yeah. When you chose a specific meaning of life, you risk it being not aligned with your inner expectations, even worse when you chose a meaning pushed down from people who don't care for your wellbeing. Like with any metaphor of life (life is a game | life is a series of transactions | life is a story | life is life [nah nah, nah, nah nah] ).
From article:
> More bluntly: it’s certainly not true that all of us are naturally Narrative; not as I understand the notion. Some people are naturally non-Narrative. Some, like myself, are profoundly anti-Narrative. We conform to the eight platitudes, but we don’t in any way conceive of our lives as having the form of a story.
I think they'll be surprised and frightened when treated as if their lives lack meaning.
What do you mean, "working for you"? Do you consider a meaningful life instrumental in relation to something else, which we have to conclude is meaningless or it would be the meaning of that life?
I get the impression that you manifest the risk I was alluding to in my initial comment. There's a huge distance between the person Augustine described in his confessions, notably book 2, about the pear tree, and the kind of 'choosy' personality you describe here. Are you really, really sure about which kind is preferable to you?
You can feel it when you're doing what gives your life meaning. For me, I am at my best when using my skills and resources to serve my family and friends. It could be as simple as hosting a get-together or helping someone move.
For me, the meaning of life becomes 'doing the things that are necessary for life'.
This is a helpful reminder that I get most satisfaction from those things - cooking, gardening, physical activity, socialising with and helping/nurturing others, etc.
In the modern world, most of us 'make a living' by doing quite abstract tasks and fall into the trap of using that income to replace what we think of as mundane tasks with more convenient alternatives (fast food, movies instead of conversation, etc). In a sense, we alienate ourselves from what our lives actually are.
A scattered piece, and it would not have suffered from the attentions of a decent editor.
But, the meaning of life is living. It's all we have and it's the grandeur mentioned. There's no universal meaning beyond that, none at all. I and thee are meaningless in any general sense. I think that Camus had it right.
I have barely managed to read through, holy shield! this feels like someone barfed out pretentious BS, sprinkled in some random quotes out of everything loosely related to "meaning of life" and uploaded straight to web without a single proofread.
Readit News
Having no answer is not negative. You deem it negative because you have decided it should have a meaning.
People think nihilism and absurdism to be very pessimistic philosophies, for the sole reason that they do not want to accept that life has no absolute meaning. Even the idea of leaving your mark to the world is short-sighted selfcentredness, because in a long enough timescale people will even forget about Einstein.
No, what is pessimistic and aberrant is this very human notion that life must have meaning. Just embrace the reality of it. There is none. No one really cares or judge you at the end. It is such a happy and freeing platform to build your life around, rather than going through life silently cursing a God that by not existing, forgot to give you meaning.
Go through your own spiritual ego death. Then go do whatever you feel like doing, free from any shackles.
My working definition of nihilism is not "life without meaning". Rather, it is "life without values." Values, here, means personal values. That which we seek to acquire and keep.
While some may have their own definitions that are at odds with mine, my view of nihilism is that it is a philosophy of self-sacrifice, because a nihilist (at least a logically consistent nihilist) does not value life, let alone anything else.
We have many examples of nihilist philosophies that are prevalent today. To give one: a particular variant of "envrionmentalism." Don't get me wrong, not all variants are nihilistic. But there is a specific variant that views humans as inherently destructive and at odds with "nature", and genuinely believes that humans ought to go extinct for the sake "nature", which is everything non-human. This is nihilistic because human life is what makes value possible in the first place, therefore without life you can't value anything, let alone "the planet."
> Then go do whatever you feel like doing, free from any shackles.
This is not nihilism, it is hedonism. There is a value there, albeit irrational ones (what if I feel like robbing a bank, or doing heroin? How will that work out for me?) But it is not without values, it values whims and pleasure without context.
Anyway I'm sure this is going to open up a big can of worms in the form of replies. I look forward to reading some of them but will probably opt to just do this single "drive by" comment since philosophical discussions are almost necessarily verbose and time consuming.
I mean you can happily define any term however you want.
It will cause certain kinds of issues though... but just because the community organized documentation of our massively open source project called philosophy says (very roughly):
let Nihilism: &str = "Life is without an (intrinsic|external), fixed basis for meaning."
you can absolutely redefine it in your personal REPO to mean.
let Nihilism: &str = "Life is without a personal basis for value."
But... I mean, your definition is very strange and is not aligned with the community docs, in many ways it is quite antithetical and will cause any dependent arguments or clauses to have runtime errors.
But I mean, if you want to pick a nihilism variant/alt (My favorite nihilism is Mereological Nihilism) and elevate it to be your primary definition of Nihilism that's ok!
No, hedonism is seeking pleasure. That is not what I said.
What you feel like doing is the stuff that makes you tick. The stuff that makes you get out of bed in the morning. For some, it's pleasure, for others, it's work, painting, surfing, seal-clubbing, whatever.
> what if I feel like robbing a bank, or doing heroin?
Then do that. People that feel like robbing banks, already are doing it, so what is the problem? Reminds me of the misconception from religious people that atheism means having no morals whatsoever, that it means murdering babies all day long. It won't be "philosophy" nor "religion" that stops you from doing harm, if that's what drives you.
I much prefer to believe that the vast majority of people have good intentions, and have loftier goals for themselves than pursuing hedonism.
> This is not nihilism, it is hedonism.
Only if you are driven by selfish desires, but that’s not the only way of operating even when there’s no external/“absolute” definition of meaning. See “selfless action”, “karma yoga” and “dharma” on page 45 of the spiritual life manual.
Well they are, and embracing them rather than entertaining them is probably a good way to get the soul-sickness.
What you're describing sounds closer to Existentialism. It gets put into this group sometimes too, but I don't think that's correct. My interpretation is that it's a more optimistic alternative where meaning exists, but it is fundamentally subjective & completely personal.
Embracing existentialism may feel like a heavy burden for some, but others will find it liberating since the emphasis is on personal responsibility. Like nihilism and absurdism, it requires no special faith in external things. But like Stoic or Zen traditions, it's actually pretty empowering. Responsibility for your life and its philosophy is a gift and a curse though, because there's so much work to do and that can feel overwhelming.
No one is coming for us, we have to save ourselves.
When I was a theist I would sometimes lay awake at night wondering if maybe I was wrong and everything was meaningless!
Once I was NOT a theist I would sometimes lay awake at night wondering if maybe I was wrong and everything has meaning!
Believe that everything is meaningless, truly believe it and you realize how little is known. Oh, sure I still believe everything is absurd... but late at night... what if everything is full of meaning? My knowledge is unfortunately not exhaustive.
I think no matter how deeply you investigate reality, and how many hypothesis and traditions self select out as untenable or plain false, intellectual humility is the real basis for happiness.
I also now suppose that increasing knowledge and "unknown reduction" is basically the foundational basis for morality as a species as well.
And I think this may actually be a decent and grounded basis for moral reasoning and moral realism.
I don't know a single religion that actually says we should pursue real ignorance, that uplifts ignorance as a state to pursue and increase. Unlearning "false" knowledge, sure, unlearning "habits", sure, but stupidity and ignorance, Pignorance if you will, are never viewed as the state we should pursue.
So I think the basis of morality and moral reasoning is a system that maximizes the number of avenues of pursuing knowledge. The greater the number of free (not in the deterministic/freewill sense) moral agents we can have running in our universe over time the more likely we are to find something if it is out there (over time.), and if not? Well, that's for a future generation to worry about if they ever manage to square the circle.
I'll freely admit that I didn't read to the _end_ of the article - but I got about halfway through, and I didn't detect any sense of disappointment from the author regarding their "negative" answer (nor, conversely, a yearning for a "positive" answer).
Actually, I think this because a suspicious number of people who ID as open nihilists/absurdists when the Discord turns philosophical feel the need to say things like "but it's not like I'm depressed because life has no absolute meaning".
Maybe, but they often do turn out to be depressed. And claiming the arrow of causality does not exist actually isn't a proof that it doesn't exist. Plenty of obese people claim their daily caloric surplus has no relationship to their health problems, and they are just incorrect.
On the other hand, when I consider the moral realists I know, most of them seem to be quite happy people. I almost never hear someone say "But I'm not depressed because good is objective". Sometimes they might get sad or frustrated because they feel they suck at chasing it, but that's a level up.
In the most interesting case, I know of someone who started as a depressed non realist, read a bunch of middlebrow philosophy books, realized the moral realists actually had much stronger arguments than r/nihilism led them to believe, became a moral realist, and actually stopped being depressed. That would be me, myself. So that suggests a pretty strong arrow of causality to me.
I used to consider myself an "optimistic nihilist". But now, I understand the meaning of my life (by way of my biological programming) is producing offspring and ensuring they get to the point where they can produce offspring. They bring me great joy (AKA the right combination of bio-chemicals + electrical signals, ego death be damned).
So now, my meaning of life is my children. Any other "meaning" is something I make up and pretend (Eg. do a startup). And I'm at complete peace with all of that. And I'm still a very optimistic person.
That's not what people do you know.
> Go through your own spiritual ego death. Then go do whatever you feel like doing, free from any shackles.
Free from any shackles, even those of our innate empathy? No thanks. And please don't either.
It does not mean anything about the nature of the answer itself.
…is unanswerable not because life has no meaning, but because the answer is personal.
Part of growing up is to answer the question for yourself.
For me, part of the meaning of life is to walk in the woods and see as much as I can. Part of the meaning of life is to understand the trauma of my family of origin and take steps forward with my daughter. Part of the meaning of life is to be ambitious and creative and build something lasting and useful, but to not do so in isolation, to be integrated in culture and people I respect.
Exactly zero of those may apply to you or anyone else. I’ve been here for 42 years and those are things that seem steady to me.
But another person could find radically different meaning.
That’s what I think these attempts to define life’s meaning in an essay are doomed to fail. The meaning of life is not a thing in the world. It’s a process we each can embark on, if we so choose.
What is the "meaning" of a mountain? What a silly question. The only reason the "meaning of life" seems coherent is because we wrap our very sense of existence in words.
Let go of words and definitions and just be. At rest in all that is.
It’s hard to let go of language
But it’s an amazing experience when we can stop it from mediating or even interrupting, our perception of the present moment
Just being, just here, just now
Thank you for the reminder
Be of one mind with the tool. Use it to complete your purpose. Then, the work complete, put the tool down and walk away. The only path to serenity.
An observation, not a criticism! The author is a professor of philosophy, it is in fact his professional duty to engage with and teach the Great Sophomoric Questions.
And nearly all of us were sophomores, once or twice. Some of us, presumably, are sophomores right this instant.
Fortunately for all of us, after millennia of searching enquiry, this question, finally, has a definitive answer: the Meaning of Life is a 1983 musical sketch comedy, by the inimitable British troupe of Oxbridge philosophers, Monty Python.
While better known for their invention of the most popular programming language in data science, we owe the Pythons a great debt for at last settling this question, once and for all.
I guess I'll never be one of the cool kids who can honestly answer this question with a deafening silence. Oh, well. I'd rather be happy doing right by my fellow man because that's the point of it all than sitting in a corner ruminating on whether my intuition is misguided.
I'm a moral realist. Everyone seems to advocate that some things are properly basic, I think morality is one of those things.
In fact, all of our senses work like that. So it would be surprising if this other felt sense isn't also usually, approximately, but correctly, homing in on objective good.
Are there times when what we perceive to be true really is rarely the actual truth? Absolutely -- in deeply abstracted thinking, and over highly complex domains. That seems to me to be more of an argument against trusting the complicated chains of logic that lead one to deny the evidence of their moral senses, though. I've made enough "trivial" mistakes in math class that led to a totally wrong conclusion to be skeptical, and that was back when I could check the right answer with Wolfram|Alpha.
(My own deeply abstracted thinking suggests that your moral intuition homes in on objective good similarly to how the processes of markets home in on Pareto efficiency. See how silly that sounds? And yet I can't shake it. It's like making up a conspiracy theory to explain why water is wet!)
What does this mean for mystics, who claim that the most important points in life are beyond narration? How about psychedelic experiences, which in a similar way escape from the constraints of storytelling?
In a society where the absolute majority of storytelling happens in advertising, doesn't it carry risks to hinge your personality and belief on this practice?
Edit: Ah.
"Galen John Strawson (born 1952) is a British analytic philosopher".
It means nothing to them. I think they don't care about such trivialities as a meaning of life, they just live it and are happy splashing in a puddle of water (I still remember how happy I was in one pretty big puddle, there was a lot of splashing!).
> What does this mean for mystics, who claim that the most important points in life are beyond narration? How about psychedelic experiences, which in a similar way escape from the constraints of storytelling?
That's about searching of other narratives when your chosen one isn't working for you.
> In a society where the absolute majority of storytelling happens in advertising, doesn't it carry risks to hinge your personality and belief on this practice?
Yeah. When you chose a specific meaning of life, you risk it being not aligned with your inner expectations, even worse when you chose a meaning pushed down from people who don't care for your wellbeing. Like with any metaphor of life (life is a game | life is a series of transactions | life is a story | life is life [nah nah, nah, nah nah] ).
From article:
> More bluntly: it’s certainly not true that all of us are naturally Narrative; not as I understand the notion. Some people are naturally non-Narrative. Some, like myself, are profoundly anti-Narrative. We conform to the eight platitudes, but we don’t in any way conceive of our lives as having the form of a story.
What do you mean, "working for you"? Do you consider a meaningful life instrumental in relation to something else, which we have to conclude is meaningless or it would be the meaning of that life?
I get the impression that you manifest the risk I was alluding to in my initial comment. There's a huge distance between the person Augustine described in his confessions, notably book 2, about the pear tree, and the kind of 'choosy' personality you describe here. Are you really, really sure about which kind is preferable to you?
This is a helpful reminder that I get most satisfaction from those things - cooking, gardening, physical activity, socialising with and helping/nurturing others, etc.
In the modern world, most of us 'make a living' by doing quite abstract tasks and fall into the trap of using that income to replace what we think of as mundane tasks with more convenient alternatives (fast food, movies instead of conversation, etc). In a sense, we alienate ourselves from what our lives actually are.