Value is not just financial (a common fallacy), but can also be emotional. Having a loving family is very high utility to you, but you are also providing high utility to your family members by supporting them. This could explain why billionaire entrepreneurs may be unhappy with life if they don't have any close friends or family, because they are very poor (not rich) emotionally. If the most important thing in life is to maximize utility for others, then being the sole rich person yourself is equivalent to zero wealth if you haven't delivered any utility to others. Nobody is happy about Trump making the White House fancier when they cannot afford food (and he is suing for an emergency stop on issuing food stamps).
It is important to note two aspects of delivering value. First, people generally have logarithmic utility functions. If you deliver all the value to a single person and zero value to others, that is not very high utility. Actually, this really means that you want to maximize the sum of utility you have provided other people. In theory, providing ten poor people $100,000 per year generates a much higher overall utility than providing one poor person $1,000,000 per year. Likewise, providing extremely high emotional support for one person and neglecting everyone else generates less value than providing high emotional support for multiple people (such as spouse+kids+family+friends).
The general (all types summed) utility function is logarithmic, but the constituent financial utility and emotional utility functions are also logarithmic. This is captured in the inwardly-bowed preference curve in economics. Poor people with lots of friends value money more than rich people with no friends, and the rich people with no friends value friendship more than poor people with lots of friends.
Also, people's utility functions change over time. This is why it makes sense that providing financial stability for your parents when they are 70 years old benefits them more than waiting until they are 80 years old to provide them immense wealth. The utility of providing them value earlier is higher; utility functions are not constant over time.
Therefore, there's three optimizations happening simultaneously:
1. How do I maximize the amount of utility I provide for others over the course of my entire lifetime?
2. How do I allocate value across people such that the allocations maximize the sum of everyone's utility, subject to fairness?
3. How do I allocate value across time such that the allocations maximize the sum of everyone's utility, subject to fairness?
This boils down to "be good and help everyone especially when they need it", since we are optimizing across self, relationships, and time. These three things by themselves are very important to life, so this seems to be a good smell check that this idea is ballpark correct.
Finally, it is important to remember that these are off-the-cuff thoughts by me at 21 years old. I will likely mature and have more nuanced or accurate thoughts about what is the most important thing in life when I get older. Also, life is very complex and it's impossible to completely distill it into simple theorems or ideas.
I'd really appreciate hearing other people's thoughts.
If you are currently trapped in survival mode and can't help yourself, look for someone else you can help.
As far your questions lead to sustainable happiness, they are worthy of your time.
Past that, those answers follow your experience and circumstances, things that are always in a state of change. Never stop reassessing.
If you're looking for yardsticks: Be kind. Do what it takes to learn empathy. Let other individuals' well-being become important to you.
>> The meaning of life is what you make of it. Life does not have any meaning apart from that, for a human, a dog, a bacterium, or anything else. It is up to you what the meaning of your life is. So, it is partially under your control. If someone were to say “Life is just a bowl of cherries?” If that is the way you want to look at life, fine. If you decide your life is maximization of goods, then that is the meaning of life. We can have sympathy for you, but that is what it is. If you decide that your life is friendship, love, mutual aid, mutual support, a community of people who try to increase their own and other people’s happiness and welfare, then that is the meaning of life. But there is no external force that decides.
If a person decides I’m going to be a hermit, I’ll get myself a piece of land in Montana, I’ll farm it, I’ll live by myself, I won’t pay any attention to other human beings, I’ll have no form of communication with others, okay, that is the meaning of your life. I know people who have become hermits. I met one climbing a mountain once. The guy was living in a mountain hut and he just wanted to be alone. That is a choice you can have. For most people, life means warm, supportive social relationships. But you don’t know it in advance.
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That said, when you look at the state of the world, particularly political world, the amount of malice, nastiness, crime, scam, .. you wonder what is the meaning of life for the majority of population!
After this comes the question of how you use/direct this agency - the "meaning of life", so that you feel fulfillment, you know who you are, what your "story" is (and this story can be seen clearly only afterwards).
The state of constant happiness is bad. One needs times of sadness in order to understand/see/remember the state of happiness. One needs rainy days to appreciate sunny ones.
But then, a satisfactory state of striving ever onward might be called happiness, if you like. Discontentment and all. I suppose happiness has contexts, and the main thing is to be happy in your autonomy, that is, not having your personal business disrupted by catastrophes and interference, in the widest context.
Life is not a formula. There is a squirrel climbing a tree in my garden as I look out the window. I could dedicate the rest of my life to squirrel study and still not know everything about squirrels.
Life is spiritual and physical. I trust in the ancient wisdom of the Bible which will be here after you and I, to understand life's meaning. I teach Tech and love learning. I find meaning through my faith and knowledge through my learning.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to see your and all of the comments which also have interesting ideas about it; what I mention above is only my own opinion.
I do agree with you that value is not just financial, and that you should not keep it only for yourself.
I'm not saying you should be wholly selfish, but you shouldn't be wholly selfless either.
"Love thy neighbor as thyself"
If you don't love yourself first, can you really love others to your fullest? Or in the context of your post, if your wellbeing is not the most important thing in your life, are you really able to do the best job at providing utility to others?
Too many wealthy people neglect their own wellbeing in the pursuit of providing utility to others, only to find themselves miserable later in life or die young due to poor health.