The meaning of life
Filed under: life
Today, I had a taxipiphany (an epiphany in a taxi) on my way home from my son’s school. I was reading an article called Better living through self-deception and this paragraph struck me:
The standard model of the happy, smart, successful human being is someone who knows more, works hard, and has found, or at least is heading toward, their own personal meaning of life.
If I could make a couple of changes, I’d say knowing enough is better than knowing “more” and working smarter rather than harder but the key element was reaching your own personal meaning of life.
People spend their lives searching for THE meaning of life when they could be working towards THEIR meaning of life. No two life experiences are identical and it’s up to us to find a purpose, bespoke to us (if we want to. I don’t subscribe to the notion that everyone has a calling, that it’s our destiny, and we should all do that forever). The point is we have the power to do what we want in that regard. It doesn’t matter about aptitudes. A lot of that is rooted in bigotry and hypercapitalist ideals (see Myers-Briggs personality tests and the racist history of IQ).
What is your meaning of life?