This article silently assumes that a "meaningful life" means:
- making good choices of the projects you work on
- making those projects succeed, or at least ensure pushing them forward
So it reduces this broad topic "meaningful life" to the aspects of personal time management, project management and motivation management. In short, the article appears to be very work-centric (but including paid work as well as volunteer work).
Within this work-centric view, the article is great. But given the article's title, I would have expected a broader treatment of the whole topic.
Not so surprising, since most people enjoy the satisfaction of having their plans work out, achieving goals and so on - and consumerism, the dominant 'philosophy' of western liberalism, is all about the accumulation of satisfying experiences.
Of course, this doesn't sound all that great when it's reduced to its bare bones. That's why extremist ideologues often find great political success by promoting a stark message: a life filled with suffering and struggle offers more meaning then one where there's never any danger or anxiety. Hitler told the German people quite frankly that they'd have to go through fire to realize his vision, and that sounded good to enough people that he was able to make good on the promise. Likewise, millions of Slavs were willing to sacrifice themselves against hopeless odds (as it seemed at the time) to repel the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Indeed, once a country goes to war there invariably seems to be a great outpouring of enthusiasm because the inherently pointless quotidian struggles of work, survival, acquisition and consumption are replaced with the much more exciting and arousing struggles for life and death, for which economic competition is only the proxy.
I believe there are two basic reasons for this. One, most people don't enjoy thinking for its own sake all that much, but when you're in a survival situation you can dispense with all that tedious mentation and really live in the moment. For people who have lived a qualitatively meaningless life up to that point, this is tremendously liberating. The other reason is that life is never sweeter than when death is close, and danger is highly correlated with sexual arousal for evolutionary reasons - hence the epidemic of rape during wartime. When time horizons are short, prohibited actions are no longer consequential, and the normal moral calculus is abandoned, then expression triumphs over repression.
In sum, we're not really cut out for long-term thinking and abstract mentation for its own sake appeals to only a tiny minority. There is great value to living in the moment but most people don't know how to do it, and so their frustration builds up, to the detriment of the social body which must eventually express the excess -much as a boil is tolerable until it becomes a cyst and needs to be lanced.
This is the reason that attempts to create a totally safe society are doomed - the safer you make it, the more of a prison it becomes. I'd rather not write an essay about this, but there's a reason that aristocratic societies allowed and created formal rules for dueling.
I think there is a lot of truth in your comment. But I also noticed that are drawing connections between things and presenting them as evident and exclusive, apparently without thinking about other effects. For example you say
> danger is highly correlated with sexual arousal for evolutionary reasons - hence the epidemic of rape during wartime
I doubt the premise. But more than that, doubt that the epidemic of rape is really dominantly caused by fear-induced sexual arousal. The much more likely explanation is that in war, traumatized men with weapons who haven't had sex in a long time meet women that hold no power against them. On top of that, rape often goes unpunished or is expected.
All of these are better explanations than yours.
This is just an example for the issue I have with your way of reasoning.
Thanks for the feedback. I feel we're making the same point in different ways - I suppose I opted for a stylistic flourish at the expense of clarity. I don't men that men (most soldiers being men) are sexually aroused by imminent fear and autonomically assault the nearest convenient victim, but rather than that sense of present and ongoing trauma promotes violent opportunism against vulnerable persons.
I mention the evolutionary basis because it seems obvious to me that if your future survival is in constant jeopardy and your priority was to pass on your genome at all costs then you'd try to have sex any time the opportunity arose just in case it was the last time. But yeah I'm making some sweeping assumptions and stating them a bit arrogantly too.
> we're not really cut out for long-term thinking and abstract mentation for its own sake appeals to only a tiny minority. There is great value to living in the moment but most people don't know how to do it
That's the most convincing argument in favor of eugenics that I've ever heard. It's a shame that we can't easily test for affinity for long-term, abstract thinking; nor for ability to live in the moment.
Under my regime idiots who advocate for euthanasia on the basis of interest in abstract mentition with no true justification will be euthanized to protect those who don't subscribe to their fevered hallucination.
It is. If I read the great-grandparent correctly, violence is only needed as an outlet because the majority of humans don't have a particular combination of attributes; therefore, one solution to that brand of inevitable violence, is to artificially select for precisely those attributes.
No, you haven't read it correctly, and I apologize for the lack of clarity in my remarks.
My argument is that violence is only needed as an outlet because some people (a smallish minority) are willing to use it on a discretionary to further their own ends.
I do not have omniscient knowledge of the causes and dynamics of violence. If it were possible to make a few thousand clones of myself and put them on an island with abundant resources (let's not worry about reproduction in this example), I can't say that violence would never break out because opinions would inevitably diverge in the light of my clones' diverse experiences, and if the differences of opinion proved irreconcilable then conflict could break out and violence might might ensue. Since we're talking about my clones arguments are virtually guaranteed :-)
tl;dr a nation of philosophers would not necessarily be peaceful under all circumstances, and I think you'd be foolish to attempt to engineer such a thing. I don't know with which aspects of my personality can be ascribed to genetics and which are a function of my upbringing or adult experience.
Hence my particular turn-of-phrase: "that brand of inevitable violence [described by anigbrowl]". Yes, I probably should have included that bracketed clause.
(aside: AFAICT, needing violence to remove violence is as much an inevitability as needing guns to remove guns.)
If anyone's interested, there's a great book called Designing Your Life [1] which delves more deeply into the basic concept from this piece (identify what's most important to you and measure your progress toward those goals). It's based on a Stanford course of a similar name, and is an excellent read.
Given a certain background of assumptions about meaningfulness, the article offers up some sufficiently plausible tactics. The assumptions though lean heavily on values unique to this particular civilisation. With its value-free description of merely individual pet 'projects', I suspect (but can't of course know) that it would be incomprehensible to the vast majority of humans that have ever lived.
Given how rapidly our planet's ecosystems are collapsing under that same civilisation's depredations, this might be an unwise hostage to fortune.
1) Imagine yourself on dying bed - what would you regret/be proud of in your past life? Strive to go that way.
2) Bring good to humanity, and don't do evil. If nothing else, if raising kids, be a good parent and role model - don't bring more unbalanced, fucked up, childhood-issue-riddled people into this world. Too many of those around already.
Why optimize for the contentment of one moment of your life? There's no way to know, usually, how such will play out. I think people should optimize for every day contentment with an eye toward the future. I.e. Periodically evaluating how content they feel and making due adjustments.
I mean, who knows what dying is actually like; you might end up thinking about peanut butter and lint. However, feeling shitty about your life can happen at any point, and the death perspective just helps force you to consider what you value about your life.
From brief exposure to various death-bed regrets, I get the impression that people generally regret what they didn't do. I.e. if one had a family-focused life, they'll regret not doing anything useful. If they worked hard to help their community or the world, they'll regret not spending enough time on relationships or not starting a family. Etc.
An issue with 1), is that many people don't actually care prior to that situation. There are so many people with no goals and no motivation to do anything. They may start a project, but there is no incentive to complete it. If you don't work towards anything, you won't have anything to regret.
Do people really do retrospectives of their lives on their death beds? Seems like a really odd thing to do during final hours of life. I am sure everyone no matter how meaningful their lives are, is going to have regrets.
I just hope I am mentally well enough during my final days to enjoy it, not do an inventory of regrets vs accomplishments.
Revenge is underrated. Forgiveness is great, but only if the guilty party alters their hurtful behavior. If they just keep up their wicked ways, there's no moral reason to keep forgiving them over and over. Indeed, I'd argue it's rather irresponsible since you know they're going to hurt other people.
Do you ever have moments when you look back at some of your experiences (school, work, relations, spirituality, health, etc.) and reflect on them? Either because you enjoyed them, messed up, etc.
if so, this is similar but on a grander scale.
> I just hope I am mentally well enough during my final days to enjoy it, not do an inventory of regrets vs accomplishments.
Those two aren't mutually exclusive. You can reflect on your life and enjoy it to the very end. The general idea is to live the kind of life you can look back on and smile about when death comes knocking.
You don't have to have that kind of experience when you're near death of course, but a lot of people do.
- making good choices of the projects you work on
- making those projects succeed, or at least ensure pushing them forward
So it reduces this broad topic "meaningful life" to the aspects of personal time management, project management and motivation management. In short, the article appears to be very work-centric (but including paid work as well as volunteer work).
Within this work-centric view, the article is great. But given the article's title, I would have expected a broader treatment of the whole topic.