As far as I can tell, meaning is a feeling, something like a passive sense that you’re on the right track. The feeling is generated when you are working on something that you personally enjoy and care about, and when you are socializing sufficiently often with people you enjoy and care about. “Friends and hobbies are the meaning of life” is how I might phrase it.
Note that the activity that you spend your time on could be collecting all the stars in Mario64, as long as you actually care about completing the task. However, you tend to find it harder to care about things that don’t involve winning status or helping people, especially as you get older.
I think some people get themselves into psychological trouble by deciding that all of the things that they enjoy aren’t “important” and interacting with people they care about is a “distraction”. They paint themselves into a corner where the only thing they allow themselves to consider doing is something for which they feel no emotional attraction. They feel like they should enjoy it because they’ve decided it’s important, but they don’t, and then they feel guilty about that. The solution to this is to recognize the kind of animal you are and try to feed the needs that you have rather than the ones you wish you had.
Thanks! Some questions on what caring about stuff feels like for you:
Do you immediately/readily tell whether or not you care about something, or do you think about and “decide” what things you care about?
Have you had any things that you cared about for some time, then something happened that made you not care about it anymore? If so, what did that feel like?
To point one, if I feel an excitement and eagerness about the thing, and if I expect I would feel sad if the thing were suddenly taken away, then I can be pretty sure that it’s important to me. But — and this relates to point two — it’s hard to care about the same thing for weeks or months or years at a time with the same intensity. Some projects of mine have oscillated between providing deep meaning and being a major drag, depending on contingent factors. This might manifest as a sense of ugh arising around certain facets of the activity. Usually the ugh goes away eventually. Sometimes it doesn’t, and you either accept that the unpleasantness is part and parcel with the fun, or you decide it’s not worth it.
As far as I can tell, meaning is a feeling, something like a passive sense that you’re on the right track. The feeling is generated when you are working on something that you personally enjoy and care about, and when you are socializing sufficiently often with people you enjoy and care about. “Friends and hobbies are the meaning of life” is how I might phrase it.
Note that the activity that you spend your time on could be collecting all the stars in Mario64, as long as you actually care about completing the task. However, you tend to find it harder to care about things that don’t involve winning status or helping people, especially as you get older.
I think some people get themselves into psychological trouble by deciding that all of the things that they enjoy aren’t “important” and interacting with people they care about is a “distraction”. They paint themselves into a corner where the only thing they allow themselves to consider doing is something for which they feel no emotional attraction. They feel like they should enjoy it because they’ve decided it’s important, but they don’t, and then they feel guilty about that. The solution to this is to recognize the kind of animal you are and try to feed the needs that you have rather than the ones you wish you had.
Thanks! Some questions on what caring about stuff feels like for you:
Do you immediately/readily tell whether or not you care about something, or do you think about and “decide” what things you care about?
Have you had any things that you cared about for some time, then something happened that made you not care about it anymore? If so, what did that feel like?
To point one, if I feel an excitement and eagerness about the thing, and if I expect I would feel sad if the thing were suddenly taken away, then I can be pretty sure that it’s important to me. But — and this relates to point two — it’s hard to care about the same thing for weeks or months or years at a time with the same intensity. Some projects of mine have oscillated between providing deep meaning and being a major drag, depending on contingent factors. This might manifest as a sense of ugh arising around certain facets of the activity. Usually the ugh goes away eventually. Sometimes it doesn’t, and you either accept that the unpleasantness is part and parcel with the fun, or you decide it’s not worth it.