Amateurish meditations

Having struggled with somewhat of an existential crisis (or perhaps we should just call it depression, I'm not sure) for a few years I'm starting to feel like things are getting better for me. I've tried to formulate what realizations and changes of perspective have helped me with this. I don't think it will be very helpful to most, as my experience is often that even with the most celebrated texts like 'The Myth of Sisyphus' I don't get much out of them and then after having learned a number of things 'the hard way' it finally hits me "oh that's what he was talking about"; and these are basically the ramblings of an absolute amateur (I'm not even a trained philosopher or anything). But perhaps this is of some interest to someone, and some feedback would be really nice, or perhaps it could open some discussion. I know not all my points are argued-for that well, but as Nietzsche said "It's hard enough to remember my opinions without also remembering my reasons for them". I'm interested to see if anyone feels like there's any merit to these views at all. I want to mainly disagree with two perspectives; one is the absurdist/existentialist idea that we can make our own meaning; I think the perspective that we have to discover meaning is a lot more accurate. The other is the radical nihilism that existentialism universally tries to solve but which I think it is far too allied with: The idea that everything is fundamentally meaningless. I would hold that the standard existentialist view of 'make your own meaning' is not any kind of resolve for nihilism, but if anything a cynical joke about the human condition that implicitly still assumes that all is really, deep-down, meaningless.

To start off: Life may seem meaningless and have us constantly caught up in the problem that nothing really seems worth doing; a way to live that cannot end well, for if there's nothing that makes life worth living, but life obviously comes with things that make us question whether we want to be alive, then its only a matter of this sinking in and growing cynical enough about the hope of finding a way out, before the logical conclusion is suicide. Having found myself frozen by fear and lost in meaninglessness, here I attempt to supply the mechanism by which I can force myself to live.

What's worth doing we will call meaningful.

Our point of departure should perhaps be that realization that is all too common in our times, which is that "objectively speaking, everything is meaningless". I have found that this is commonly regarded as a statement that is either superfluous, in itself meaningless, or even a point for an idiot to make; it's a stupid perspective to adopt, so it is thought (by J.B. Peterson for example: "Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters"). However, it seems that a human being is not able to simply take another perspective out of nowhere, without good reasons. Having gotten to the conclusion that objectively speaking, all is meaningless, one cannot just get out of there by an act of will, at least not just by will. In order to get out of this perspective one needs another perspective which is as solid, or even more so, than it. Thus when confronted with a notion or feeling that spreads an aura of meaninglessness within oneself, it is no use trying to look away. There is only one option, and that is to face the darkness head-on.

A different perspective could perhaps be offered in a phenomenological approach to life; that is to say, that one accepts that one's experience of the world is the most primary factor of it. The reason for this is simple: More reliable than what my experience tells me about the outside world, is the fact that my experience is such. That is to say: It's a more foundational truth to say that I experience seeing a leaf, than that there is a leaf. Taking this step back perhaps allows us to recover information previously unavailable: Perhaps meaning is not in the world, but only in our experience of the world. Science is a very useful tool, and in any domain that it can be used, it should be used, but science can only really be used in our exploration of general, rather impersonal facts. Of course there can be all kinds of implications; if I care about the welfare of trees then science may tell me what I personally should do; science may even tell me that I care about the welfare of trees; but were we to be in the situation where for example, I feel dizzy and some scientific investigation of my brain-state tells me I'm not dizzy, then the fact that I feel dizzy should take precedent, simply by the fact that my trust in scientific investigation as well as the workings and results of that investigation are an interpretation of all kinds of experienced phenomena, whereas my feeling of dizziness is a lot more fundamental to my experience. The whole world could be an illusion, but if I feel like I'm experiencing dizziness, then I really am experiencing dizziness, whatever kind of illusory phenomenon it might be; the fact that I'm experiencing it is undeniable.

The most primary truth to accept in order to find meaning might be that meaning is to be found in subjective experience, and it cannot exist outside of our interpretation of the world. Meaning is the feeling that something is worth interacting with. We hear this idea that in the grand scheme of things nothing matters, as if to suggest that nothing matters. But this merely says that something matters 'in the grand scheme of things'; but what if I don't care about the meaning of things 'in the grand scheme of things'? I don't want to reject the proposition that objectively, or in the grand scheme of things, whatever you prefer, nothing matters. But if we do not care about meaning in the grand scheme of things, what do we care about? What I think are the real questions are things like "is anything worth doing"? "Are there things that can make my life worth living"? That is the kind of meaning that we should care about. If our lives are worth the effort, then who cares if the universe is worth its effort, so to say? We only really have to care for ourselves, and by our seemingly being social animals we can't help but care for some others too, but that's where it ends. The meaning of the universe might be interesting to wonder about, but it is a totally irrelevant question to whether we can find what we do to be meaningful, and our lives to be worth it. Suppose for example, that some god would reveal himself. Let's call him God because that's probably easiest. Let's say God reveals himself to you in a way that makes him unmistakably God, and he tells you: The reason I created you, was so you could be a bricklayer; that was my intention with your life, but you are free to choose, goodbye! Suppose you hate the idea of being a bricklayer, you have actually tried it and didn't like it; you think it to be an absolute waste of your time, and suppose you actually have a job that you actually like and pays well. Would this revelation be a reason to care about bricklaying? Suppose there's nothing in it for you; God won't punish you whether you keep your current job or start being a bricklayer. You won't become any good at bricklaying magically; everything will be basically the same. Would you then because of this revelation suddenly feel like bricklaying is what makes your life worth living? I think not. My point is that wherever meaning is to be found is not from on high, by some revelation, or to be found in science (I'm one of those old-fashioned people who thinks that science cannot lay the fundaments of a moral ontology).

So let me provide an example of what I think demonstrates that things can be meaningful: The experience of having a crush. When you have a crush on someone, you don't seem to actually see the person as they are. What you see is overlayed with some weird kind of interpretative structure. This becomes obvious when after a while (getting rejected or finding out your crush already is in a relationship often helps) you lose your crush on this person, and you suddenly see them as someone quite different; they seem less attractive; most of all they seem to have a different face I have found. (In general, studying someone's face often reveals that you've been looking at them in a way that is rather inexplicable, but with a crush this is most obvious). Thus we can see that what you see is actually not the person who is your crush, but is rather something like your crush, who happens to be a person. By which I mean that what you see is whatever your crush happens to mean to you. You crush probably looks attractive to you for as long as it's your crush. You see whatever in your mind the face of your crush should be like, rather than the real person. What I'm getting to is that you have an intense experience of seeing the meaning of something, almost as something more primary than the thing itself. (We actually know that there are people too blind to see a snake strike at them but will still jump away from it; they can still interpret the meaning of an image without recognizing what they are looking at (Blindsight, this is called)). So in other words: We see the meaning of things, now and then (because of course most things don't have much of a meaning to us at any time). And what is your crush if not a call for action (I again don't mean the person; I mean your crush which is not the same thing at all)? Do you not want to introduce yourself, ask him/her out, go on a date, get to know him/her, engage in intimacy, and so forth? Does it not seem like going through these experiences would at least be worth the time that these experiences cost? Does it not seem worth a bit more than that even? Would it not be worth it to travel for an hour for each of those things; would it not be worth the money and the work? The meaning in this case is obvious; and it is obvious that while you have a crush with whom a relationship isn't impossible; there is some meaning in your life, undeniably. A sense of meaning that tries to drag us into some particular future; one where we do not start by killing ourselves, most significantly.

So where is meaning to be found? If anywhere, it is to be found in our experience of the world. After all what we are asking is fundamentally whether life is worth living by virtue of our activities and experiences; in other words what we are asking is not something about the mechanics of activities and experiences such as ours, but what they can mean to us and whether this suffices for us. Like I stated before: We could find out that objectively speaking life is worth living and that would not be of any help. We want to get to a state where one can experience life as worth living. So the fundamental question is one of our own ontology: What do things mean to us, and most fundamentally, can they be meaningful enough as to make doing them worthwhile and redeem the fact that we have to live our lives in order to do it? Or posed the exact other way around: Contemplate your death, at whatever point it is likely to occur; what do you want to do even though it is coming? In some sense this question is unanswerable if we want to have absolute certainty, for I can only investigate my own mind and reflect upon that. But I can know nothing about yours (at this time) and as such can make no claim to the universality of my discoveries. The fact that meaning is only found in our own experience is obvious when we actually consider when something is meaningful to us: When we do something and we don't find it meaningful, the only way that anyone could convince you that it's meaningful is to point to something that you're affecting that you find meaningful. There is no other kind of argument that could convince you, no facts that can be shared that will introduce meaning, unless whatever is shared is grounded in an already existing meaning. So in some sense we can't escape it. This then draws importance to the fact that we of course have no freedom to consciously choose, and we are merely observers of our choices. Comparatively, there is no freedom to find things meaningful, we can only observe the meaning we experience. That being said; why would we claim to find any truth in our way of viewing the world? Perhaps we are all misled; is it not the case that our instincts don't match the truth often enough? Well: The claim to certain truths of our experience is even better than those of science, for the assumptions can be embedded in the claim and therefore the assumptions disappear: If something appears to me as a tree, I can not know for sure that it is a tree; but what I do know for sure is that it appears to me as a tree. The same kind of view I can apply to meaning: If something appears to me as meaningful; I know for sure that it appears to me as meaningful. And our scientific approach is in some sense based on this. Why do we trust science? Because of our experience with it. The truths of science are embedded in the truth of what we experience. But then the question might be: Even though something appears to you as a tree, it may still not really be a tree, and you could perhaps scientifically investigate if it is really a tree, to find out. Why could it not be that what appears to you as meaningful is actually not meaningful? But this is to misunderstand meaning; for meaning, what appears meaningful is meaningful, because is a fact about our perspective rather than about the world outside of ourselves. To say that something is meaningful is not to say that it is meaningful, objectively speaking, but to say that it is meaningful, to you.

Why should we take our meaning seriously? Because to take our meaning seriously is simply the act of not running away from ourselves; to find something meaningful is to find it potentially contributing to redeeming life; that is to expect to find it worth the effort; and that is exactly why we should take it seriously: Because if we want a life that is worth not killing ourselves over, then this life is necessarily we ourselves find it worth not killing ourselves over; thus we simply have to ask the question: What is it, actually, that we find meaningful? That is to say: What is it actually, that we find to have the quality of being what we should do in order to make our time spent and the way in which we spent it worth it to ourselves? My experience is that many people actually live guided by their meaning rather automatically, which is of course not surprising: People are motivated to do whatever they are motivated to do. Thus, for many people existential questions like that of the meaning of it all either don't bother them or they don't come up at all. So what can stand in the way of our meaning? It seems to me that all that stands in the way of our pursuit of meaning is our self-deception. Our neuroticism/anxiety is that which keeps us from doing what we find meaningful for fear of the consequences; consequences which get invented on the spot whenever that which is meaningful is being pursued, and in that way are a kind of self-deception, for they seem to create a meaning in avoiding exactly that which we should be doing. But investigated more closely, it seems that the actual sensation of fear is more one of mental preparation to be ready to fight or flee; and the stress associated with this is creating the sensation of something being potentially not handle-able, and that is the deceptive implication (which is not actually primary to the experience) for it actually isn't to be avoided, hence it being deceptive; it's a confusion of "that which we might have to run away from" with "that which we should run away from". Our self-deception can perhaps be more sinister though; when contemplating what we find meaningful and how we should act, self-deception is that which makes us generate answers that are not true, which can simply happen by identifying (for historical reasons for example, or because one sees oneself as a member of some group) oneself with something which one is not. It is therefore necessary to root out self-deception, and to recognize when neuroticism/anxiety is holding you back needlessly for that way lies authenticity. To be authentic is simply to not be self-deceived about what you find meaningful. This is why death can be our dearest friend; because death allows us to contemplate the meaning of things not just in face of the end that is coming, but especially because a deep contemplation of it allows one to imagine what the meaning of things would be if one were free from its consequences, and thus not be clouded in one's judgement by the fears about what might happen. Rather, death, when contemplated properly and deeply, can sometimes throw us back into life with new meaning realized. (I think this is where Cioran gets his (I'm paraphrasing) "Without being aware that I had the option of killing myself I would've probably already killed myself, or Nietzsche's "The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night."; but I could be wrong) Another form of fundamental doubt could be the question of whether we value what we should be valuing; our experience of meaning may be most fundamental, but it is somewhat plastic, and perhaps it should be something which it isn't? This simply means that we might have things to learn; as it seems to me that what we should be valuing is in some sense always part of our ontological structure; that is to say that we might find ourselves valuing one thing, and then discovering that we could be valuing another thing which is in contradiction to the first, and then what should be valued higher is always a judgement based on other held values, be they learned or part of our nature. I am convinced that even when our values change, the source of value always remains within our experience; the judgement that one meaning should take precedent over another is just another endowment of meaning, coming from some half-subconscious subjective experience.

So where in our experience is meaning to be found? To be so general as to cover all cases: In physiological affect; in finding in yourself what you care about. By simply observing oneself, one's fantasies, one's fears, one always finds implied the care to do or avoid some certain thing. To be concrete: I will supply some examples; starting with fear. To fear is to care enough about something to feel like interaction with it is needed, but at the same time preparing to run from it. When the fear is for an activity, this means that the activity is something you probably should be doing. I don't mean fear in theory: "If I were to jump out of a plane I would feel fearful", I mean fear felt in the current moment. Another example: To be lost in time, to feel engagement with the world. To lose track of time means that time is to you implicitly irrelevant, that is to say that there is no pressure from the past or the future, but the current moment is enough; you are simply doing what you should be doing. Unless your sense of meaning is absolutely corrupted, this means you are in the right place. To be interested in something (or someone, as previously illustrated) is to feel drawn towards a future with it. Thus to be interested is to discover that something is meaningful to explore. In some sense our way of looking at the world always implies some kind of meaning. Even when we are seemingly disinterested with everything, this merely means that meaning is not to be found wherever you are. And thus one is implored to just explore and keep looking; a deadly combination for someone who doesn't have a lot going on, is rather unenthusiastic and rather withdrawn: It's a cocktail of self-sabotage that will keep you doing exactly what you should not be doing in that case. And then most ultimately: Our fantasies. Anyone who watches himself for long enough will discover that within him or her there are all kinds of sub-personalities that have their own senses of meaning; we feel conflicted about whether we want one thing or another. To develop a fantasy, and I don't mean by a mental effort, but spontaneously, is to create a vision of how things should be, according to a sub-personality, for it is what some instinct within you indulges in and wants to speculate about. Your fantasies thus are indicative of a part of yourself that must be dealt with, and there is only one way of dealing with it and that is to integrate it.

Chasing meaning always seems to allow for some positive emotion, an intense positive experience of meaning; which is either of a form of feeling meaningful movement or meaningful attainment. What our sense of meaning is in some sense always based on is the will to be more than ourselves, one might call it a will to power. Whether it be in love, where the meaning seems to come from the feeling of perhaps attaining a relationship at first, and then from seeing it progressively strengthened, or whether it be in power, from increased competence or might or the venting of such things, or in the discovery of truths, a facing up to reality as it is and an increased comprehension of the way things are. Or in aesthetics: The simple standing in the face of new unimaginable depths, brute existence, filth, and heavenly aspirations. At my darkest moments I sometimes get this feeling that a justification of life can even be found in its aesthetics, life as some kind of dark but deep painting worth contemplating.

In the realm of meaning we also find the realm of ethics. In the objective sense, I believe ethics is nonsense. In the phenomenological sense however, I believe ethics is real and worth investigating. For what do we really mean when we say something is good or evil? We mean perhaps to say that it violates our idea of how other humans should behave. This makes ethics and one's own moral judgement a rather interesting object for introspection: For what does what we find unethical exactly indicate? And is this a form of self-deception, or is it truly how we see the world? For example, a way of self-deception would be to adopt a slave-morality, in the Nietzschean sense: A standard of judging others that is formed by adopting as the highest values always only what is definitely within reach; like the early Christian slaves that strive to be meek and nonviolent; as if they had any other choice, except plainly self-defeating options.

When meaning seems out of reach, it is perhaps worth to ask oneself: How might I be deceiving myself? What things that are meaningful to me am I trying to avoid? (In a Jungian sense this would be stop identifying with your persona (the face you show to others) and integrating the shadow (sub-conscious resentment and motivations you are in denial about because they are too dark to be you) and Anima/Animus (sub-conscious elements of yourself you are in denial about for them being too unlike your self-image, especially on the basis of gender) for example). Perhaps out of fear for what your sense of meaning might require you to do; perhaps out of fear that you wouldn't be able to do it, and thus would be setting yourself up for failure. Perhaps because what this implies is that you are not the way you want to see yourself; you are perhaps not as strong as you'd like, or as much of an individual as you would like. Our world is a complex one, that may fill us with anxiety and fear about our future, with insecurity about where we are, with a constant dread about our predicament. In situations like these one can do nothing else but have the optimism that remains after pessimism: Even though everything is always going to hell, even though our options may be awful, even though we are not all that we might be, even if we are despicable by our own judgment if only we stopped lying to ourselves about what we are, even though at many times everything might seem like a dark sea of despair: It is not impossible that if we looked closely enough and stopped lying to ourselves, that we might find some meaning despite all of that. To finish with an inspirational quote:

"If you ever feel like you're not doing a good-enough job as a human, then know that in a day our only mission could be just not to die, and then you're a successful human. [...] as long as I end up in my bed at the end of the day I have done a good job".