P.S., This is why writing and editing are different things. First you have to say a bunch of stuff: that's writing. Then you have to figure out what you actually meant: that's editing. Only then can you remove everything that's not related to what you meant. Clearly, for this piece, I only had time to do the former, not the latter. Happy Lunar New Year from Vietnam.
I think that's a great insight on distinguishing the vague collective templates we have for meaning from the specific events that we actually end up finding meaning from. The fact that effort is often involved suggests there IS a way to predict it, and yet I can think of plenty of things that I worked very hard for (e.g. my degree) and yet gained absolutely zero meaning from.... but what's surprising to me is how many bad events that just "happened" to me I still derive meaning from, even though I didn't "do" anything in those cases (or if I did, I was really the problem). I think the simple act of just undergoing suffering, and making it out the other side, has a way of almost forcing your subconscious to make sense of it in a way that feels meaningful: you've experienced something that maybe few others have, and now you know you can survive more than perhaps you thought.
I think maybe one of the things that I'm really trying to push here is that the creation of meaning resists statistical regularities in a way that's different from other activities. Because meaning is a story we tell, the role that an event or experience has can change instantaneously. And as I try to convey in the piece, there are definitely things that we're told via our culture that are important and we should construct meaning from—like a degree! Whether or not we actually do that is up to us. So there are statistical facts about what people endorse as meaningful or not, just like there are statistical facts about anything that occurs in the world. But the statistical facts don't necessarily play into what's happening for any specific individual considering their own specific experiences.
Maybe one way to think of the suffering thing is: effort + emotion (i.e., suffering elicits a high magnitude of valence/arousal, as opposed to, like, working out which is high effort but not very emotional). I'm going to do a review of Man's Search for Meaning, since this is the launching point for soooo many people thinking about broader problems of meaning, so I'll about the problem of suffering more then. Would appreciate any further thoughts that come to mind!
P.S., This is why writing and editing are different things. First you have to say a bunch of stuff: that's writing. Then you have to figure out what you actually meant: that's editing. Only then can you remove everything that's not related to what you meant. Clearly, for this piece, I only had time to do the former, not the latter. Happy Lunar New Year from Vietnam.
I think that's a great insight on distinguishing the vague collective templates we have for meaning from the specific events that we actually end up finding meaning from. The fact that effort is often involved suggests there IS a way to predict it, and yet I can think of plenty of things that I worked very hard for (e.g. my degree) and yet gained absolutely zero meaning from.... but what's surprising to me is how many bad events that just "happened" to me I still derive meaning from, even though I didn't "do" anything in those cases (or if I did, I was really the problem). I think the simple act of just undergoing suffering, and making it out the other side, has a way of almost forcing your subconscious to make sense of it in a way that feels meaningful: you've experienced something that maybe few others have, and now you know you can survive more than perhaps you thought.
I think maybe one of the things that I'm really trying to push here is that the creation of meaning resists statistical regularities in a way that's different from other activities. Because meaning is a story we tell, the role that an event or experience has can change instantaneously. And as I try to convey in the piece, there are definitely things that we're told via our culture that are important and we should construct meaning from—like a degree! Whether or not we actually do that is up to us. So there are statistical facts about what people endorse as meaningful or not, just like there are statistical facts about anything that occurs in the world. But the statistical facts don't necessarily play into what's happening for any specific individual considering their own specific experiences.
Maybe one way to think of the suffering thing is: effort + emotion (i.e., suffering elicits a high magnitude of valence/arousal, as opposed to, like, working out which is high effort but not very emotional). I'm going to do a review of Man's Search for Meaning, since this is the launching point for soooo many people thinking about broader problems of meaning, so I'll about the problem of suffering more then. Would appreciate any further thoughts that come to mind!
Life: Lived as it is. Me2
Life: technically only exists in the present, but you can also think about the one that existed previously or will exist in the future.
Right😉