meaninglessness or aimlessness?

[Lark]

If you had to pick one of either meaningfulness or aimlessness as the "problem of the age" which would you pick and why? :tantrum:

As always, show your working out.

 

[Jaguar]

Fix your post.

 

[Agent Washington]

*does 50 pushups* i am working out

 

[Mole]

We are meaning creating animals and meaninglessness drives us to find meaning.

 

[Lark]

I'm disappointed that this thread didnt get more attention, its something that I've written pages about in a reflective journal offline and am still not sure I'm not just going in circles, perhaps its something which defies rigor.

 

[Lark]

This inevitably has some overlap with another thread but I'm linking it because of the line from it I'm going to quote:

The Philosophy of the Midlife Crisis | The New Yorker

what really unnerves him is midlife ennui—the creeping sense of aimlessness and exhaustion that sometimes overtakes people as they age. The problem, Setiya finds, is that there’s something intrinsically self-defeating about getting things done. Once you’ve done them, you can’t do them anymore.

I've thought about that, since it was inevitably something I realised when I created a bucket list after watching that movie (I've thought about it sense and think those goals are largely aims) but even on the website which I used at that time 43 things, which I think exists again in a different format to the original, permits when you complete a goal to add it to a list of things you are "doing again", which is handy when its little goals like compliment two people daily or something like that.

 

[Fluffywolf]

I saw this talk about the brain and chemicals once, about the short term dopamine effects and the long lasting effects of serotonin.

I find I am mostly aimlessly going through life looking for that next dopamine hit myself. It's comfortable and enjoyable, but overall a stale existance. I should probably focus on activities to increase my serotonin instead to see what that world brings.

 

[Galena]

Maybe it's just for people like me, but knowing what's meaningful you doesn't seem nearly as difficult as acting upon it and certainly than getting it into a central place in your life - I'm hesitant to even make the latter sound like a reasonable hope. It's great if what you care about happens to be something economically lucrative, but for the rest, you've got to set up your financial base first - even if that actually isn't as necessary as it sounds, there's a lot of anywhere from encouragement to harsh pressure to go that time-intensive path to your genuine end. Personally I'm afraid of some freak mortal accident occurring before I'm able to get to the end, though I work hard.

Perhaps I'm making it more about the individual than it needs to be. Or alternately just have a lot of doubt, although that doubt ultimately doesn't slow down my actions.

Honestly, meaning was the first and easiest thing for me to grasp as a person - Fi-dominance would help with that, too. But then after that, there's a lot more that survival is about, a lot of that isn't concerned with meaning, and meaning won't last long if you're not surviving. Perhaps a sense of meaning that comes to one too formatively can be too distilled and in that way come in conflict with the way of nature to demand adaptation. That conflict would be important to resolve, then, to make real contact with a meaning that may not be what it was "supposed" to be but is more genuine than you once expected.

 

[entropie]

I'ld be a afraid, if one generation ever would see itself as meaningful