When people do not understand the meaning of life. Part I

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

I'm starting a series of notes on the meaning of life. Fortunately, the answer to the question about the meaning of life is well known to me, at least I think it is. Unfortunately, this answer is difficult to explain lexically in a way that anyone else can understand. Each needs to be explained in its own way. It is enough for a believer (and even then not in every religion) to say “to be the viceroy of God on Earth”, and everything is clear to him, such an answer will not work for an atheist; the process of development of matter”, someone else needs to be told“to develop oneself and the world around it”, etc. Behind all these answers to the question“what is the meaning of life?”, for whom they were not intended, lies a rather deep and unobvious meaning. I will try to reveal it gradually and start with the simplest examples of such cases when people do not understand why they live and what to do. From my point of view.

Let's take a look at the following examples.

Decorator Michael Carmichael has been painting a regular baseball with regular paint every single day for 35 years. As a result, I dyed to the Guinness Book of Records, as it turned out a ball that began to weigh more than a ton! 64-year-old artist and decorator Michael Carmichael admits to having spent perhaps thousands of dollars on paint.

Norfolk County John Brooker created a 35m long and 7m high dragon from the greenery around his home

Minas Tirith created from 420,000 matches.

An amateur "World Of Tanks" from Novosibirsk made a self-propelled gun SU 122-54 out of snow. It took 20 tons of snow.

The girl has put together the world's largest jigsaw puzzle - 33.600 pieces.

Butter sculpture by Vipular Azukorala.

Answer, why do people do it? What is the meaning of their creativity? If you list the different reasons that induce people to do this, then among them there will mainly be irrational reasons, such as, for example, the desire to become famous, to boast, to declare oneself, to satisfy unreasonable curiosity, to become better than someone.

Here is a man painting a ball, spending thousands of dollars on paint. What has he accomplished with this? Money or paint could have been spent on more useful things. The girl has put together the world's largest jigsaw puzzle, oh, how cool! - Why? The process of assembling such a puzzle is completely obvious and monotonous, if I was able to assemble several ordinary desktop pictures from a couple of hundred or thousands of parts, then further development in this area does not make sense, there will be no further development, it just takes more time and effort, and that's it. This time and effort could be spent on achieving more complex goals. And why did man wear out half a million matches? For someone to hold their gaze on his craft for 10-15 seconds and go (or flip through) further? About sculptures made of snow, bushes or oil, I generally keep quiet. I will only say that such creativity has meaning, but when the idea of art itself is understood correctly as an attempt to express one's inner world in the process of understanding reality through the creation of some things. Here, in these examples, I personally do not see such attempts - it's just self-indulgence.

That's all for now, I invite everyone to think independently about how to distinguish self-indulgence from a business that is really useful from the point of view of the meaning of life. This is not easy, because outwardly both phenomena can look exactly the same. So far, I have shown only that with such a presentation of my work, these people are very, very far from the meaning of life. I admit that something in these stories has remained behind the scenes, but I strongly doubt that this can be so in these cases.