Journal Entry #2 – Determining Meaning

This is the second addition to my series of Journal Entry. Today’s entry is highly subjective, but should provide perspective on my approach to dictating my own meaning in life. Note: This entry is a lot more geared towards being an article then a journal entry. Will improve this in the future.

As a pre-teen, I was a self-proclaimed absurdist. I observed the meaningless world as virtually certain and acknowledged the futility of finding any meaning. Yet as life progressed and I observed nature and the impact of progressive human behaviour, my opinions drifted. I found myself in an existential crisis. I was questioning unsolvable dilemmas like. – Does human life have meaning? Or even how do we contrive one person meaning contrasted with another person’s purpose. After realizing these questions are fruitless, I settled on one fact, human life does indeed have meaning. But the question that remains, how do we shape it?

Initially, I satisfied this question by setting a life meaning that I could work towards daily. However, with every day passing, a question lingered, is what I accomplished today enough to reach my eventual meaning? Obviously, this question is purely subjective and can produce any sort of answer. With such freedom, many of my thoughts became uncontrollable. I reached an eventual state of relying on material benefits as it was the one thing that was tangible. But after listening to a portion of Ultralearning by Scott Young and Atomic Habits by James Clear, one thing became apparent.

Setting an end meaning is for suckers.

Mostly because significant goals lack support for motivation and potential. Let me breakdown these further.

Motivation:

• Humans are attracted to outcomes. Our brains are physically wired to enjoy the gratification that comes from accomplishing and achieving goals. But a problem arises when our goals are overly-ambitious; they tend to take way too long. This is a problem for gratification-addicted humans as long-term outcomes take too long and are swapped for shorter-term gratification like social media or ego parades. As such, goals for your meaning can’t be too ambitious that they are impossible, but can’t be so under-ambitious that they don’t develop you further.

Potential

• Throughout the last few centuries, human productivity has seen a massive decline. This significant decline in productivity has been caused by numerous different things, but the most observable is a lack of training and overall lack of meaning people carry. I attribute this lack of values to the education system, which you can read in another article I wrote. Summarized, though, the school system sets goals to a limit of 100%, which fundamentally teaches you that you can’t exceed that limit and do better. The system guides us to set a goal, complete it, and move on to something else. But life doesn’t work like this. After we accomplish our meaning, we can’t just move on; there physically is nothing to move on to except death. As such, setting a goal with a definitive outcome is futile and should be avoided.

What should I do then?

Stop focusing on an end meaning. Instead allow your actions to dictate your eventual purpose.

How is this done?

Set small or atomic goals that allow you to become better each day. By focusing heavily on your process/actions you dictate your meaning as you pursue what you love and get motivated by small wins along the way. Focus on small and tangible goals that can be completed within a few days, otherwise you will begin to lose vision and overall motivation to continue. Also, by setting new goals everyday your overall potential remains uncapped and ready to be brought to new levels.

That’s it for today! I hoped you enjoyed this entry. If you prefer this one as opposed to my prior one, clap this one up more so I get an indicator of what you like better.

Jake