Quote by UberDogMan is on an
eternal quest to place structure in a ever continuing Universe of entropy. Happiness is as you say just one of the
myriad of "coping mechanisms" that we use to make our existence and meaning seem logical and have purpose.
Quite simply no one can know what is going to happen next so just deal with it. Peace and Happiness be upon your
house.
So you're saying happiness is a purpose because it, like any other purpose we can think of, is simply a way to cope
with absurdity.
I do agree that in this case it really is of value - in the sense that nothing is of value or nothing has
'inherent/pre existing' meaning or purpose anyway.
But then, and I'm going off topic here but I think this is necessary-
I don't see why would you like to think of life in that sense, that purpose and meaning is something present
already, a given, to which you can then react to. In other words, why would you assume that 'things can happen any
which way' and we can only 'try' to make it work for us, i.e.
board a ship if it lands on your shore but whether it would or not who knows.
Instead why not create purpose and meaning, as simply as- let there be meaning and lo there it was- perhaps these terms
'purpose and meaning' do not even exist outside our minds, a feature unique to life.
Then it becomes your 'choice/will' to do or not do. A boat may or may not arrive your shore, but you are free
to build a boat and set sail. You no longer have to be uncertain about meaning and purpose as you're capable of
creating it, not relying on favorable circumstance. Or, as master yoda put it:
Do or Do not. There is no try
Now, in this approach, you no longer need to cope with meaninglessness and purposelessness.
Assuming you would subscribe to this more active approach, would you say that happiness is something worth striving for,
or is achieving happiness a purpose worth assigning to your life?
merged: 01-28-2017 ~ 04:22am
Quote by ValunaYou need those
'coping mechanisms' so that your meaning of life and existance isn't lost... reasons that drive your life
to make you take out it's last breath are your coping mechanisms.
We all have positive experience and negative ones, but life does not exist out of simply one of them. What makes us move
forward is the positivity (negativity too, if you manage to twist it positively).
I agree, good feeling (or happiness or positivity) and negative feeling (or sadness or negativity) are passive
biological reactions to positive and negative experiences, experiences of things going or not going the way you wanted
them to.
Quote by Val
One becomes greedy to give themselves a good feeling. So in other words, we all need to be a bit of a narcisist to live
our lives.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Do we really 'need' to get 'good feeling' (or happiness
or positivity)? This feeling is just a human idiosyncrasy like anger pain and laziness, it's a good biological
input, not too different than eyesight or hearing, but should you make it the goal of your life? I strongly disagree.
But then you may say what other purpose- and if you check my reply to uber, I feel simply wanting to do something is a
purpose worthy enough, you simply create purpose. So I see the next paragraph the opposite way-
Quote by Val
'I want to do that', 'I want to become this', 'I want to have this' are all goals that
motivate us to look forward to the future and to work towards achieving them. Achieving something, discovering, creating
and even helping all have an immense amount of positive feelings. Even the slightest bit, will make you want to do it
again, to go even further. This way, one can life a quite satisfying life in doing so.
Does it make us happy? Most likely, yes. I say so because when you reach one goal after another and find new ones, you
make yourself feel good about yourself and the world around you. It's good to be selfish to some degree because of
this. You need to grant yourself the rights to be a greedy human and live your life the way you want it to be.
being greedy (or more precisely, demanding/willing) isn't given validity by whether or not it
makes us happy (and consequently cope with purposelessness). Rather, it's moving from goal to goal, wanting
different things, which is a worthy purpose in itself. And ability or inability to do so causes happiness or sadness as
me biological inputs to your brain.
So yeah, like I replied to Uber, if you do subscribe to the thought that meaning cannot be assigned, I agree that
happiness can be considered necessary, a worthy purpose to strive for. But I don't like they outlook, maybe we can
discuss on that in a different thread.
Quote by Val...How to be happy is
way easier to tell than what actually drives us. Well, in short. You must be one hell of a masochist if you like a life
full of suffering. We don't like to be hurt, to feel bad and all so we seek what makes us feel good instead.
Happiness is simply part of that good.
this I agree with even using my outlook. Happiness and
sadness are very straightforward indicators of whether what I want to do is happening or not, so that I can act on this
feedback and do the thing in doing more or do it less. Though when you say we 'seek' to be good, I look at it
in the way that 'we seek places where the metal detector beeps more, But really it's not the beeps that
we're seeking, it's the treasure the beeping indicates that we're seeking. But the beeping might always
lead you to the treasure'.