This blog post was originally written on 15 February 2006. It is reproduced here for archival purposes and your reading pleasure. It is reproduced as accurately as possible with no style, mechanical, or spelling corrections whatsoever.
Current mood:
optimistic
Sorry about the long wait for this one. I seemed to have run out of topics for a while. I will try to continue to post these as regularly as I had been. If you have any topic requests, please let me know. I think that I may start making the blogs a bit more personal, but I'm really not sure.
Tonigh's Topic: The Meaning of Life
How Should We Spend Our Days?For a all of human existance people have wondered what the meaning of life is. I know that I have. Sometimes thinking on the meaning of life creates an incredible optimistic feeling that gets me excited, and makes me feel like I'm really doing something worthwhile, and other times it makes me feel like I'm wasting my time on petty things, and I will die wishing I had spent my days more wisely.
We are all aware that our days on Earth are limited. Depending on what your religous beliefs are you may feel that there is another life awaiting us, or that after we die, we simple cease to exist. My Christian (Mormon) faith tells me that there is an afterlife, but that is not the purpose of this blog. This blog is to examine our time on Earth, and try to decide how we should spend it. I think that wether you believe in an afterlife or not, we can all agree that our time here on Earth is precious, and that we should use it as wisely as we should. I am not implying that I (or any one of us for that matter) knows what the true meaning of life is, but I think that between my blog and your comments we may be able to pick out a few of the more important points.
As a senior in high school I have spent the last several years of my life preparing for "the rest of my life." Of course that is not all I've done. Along the way I've made many unforgettable friends, participated in sports and clubs, developed several hobbies, and had a lot of fun. So if I were forced to look at my life thus far as if it were my entire time here, I would have to ask myself if I had lived it to the best of my ability. And I think that the answer would be no, as it would be with the majority of people my age. The reason for this is not a bad thing though. I have not lived my life to it's fullest because I have spent a good portion of my time bored in my classes, and frustrated over homework. Certainly being bored and frusterated is not the meaning of life. But these are things I have done because I believe (most of the time) that they will help me to live a more productive life in the future. So if my life ended tommorrow I would say that I have wasted a great deal of time studying and preparing for nothing. The chances of my life ending tomorrow however are slim, and no one should spend their time thinking about how their life could end at any minuuite; that is most definately not the purpose of our lives.
So now we need to establish what a productive life is. According to my mormon faith I think that the biggest purpose of our lives is to serve God, and most religions would agree with that. But I will make this as unbiased as possible. This serving of God is broken down into several other things that most all of us including many agnostics and atheists would quite possibly also agree with. These are things like helping people who are less fortunate and the giving to the poor etc. that you hear all the time. But they are also things like making yourself feel good. I don't mean that in a hedonistic, party-hardy kind of way. I mean we should do things like hang out with our friends, and enjoy watching movies and reading books, and working hard to acheive goals that we have set for ourselves. Of course watching movies, and reading can't be all we do, as we also need to feed ourselves, and clean ourselves in order to continue surviving. In our country doind these things is really a matter of being able to afford food, and water, and clothing. Now this means for most of us getting a job.
So this bring me to the point of working. It is in most cases necessary to work, or have a business, or some means of income, or even to hunt and fish and make clothing in order to survive. Whichever scenario you belong to, doing the aforementioned things is probably not the way you prefer to spend your time. And if this is how you spend most of your time, you may want to rethink your life. Afterall no one ever lied on his death bed wishing that he had spent more time at the office.
So a few of the ways to spend our time include having fun, surviving, and preparing for the future. But what about working toward goals. A good example for me personally is my cross-country training. I spent months running nearly every day, and I feel that it was well worth it because I had a certain amout of sucess. But this raises the question: what if I hadn't had any sucess? What if no matter how hard I trained I just couldn't be fast? Would that mean that I wasted my time training? I think that the answer to this question would be different for every person. Additionally I think it would depend greatly on wether or not I got anything else out of the training. It is quite possible that even spending time working at something that didn't end up working out could still be worthwhile. Following my example, I also got a great sence of stisfaction from the fact that I could bring myself to run everyday.
Another thing that I've often wondered about is relaxation. Sometimes I just feel like laying around. This is probably a good thing as it would be very stressful to be constantly working at fulfilling the meaning of life. But relaxing, and sitting around idle all the time would not be a very meaningful thing to do would it?
What then have we established? Well to be quite honest: nothing. We are left with all of the same questions we had before this blog. Perhaps in a slightly more organized fashion. How much of our time should we spend preparing for the future? How much of it should we spend with our friends? How much relaxing? Should we let our jobs dictate our schedules? How much should we work? How much of what we earn at work should we give to the less fortunate? Should we spend our time working hard at our goals to get a great sense of satisfaction when we acheive them, or should we be content to take pleasure in more simple things like good company? Is it worth spending our time working toward goals that we may never reach? Most importantly will we ever know if there is a correct answer to these questions?
All that being said, please post any thoughts or ideas as comments. Hopefully this will get the quality responses that the NHS blog did.
love, Joshy Woshy
This may surprise everyone, but I actually still haven't figured out what the meaning of life is. I have, however, figured out how to use a spell-checker, so at least something productive has happened in the past five years :) This blog post was kind of rambling, but I guess its hard not to be on a subject like that. I pretty much still have the same questions I did at the time, although I am in a later phase of life so I can do a little reflecting. The time that is spent preparing for the rest of life is not just preparing. Looking back on high school and college I see that awesome memories were being made the entire time. Including when I was stressed over last minute assignments, or dying of boredom in studyhall. And one thing that I never would have guessed when I wrote the original post is that it's okay to waste a little time, and slow down. Daydreaming is important! I recommend it to anyone.
So maybe you all can provide some insight in the comments.
love, Joshy Woshy
