119
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
119 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
49805 readers
376 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
That was really insightful tysm for replying. I feel like you've thought about this before haha.
Yeah I think you might be right, sometimes it feels like a day's been wasted because I didn't spend it exactly how I envision a good day, but there are different kinds of good. Every experience and feeling is unique and it's hard to say that one experience or feeling is objectively better than another.
Also I like your phrasing 'happy to live', it sounds like contendedness which I do believe is possible unlike permanent happiness. Have you heard of that infinite happiness machine thing btw?
If you live thinking this you're only focusing on stuff which, at your point in time, find meaningless. Finding meaning in things changes drastically over time, and your point of reference is based on what you believe at a certain moment. During your childhood you probably found playing with toys to be "meaningful", but now during your adulthood (assuming you're an adult lol) you look at playing with a firetruck to be meaningless.
See the difference?
The time wasted on meaningless tasks are usually memories and experiences which we hold very dearly to. I'm sure as you get older you will regret not doing a certain thing because you're too worried about the future, and how different actions will cause different results if you waste a little time. I know for a fact that I already regret not doing the "meaningless" things I thought were a waste of time, like spending more time with my now deceased dog. I took for granted that he was alive, and never really spent nearly as much time as I wish I did, thinking that an hour of work was more important.
Contrary to what I've been saying though, the manner of living life like "you're going to die young" is also pretty valuable. You don't want to be on the extreme that you simply don't care about the future, and try to attach meaning to every action you take - it's destructive.
Really, there's no "right" way to live life, you can only live, make mistakes, take insight from your mistakes and mistakes from others, and to create your own way of living. It does sound corny as hell, I wont even lie, but think about it and do what you want with the knowledge you have right now.
I was not saying that spending time with my dog was meaningless, just that I prioritized my work, indirectly issuing "less" meaning to the time I spent with him. Either way, the past is the past, I can only go up from here.
Well said!
I'd like to add that even scrolling social media like Reddit, Facebook, Lemmy etc can be meaningful. I find it's like walking around town looking at what other people are doing. Listening in on someone ranting from their soap box, participating in some open air discussion, looking at cute cats in the park and learning something from a mechanic talking through a problem with someone standing beside a broken down car. It's also a social experience even though it can't be your only social exposure it still provides something.
It really is about variation and moderation. It wouldn't be meaningful, in my opinion, to spend your life on a rotation of the gym, cooking healthy, reading about those topics, working hard at some nameless corp and sleeping properly. But if you don't normally go to the gym it's suddenly meaningful to go. Life is about experiences and about challenging ourselves to find out who to be and how to be the subjective "best" version of ourselves, and that quest has no truly meaningless activities, all roads lead to the end of life and while we might regret some activities that regret in and off itself is a lesson that we took with us.
Tbh I'm not sure lol. Personally I've struggled with a lot of mental health issues since I was young so I'm finding it hard to say whether we should live life to its fullest or just accept the feeling of finally feeling ok. What do you consider meaningless btw?
It's somewhat of a common topic (life and living) between my wife and I, we share similar philosophies in life so it's pretty normal for us to expand and better define what we believe. I would like to say we have found a good standing on where and what we believe to understand, but everything changes overtime, and I'm sure that I'll understand something completely different.
I don't believe so haha. Sounds strangely dystopian though - mind explaining it?