This is a fun discussion because we all have dueling perspectives on it. For starters, life is literally the longest thing you'll ever do. You'll be alive until you die. You'll be alive for as long as you live. So in that sense, life isn't short at all!
On the flip side, in the cosmic scheme of things, life can appear to be pretty short, and that implies meaninglessness (which isn't accurate, but we'll get to that). It's easy to be cynical about it: everything you do will be obsolete in 100 years. And you'll most likely die long before that. And your ability to influence real change in the world is limited. Trump, who is president of the free world, has a very limited scope of influence on human in general & in your life specifically. Even Hitler, who threw the entire planet into WWII, had a limited impact, statistically-speaking - there were about 2 billion people on the planet in 1939 & just shy of 80 million people died, which is roughly 3% of the world's population. So humanity's reach is not infinite nor does it affect every single person on the planet, so why bother, right?
So...what
does matter? Well, to begin with, I think having a meaningful-to-you life matters. And I think the implementation of a meaningful life is a multi-faceted discussion. At a basic level, you've got Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which means that for starters, you've gotta go get a job to feed & shelter yourself. But I don't believe we showed up on this rock simply to survive, but to
thrive. I think that we are here to learn & to grow & to do great things with our lives, although not necessarily in relation to others, but more of in a "PR" (sports-talk for beating your Personal Record) kind of way, where we're focused on incrementally improving ourselves, inviting good things into our lives, doing good work, feeling good, etc.
And I think all of that boils down to an equation of sorts, which begins with the power of choice: we are all free to recognize or reject truth. We are all free to make our own choices on a day by day basis. We are free to be victims or victors. To quit or to be persistent. To have a fix mindset or a growth mindset. To have integrity or to be underhanded. To be moral or amoral. And it's super easy to just quit & give up & feel trapped. I've gone through my own periods of depression where I've either felt so bogged down that I didn't feel like there was any light at the end of the tunnel, or so apathetic that I didn't care because I wasn't feeling it, which, to me, says that there is purpose & goodness in life, because how can you feel so down in the dumps if there isn't also good in the world? And I don't think I'm alone in this feeling. JRR Tolkein had this great bit from LOTR - Sam's speech:
Followed by an equally fantastic quote from Gandalf:
This quote is a highly clarifying statement: you are here, on earth, on lease. You have a limited amount of time left - do you want to be an ostrich & stick your head in the sand & coast? Because you can 100% do that if that's what you want to do, and it's easier than anything to get stuck at home doing nothing. But given a world of infinite opportunities & options, why make such a choice? It IS daunting to try to figure out Life, the Universe, and Everything, but I feel like we also need to define a path forward proactively if we're going to be truly happy. Because to me, it's hard to be happy if you're missing the key requirements, which are:
1. Defining what happiness means to you personally
2. Discovering things that make you happy
3. Putting in the effort & thinking required to both achieve & maintain that
I personally believe that a person's happiness & success in life is largely dependent on how proactive they're willing to be. It's hard to be happy if you don't know what happiness means, and it's hard to be happy if you don't put in some effort into maintaining that state. I kind of view myself as having a ying-yang inside my brain: the Reactive Man on one side & the Proactive Man on the other. Bourdain said it more succinctly:
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I don't think life is static. I think it's more like a plant: if you want a good result, you have to take care to feed & water it, because left unattended, it will wilt & it will die. Like Bourdain said above, that reactive, lazy, childish part of you is
constantly trying to maintain the inertia of being a couch potato & having existential crises & not doing too much or being willing to dive deep or try to do better or anything like that, so it's a constant battle, in that regard. So now our equation for life is growing:
1. We all have the ability to choose & the freedom of choice in our lives, despite what our current circumstances dictate. If you want to read more on this idea, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. He's a dude who decided not to let life in a Nazi death camp beat him down on the inside. Amazing concepts about attitude & reactivity in it. Anyway, given the freedom of being able to choose how we react, what we do, and what we invite into our lives, this is both scary & awesome, because we can choose to live as
dumb of a life as we want, or as
epic of a life as we want!
2. Life requires TLC; it needs constant babysitting, because like a plant, it is alive, and will wilt & fade if not properly attended to. This means that if you want meaning in your life & happiness in your life, there's no "one shot & DONE!" approach available...it's going to require your constant involvement in it!
3. We all have an Earth Lease. We don't know when it's up - maybe tomorrow, maybe in 50 years, who knows? You are here now, and you have what time you have left to either be like a turtle & withdraw into your shell, or do take the reins & put in the time & the effort to defining what you want from life & then working towards it (including happiness!). That can be a big wall to overcome, and the existential dread that comes from thinking about the Big Things in life makes it easy to slip back into reactive mode & completely forget about it just days later. Our ability as human beings to live in denial is unparalleled in the universe, lol.
To me, that's just the tip of the iceberg. I believe there's meaning in life. I believe happiness can be achieved on this planet. But I also definitely believe that it requires time, effort, and thinking to not only get there but to
maintain that state, because we are constantly fighting the Reactive Man. We have to decide to take on the role of the Proactive Man in order to keep the Reactive Man at bay, and that often has to be done on a daily basis, from what I can tell. And with all of the modern distractions available, it's
incredibly easy to let that slip out of mind & out of sight & go back to living in blissful ignorance to what I consider fundamental truths of the universe, because continuous effort over time is a surprisingly difficult thing for people to do in general!