Lately I’ve been feeling like my life hasn’t gone anywhere. I question everything I do and if it is worthy of pursuing. I wake up and feel anxious to start the day. Not because I’m afraid of what the day will bring, rather afraid of what the day will not bring. I have been thinking about what I want to do in my life. Why am I doing the things that I do? What purpose does it serve? These are some questions I don’t fully have the answer too, and in a way, it scares me. I’m at the moment reading Jordan Peterson’s book Maps of Meaning. In this book he would look at my situation and say there is a disturbance of chaos between where I am, where I believe I should be and the path towards it. It is this path that gives meaning to your life, but when chaos grabs hold of it, your meaning can suffer under it.
I would always joke with a friend of mine that if we had this feeling, we were having an existential crisis. Though it isn’t as severe or as serious as crisis would suggest, I feel it does sum it up pretty well. A crisis is a point where the future is uncertain and where one tries to grab hold unto the known. But sometimes everything becomes the unknown. The job you’ve been doing for so long feels strange. Like it isn’t what it used to be. Sometimes you just feel totally numb to what is happening in your life. Meaning has lost its purpose.
Now this doesn’t mean you can’t see the purpose of life. I’m a bit lost at the moment within myself. The path towards who I believe I should be is blurry, unclear, it is in the realm of chaos. That doesn’t mean I’m depressed or anything. It just means that I am uncertain of what is happening and will be happening. And that’s not a pleasant feeling.
How do we stop this felling of meaninglessness? I believe it can only be solved by looking inwards, revaluing your values, looking at what you think is important in life. I’ve been working on many projects lately, not knowing if they will work or not. In a sense I’m shy about what I made. I have this sense that it needs to be perfect. The way it was in my head, but it never is. It never comes out just exactly as I want it. And it frustrates me. It makes me quit those projects, just sometimes ruining the experience of creating it altogether.
I think I’m too much focused on the result, on the end goal, instead of the steps of creating. The fun I have in creating videos, blogposts and music. It all gets overshadowed by this urge to achieve perfection. Sometimes this can be a good thing. That way you learn, become better, improve. But when it clouds the fun you have while doing it, it’s too much. So yeah, I might need to care a bit less. Maybe by not caring about finding meaning, I’ll find it in an unexpected place. It’s like getting a girlfriend. Whenever you search for her, you never find her. Wherever you look (and you look everywhere), they just aren’t there. And then you decide that searching is not the way to go and like a true Stoic, you let fate decide for you. Then out of nowhere you find here. The perfect girl. Maybe it’s the same with meaning? Who knows.
I mean, the thing I always wanted to do is to improve the world. To leave the world a bit better than when I came into it. But that’s nearly everyone’s goal is some sense. How can I make the world a better place? Is what I’m doing contributing to making the world better? Or am I making it worse by not doing enough? I don’t really know.
This was a bit more personal, but I just needed to write about this a bit and maybe you’ll find some meaning in it too. It’s mostly just some loose thoughts but hey, what aren’t loose thoughts? (aah spoken like a true philosopher) If you took the time reading this, I just wanna say I truly appreciate it. The fact that you put in the effort to read my jumbled pieces of writing mean a lot to me. With this I just want to say thank you. I hope you have a great life, filled with meaning. I’ll try and see if it appears for me.
Elenchus Philosophy 