Important in life?

Faye

Faye

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What is really important in life? I thought this would be an easy question to answer, but when I tried to answer it thoroughly, it became extremely complicated. There seems to be two main answers: the social answer, and the existential answer. The social answer is basically that friends, family, etc. are what is really important- your human relationships are important. The existential answer is that nothing is important, so you have to create importance out of that nothingness.

I don't like either answer at all really, and I don't care for the hedonistic answer as well, which is basically that avoiding pain and attaining pleasure is important. I do that- everyone does that- but it doesn't help figure out what is important. Hedonism is about the same as saying "important things are important", unless you're debating an ascetic.

I'm constantly overcome with the feeling that the world is basically a terrible place. There are a lot of good reasons to think that. It seems like we're basically just surviving, as opposed to living, which is supposed to be more than just surviving. But what is that?
 
Survival seems to be high on most people's priority list. You can't really do anything without being alive, so it must necessarily take first precedence. In some cultures your own survival is less important than the survival of certain values however, or of the group's survival, but in each case, something must exist in place of nothing, so existence is probably the most important thing in life.

btw what makes you think life should be more than surviving?
 
to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women
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What really is driving me through life, is I feel (very strongly) that I have a purpose here. What that purpose is exactly, I don't really know. I have some kind of idea of what it is, but not much. This really has become my ultimate goal; to fufill my purpose. As a really goal-oriented person, this keep me "alive" in effect.

What is important to me, is life, love, happiness, and friends. This is wildly incomplete though. As the OP said, when you really start to think about it, it becomes highly complicated, and can no longer be defined in a way that can be written on paper (or in this case, typed onto a forum). However, for me though, things don't break down. I retain the common theme that there is a reason for me to be here. You can call me delusional if you want, but I just feel that this is true, and I have gotten signs that this is the case. When I do veer of track and try to pinpoint exactly what makes me happy in life, and come up short (in essence, enter a depressive spell), something eventually snaps me back.

The fact that you have to create meaning and happiness out of nothing, is not new to me. Hell, I have been doing this for as long as I can remember. I am very much an idealist. Yet, just pulling together meaning from something that mildly seems like sense, is often not efficent enough. It's the search for meaning out of nothingness that is painful in itself. If one can accept that there really is no need to find meaning, they can be happy and live their life. If they can find meaning and reason, they can be happy and move forward. It becomes very problamatic for someone who is stuck in the middle. Much more so if the person truly has an inner drive to find the ultimate answer to everything (which is an infinate question really).

Like so many things I have seen in life, this is another situation where there is no way to find and define the path to finding what is needed. You sort of go along fitting peices into places in the dark. Then suddenly the lights are turned on, and you realise you were doing it right all along, and then you know how to work it from that moment on.
 
One all rounder answer from me:

Actually i discovered on net, it is, To be happy in all circumstances because this is one thing you can count on. It is all good. Whether it is sadness or happiness. If you are missing one of it, then think you missed your life.
 
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Sithious said:
To learn to live as humans
Click to expand...

At the moment, at least.

I view my life as a situation. If I have been born in another situation, something else was going to be more important, but now it's this.

Also, if I get to live long enough, it will change. It already changed a few times for me, because 1) situation is changed 2) my understanding of it is changed.

Going on a life-long crusade of one single goal, when all the data input makes it useless, would be unnecessary.
 
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