Abraham Joshua Heschel:
When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.

@ Chris L - Thanks Chris, I make a strong effort to reply to almost every comment, even if, like with yours, it’s taken me a few days to get back to it.

Your illumination about how the route to happiness for many people comes at the cost of other good things, like the environment, proves rather clearly the degree to which you do see the bigger picture. And I completely agree.

As to your points on atheism, you’ve touched on the concept of the soul, and though I don’t talk about all of my views regarding the soul on this blog, my extreme sense of atheism does, in fact, require the lack of belief in a soul. However, telling people “I have no soul” doesn’t seem to fire too many people up

We should talk sometime.

@ Veronica - You, Veronica, just touched on how I define happiness. Your achievement in your career has been the main thing absent in my life, and, as I hope you’ll see in just the next few days, I’ve got it cracked.

@ Paul-

How do you answer a person who doesn’t love anything - that finds everything futile?

I would first wonder if they are in the clutches of nihilism, because finding everything to be futile is pretty close. For that, I would, were I to believe that I could help them become happy and if I knew they were receptive to new ideas, turn them toward a philosophic enterprise of creating a subjective sense of value based on the truth that life is futile. That task might be beyond me, but if you’re interested, I’ll discuss it at greater length with you. Ultimately, that’s my life ambition.

As to the Buddhists and Hindus, they have found a value in the futility and they identify it through their religion. If they practice their religion successfully, then they will find happiness in it. In other words, for them, there isn’t actually a futility, because the religious objective of enlightenment isn’t futile.

Finding a passion has a prerequisite: knowing oneself fully (yet another philosophic notion). If someone knew oneself fully, then they could focus their ambition on something they felt was achievable on one hand, but also bigger than them on the other. Of course, they couldn’t achieve that if they felt like everything was futile.

Meaning is subjective. In order to believe it, we have to create it.

@ mrsmartypants - I agree that taking someone’s religion away from them could be very irresponsible.

@ Megan - My reluctance to dumb myself has often been a source of my unhappiness. I don’t want to. So, my goal is to manage my affairs so that I can bring them both together.

@ Veronica - That concept, of forgiving some of the depth of thought to find ground in the present or pragmatic surroundings has always seemed like a shame to me. I aim to retain my sense of wonder and aspirations to think deeply about things forever.

Now I realize that I am wrong probably 80% if the time, and I don’t argue with people as much. That is nice.

Everyone wants to be the top dog, I have chosen to let them. I just don’t care to be in charge, or thought of as smart. I would rather be thought of as fun.

For kicks, my recent mental exercise/torment has been an attempt to determine the full context in which I exist. Now that I think about it, I suppose it really boils down to the continuity of our existence, though I hate using works like that, and whether the seeming continuity is really just a convenient illusion imposed on us by our brains. It seems there’s really nothing outside the moment, and if I had to choose between past me, current me, and future me… well, I choose present me every time, because we’re three different people. My brain is just effed up a little and convinces me I care too much about this future me person. I find I cannot overcome this irrational no-doubt-biologically-induced mental block and therefore I continue to live responsibly.

How about some discussion of teleportation? It ties in closely to this same idea. I don’t care how well it seems to have worked out for (the new) you, there’s no freaking way I’m doing it. Or forget teleportation, what would it mean to replicate a person down to every last subatomic detail? But if I only exist in the moment do I care one bit about a replicant? Am I nothing more than a replicant of the me that existed here a short moment ago, with the whole continuity illusion still intact? Death is either the most tragic product of the universe, or uttlerly meaningless. Unfortunately my amygdala still reminds me in my half-asleep night terrors that I care about this for some reason.

Speaking of the universe, there should really be nothing. That will never be explained. Same for time, it is not independent, and it has another name already, called “change”. Time does not go on; things just change at regular rates relative to other things in their nearby universe.

That was fun. Forgot my unhappiness for a few moments and almost eased myself to sleep.

This is somewhat akin to ‘finding’ your passion. How do you answer a person who doesn’t love anything - that finds everything futile? Are the Buddhists who find enlightenment in nothingness, or the Hindu guru’s who do something similar to be admired or rejected?

How exactly does one find one’s pash? I’ve done some searching online and there is precious little in the way of useful information about it. Following hard on the heels of a lack of passion and the feeling of intense boredom is a lack of motivation. To be motivated one has to feel some kind of connection to what one is doing. No passion, boredom, no motivation - a pretty vicious cycle that could lead to depression, frustration, and anger.

People, even smart intelligent people need hope. Without it death and suicide become reasonable options. There is something innate that screams that life should have meaning and purpose, that suicide and death are unreasonable and wrong. Victor Frankl wrote about man’s search for meaning, yet he failed to provide a mechanism to find that meaning.

There is meaning ‘out there’ or ‘in here’ but do we believe it?