a meaningful life
SELF: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECIEVE
The world is enough. More than enough, for all of us to have A Meaningful Life.
Mon.Jan.15.2024 - Ubochi Eke
As an African, I can directly speak to a poverty mentality that holds back our ability to rise with notions of scarcity that do not actually exist.
The world is enough. More than enough, for all of us to have A Meaningful Life.
As a child I danced to the tune of "Ibiri Ka Mu Biri" (Live and Let Live), by Chief Oliver De Coque and looked around in curiosity at the world's constant stupidity in acting like this massive world, is not enough for all of us.
A Meaningful Life can be defined in many ways but one of the best ways to see it, is in the mirror, reflecting back at you, as someone else's life.
If your life were a movie and that movie was played to you, would you consider the actor good and his life worth living?
If yes, that to me, is a simple test of A Meaningful Life, and I cannot imagine that living just for yourself can ever have sufficient impact to be worthy of consideration, as having made sense, or being worth depiction in 2 hours of cinema.
For most people this may sound like a call to Wealth and Glory, the notions of Money, Power and Respect coming to mind, aspirations of Celebrity and Fame dashing in and hopes of documented Legend with Autobiographies, Memoirs, Documentaries about you and all the fan fair, signs and evidence of meaning but this is not at all what I think of when I write to you about A Meaningful Life.
The meaningful Life I write about, is all about you and your own satisfaction with the net results of your life and the final conclusion that it was a worthy errand, no matter its twists and turns. it is about earthly happiness and not heavenly bliss or some esotheric definitions of satisfaction.
in that regard, A Meaningful Life is in fact a very Selfish "idea". It is the notion of a life that in its ends, is meaningful to you but here is the oddity, it is not a selfish life, nor is it aimed at selflessness and some sort of religious asthetisism, it is a balance of you, us and the world.
While A Meaningful Life must satisfy your definitions of meaning, your values and
dreams, it must have punch and impact and you cannot punch hard enough to make a dent in the fabric of life or fix a dent, (and one of the other is required to register your life in the "book" of meaning), you can hit a resounding punch, when you are only punching for you.
Your Visions need the boost of more, your Creativity needs the abundant inspiration of the world, Your life's work can only be sustained by the disciple of consequences, your achievements can only be secured by the wieght of Responsibility, your falls can only be arison by Care and what can be meaningful, if it isn't full of you.
VISION
A vision that is centered around yourself will end up being too small for any impact on the world. Even if your vision is to drive a A300,000 Rolls Royce, is that something that can be written on a tomb stone? If not, then where is the meaning in that?
A Meaningful Life is a life that when reviewed by another person who is reading a story to you of someone else's life, would sound good to your ears. Your ears, not mine. central to it is a coherent vision for your life that enables you to stay on a Definable course throughout life's renowned turbulence.
This vision must not be to be President of nigeria or Governor General of all of Africa or anything that is luxurious in definitions, it can be a vision for education in which you are truly invested to the knowledge given to your students and the impact it generates in their lives. it can also be a vision for culinary excellence, a life of service in the sciences, it can also be innovations, inventions and enterprises at the level of fame an fortune.
The point is not the size of the vision but the fact that it has a "point". A Meaningful Life cannot be derived from random pursuits of self service that have no value, meaning can only come from value and you must have a clear vision of the value that your life represents. This cannot be done, if you are only thinking about you.
to think about yourself in Sex would me ecstasy and not concern for the interests of the other party, such can never concern itself with children and can be defined as fun but does not have sufficient yield to be defined as meaningful.
To think about yourself as a teacher, can still lead to prices and awards as you sharpen your skills in order to earn more money but if the awards were gotten in order to earn money, then the awards have no value and are meaningless appurtences because the money could have been made in other more easy ways and without the need for awards.
In essence when your visions of your life are selfish, it does not mean that you will fail, it is however a waste of time to build out a vision of life that succeeds on face value but has no meaning, when you can in the same vein step outside of yourself and sketch a vision of life that gives value to the world and gifts you, A Meaningful Life.
CREATIVITY
A Meaningful Life is crafted not won. It is a tailored and manicured experience and requires inspiration for the Vision and creativity to navigate the human and material environments in which they must be earned.
How can you be sufficiently creative about a world and people, when you only think about yourself.
A key tool of creativity is the mind and it takes reflection, introspection, Retrospection, Perspectives, Views, Logic and so many other mental engagements to reak peak creativity. It is hard to achieve any reasonable levels of creativity if the only thing in view is you.
You ambitions for self aggrandizing success can be a motivation for creative means of accumulation but will lack the depth of reasoning required for meaning and impact.
This is not to say that selfish people never created anything. No. it is a realization that A Meaningful Life is not about creating things, it is about creating things that are meaningful and when your only perspective is your own, there are so many limits to the things you can create and the problems they can solve, in the end making your creativity and effort in futility because it will lack the range it needs to achieve meaning for anyone beyond yourself and in that very handicap, it may not even be able to reach far enough to create meaning for you.
DISCIPLINE
There is no impetus to be disciplined if your only focus is on your own benefits. This is because often discipline requires sacrifices and sacrifices are simple defined as things that have a cost on "you".
There are very few reasons to allow things to take a cost on "you" if the only thing that matters is you. Yes, many athletes in a bid at selfish interests, train with discipline and sacrifice diets and other leisures for the net results of a fit body and performance in competition. But as we have established area in our discussion on Vision, when the medal comes and it is not a "prize", what then is the point?
Again, it is not an inability to be disciplined when you are selfish, there are many motivating factors of self aggranziment and pleasure that are sufficient to maintain discipline but not any that result in A Meaningful life.
Note that this article is about self, within the context of A meaningful Life and so the question is not whether you can have a successful yet selfish Vision, or whether in a quest for self styled success you can have sufficient Creativity or whether you can maintain the Disicpline to achieve your Selfish visions. All of the above are possible but they will not result in a life that can be considered meaningful both to others and to yourself.
Many very selfish people live extremely disciplined lives and make the necessary sacrifices to attain material successes and even have families and other external things that should be about us but the main point is that often, if given the ability to review their own lives and with all of the success of championships, fame and fortune, most will consider the net result a fail.
To make all of the sacrifices of life and attain, maintain and live the required disciplines all to the end of material gains that could have been an addition to a more excellent and meaningful life is in retrospect a waste of opportunity.
A great father can still have 10 sons, so can a bad father, a great teach can still win awards so can a selfish one, a great friend can still have friends, so can a selfish one, why would any reasonable person one to be one, when you can be the other and have both the benefits of discipline and the joy of its meaning to us and the world and ofcourse your self.
LOVE (CARE)
To live through life assembling cars with no concern for their design is still an option but it seems too idle for me. Why not love?
What is the benefits in flowing through the world without a care in the world?
yes, you can do that, but where is the meaning in that?
Often times we are goaded into notions of life that are terrible nonsensical if you put them under proper review. men will say that they don't care about love, women will claim love is not enough, workers will claim that you can't make a living from what you love, bosses will claim that you can't find workers who love the job and on an on.
What then is the reason for love, if it is not useful to daily life?
the truth is that when we are so absorbed in our own world, studying our pains for who caused it and reviewing our challenges for competition and in general, taking a view of life from a stand point of self, where things happen to me, people do things to me, the world doesn't like me and so on, we develop a view of the world that mirrors no love and we reflect back a loveless response and the cycle continues to insanity as if it is a sane idea to live in a world of love, without love.
Avoiding the esotheric or spiritual, it would make no sense to function through life without love, when nearly all of us crave love. In fact in seeking admirration for your work, recognition as a father, awards and praise we are essentially courting love or at least looking in the rear view mirror to see if the works of our hands are appreciated, "lovingly" by others. Why then would you live a life in which you fail to give the very thing you keep seeking from others.
Again, like in all of the above you can live and be wealthy without loving your job or business, ohh but what a pain that is. Of course you can run and win world records without loving to run but men could you have done so many other things that are not so hard on the groin. And yes you can father a tree fruits volume of children and not love children, you can even put all of them through the best University in the world and marry wives for them but my point remains, what is the point in all of this, if there is no love and therefore not reason and therefore no meaning?
SELF
Of course you must think of yourself, are you not important? and of course what would be the point in A meaningful Life that was not at least at some points in the journey f**k**g fun?
But the point of it all is that even in your analysis of self, you must not be selfish.
Thinking for self is a requirement of A meaningful life, because the life in discussion is particularly your life and therefore its conclusions and end must be worthy of your own analysis of a life worth living. However, it is important to be careful in determining what "you" want, because often a quick review points you to easy routes that a careful review would avoid.
As an example, when i started my journey i wanted to be an Engineer, this was my desire born of the limited knowledge I had of both the world and myself, had i followed this course i would have had immense success and would be in control of my own raw billions now, not the borrowed ones I now manage but it would not have been the same life by a mile.
in fact, when measured by strickly selfish models, I find that my current life, with all of its attendant visions for other people's progress, its creativity modelled around a better world for all of us, its Disciplines and sacrifices of comforts for a greater end and its Love of others that often seems detrimental to my own progress, in all of this i find that my life as is, is much better than I could have ever imagined had I taken the paths that were worn with wear.
At present i do not have a private jet, Engineer King would have. i married at 30, Engineer King would have been married at 22. My homes are a far cry, my list of children, volume of degrees and on and on. in all metrics, the King of my most selfish analysis beats this King but in deeper review, they are not on the same course, can never have the same end and i so much love the man and life, that a more thorough review of myself and what is in my best interest, (which oddly enough is the same as what is in our best interest) has created.
From my own journey, I have discovered that A meaningful life is found in a journey of self interest that does not move too far into the territory of selfish. Consider Self interest land and Selfishness Sea. The 1st is an adaptation of your lifes journey to the organic requirements of your own nature, the second is to seek a glowing end without truly analysising the pointlessness of swimming around, when you are not a fish. This regardless of the prize at the bottom of the ocean.
GIVE
You have a deposit of human minerals that the world needs to function and I suggest that you give it up, on your own.
You cannot have A meaningful life, if you are full.
this is the most nonsensical attribute of A meaningful life because it seems stupid to expend yourself for the world and other people. i however suggest that you expend yourself for 3 reasons, for the world, for us and for yourself.
FOR THE WORLD: Whether you like it or not, you will return to the earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Why would you want to enter the soil with some deposits still left in you, why not spend it yourself?
So many people speak about leaving the earth having personally expended and enjoyed their wealth and this sounds reasonable but wierd when you counterpart that with them leaving the world with much of their ideas, gifts, stories and general internal minerals at 10% expended.
A meaningful Life is a life that scores A on expenditure, having written all of the books in ones head, told all of the story, spent all of the semen and in all things gifted back to the world on your own, all of the deposits in your life. it makes more sense to give it and take credit, that to keep it and be buried with your gifts having been of no meaning to the world.
FOR US: For all of your effort, if you are gifted with making peace and you choose not to, we will have wars and you will get no credit and when we have peace you will get no credit. What is the point in being a spectators in a stadium, watching a match in which you are supposed to be the star player?
I imagine that, that would be a terrible match and equally life would be a terrible life, if you live to watch other do what you were made for and to live the lives you could best live and worse to at death find yourself on whatever side with people watching a nice movie of someone elses life, that could easily have been yours.
FOR YOURSELF: Beyond envy, what is the point in living so well, and forgetting to give the things that would have made it all A meaningful Life. Things you choose to keep or forget to give, which the world will not be denied anyway and which someone else will eventually give to us, which was yours all along to give.
RECIEVE
when you give, you receive, accolades, awards, applause, love and sometimes you actually recieve non of the above but in all instances you will get the most important gift, A Meaningful Life.
What is that worth to you?
AML - SERIES PROFILE
A MEANINGFUL LIFE
the "A MEANINGFUL LIFE" series is a non Religious, Non Enterprise look at life and meaning, written with the hope of getting you to a life of pure Joy, real Happiness and Satisfaction with your own life, regardless of your faith and economic profile.
It does not intend to preach, but where necessary it will. At the end, the desired result is that from this series you will pick up the tools to give your life greater meaning, and live a more satisfying existence.
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