BertM

Okay. Not sure what the reason is for the negative points on my last 2 replies. I will admit my response to this article was fuelled by my own frustrations. But still I do not see where my logic fails when I say: "Life is objectively without purpose afawk. The rational thing to do is accept that."

For the past 30 years I lived a life without meaning, purpose, passion, importance, you name it. Still, I feel no need to end it, nor does that mean I cannot enjoy things. But what that does do is make me feel lonely. I see everyone around me, everywhere, hiding behind their own self-created "purposes".

To me,... (read more)

what you don't think people have things they consider important?

On the contrary. I think people are very good at believing in things, including what is important to them. My point is, that that doesn't make it important because importance doesn't exists as an empirical concept but only as a cognitive construct. My question is: Why do we need that construct? What is it that makes people need to be able to believe in something before it becomes real to them? Can't you just enjoy the things you like without giving them an arbitrary value? The problem I have with this, is that importance -like any construct- will get a life on it's own. Much... (read more)

I am sorry. I must word my argument/question very badly because we are drifting away from my gripe with the article. Perhaps I'll just close with explaining how I experience life:

Life just is. Life just tries to keep alive. To keep alive, humans (and other animals) feel good/bad in certain situations.

To me, nowhere in this, there is anything important, useful or goal-centric. Since we are aware, cognitive beings, we struggle with reconciling our survival-instinct with the fact it is all pointless. So we invent things like cricket, money, importance, life purpose and whatnot.

Personally I think/believe it would be much better if we all just found comfort in the fact we are all useless and we... (read more)

I take "important" to be a human invention. Which is, like you say, not universal. Each importance is individual and at best shared by a group of people. As such I would argue it is a belief which does not relate to an 'objective' reality. I suspect that everyone needs a false belief in order to have a drive to live because reality puts us in a catch-22 (programmed to survive, but death is inevitable).

I am not saying we should demand a universal, objective importance. What I am saying is we must demand rationality and truth. There is nothing wrong with believing something is important, as long as you also admit it is... (read more)

Here’s the truth. We exist on this earth for some undetermined period of time. During that time we do things. Some of these things are important. Some of them are unimportant. And those important things give our lives meaning and happiness. The unimportant ones basically just kill time.

What is important though? Isn't that just subjective as well as illusionary? Purely objectively speaking (if such a thing is possible) everything is relative, even importance e.g. what is important for me, might not be for you, what is important in 1765 might not be important in 2015, what is important on earth might not be important on the moon, etc. etc. Is saving someone's life... (read more)