Why you shouldn't do what Aaron did
TL;DR If Swartz's death is triggering suicidal thoughts, you must understand that this will pass, and life will be worth living.
After seeing the impact of Aaron Swartz's death on the Hacker News community, I am concerned about the Werther effect (the tendency of a prominent suicide to trigger other suicides). I hope I can help by sharing what I learnt through 10+ years of depression and recovery.
Depression robs you of the ability to: 1. remember happiness 2. feel happiness 3. anticipate happiness 4. make considered decisions
#1-#3 make you miserable, but #4 is the killer. Bits of your brain actually shut down, and you run on pure emotion. For example, when I was depressed, I was easy prey for offers like "4 for the price of 3 on this crappy overpriced chocolate" because I couldn't weigh it up. All I could think was "chocolate: good. 4 for 3: good. 4 for 3 chocolate: irresistible". But if you're running on pure emotion and your emotions tell you "everything sucks" well ... suicide looks like a good option.
So why didn't I kill myself? Somewhere in my guts, there was a stubborn belief that "this will pass". You might even call it a sense of entitlement: "come on world -- you can give me something better than this!" And you know what? It DID! Thanks to some wonderful people, and to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, I found a way to recover.
With the best 10+ years of my life lost to depression, starting from scratch in my 30s has been hard, but it's still a life, and I swear that life is worth more than you can possibly understand when you're depressed.
Stay strong,
Pitarou
164 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] thread== Ross ==
Just a friendly reminder that depressed people cannot, for the most part "snap [ourselves] out." If the solution was to double down and power through I'd have cured my own depression years ago.
The shitty thing is that it's a long-living subconscious emotional drain. It's a downward slide that for me happened so slowly I didn't even notice until I'd lived at the bottom, completely burned out on life and barely functional for two years. It's not only a mental disorder, it's technically called "psychomotor depression" because it will by degrees affect mind and body in a downward spiral.
I've never lost sight of the bigger issues, the disorder and opportunity for change in world-at-large, but it's impossible to make meaningful progress toward /anything/ whilst waking up every day with a gnawing emotional emptiness and pain thrusting itself into the center of my consciousness. It's care about those bigger issues and for my family that has kept me in this world.
My point is this: whether you mean to or not, you suggest that people can get themselves out of depression. In general, this doesn't happen. Therapy, medication, and support of friends, combined with healthy living have begun to move me forward in my own struggle.
I hope to see in my lifetime an elimination of the social stigma of depression. We're not miserable entitled bastards that need a reminder of our incredible opportunities. We're folk who feel sad and whose brains work in a way such that we can't always see the way forward. That's all there is to it.
I also spelled my name wrong. I'm actually "Pitarou" rather than "Pitaroua". Post in haste, repent at leisure.
Argh. I hate this. I disagreed with him on so much but I wish he were still alive to argue with. :(
I've spent many hours thinking about how each of us can dig ourselves out of our dark places when we unfortunately get stuck in them from time to time; I don't think I've seen the core symptoms of depression expressed so succinctly in these few years since my own difficult times.
I spent Christmas week with friends in Hawaii, and I told my friend (who has lost an older brother to suicide -- so we talk about this sort of thing from time to time) that being conscious of "happy times" like this and making an effort to remember these great moments during our difficult moments is probably a key factor in preventing suicidal thoughts in us. He agreed.
If you don't blame yourself, the chain of suicide doesn't start. People don't suicide themselves because somebody else has annoying life circumstances. Circumstances are relative too. Modern society is constantly throwing other people's success, joy, accomplishment, and bravado in our faces. It can make us feel less than what we are. It can make us feel like our lives aren't good enough. Stop comparing your life to anything you've read anywhere anytime. We live in an age of magic. Be a wizard.
Blaming yourself is a dangerous path to go down. Don't blame yourself. The world is big and time is long. Things will work out.
[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2408091 and summarized at my http://suicidescale.com/ site.
The best advice and totally true!
My heart just breaks . . .
Actually, you just need to trick yourself into committing to seeing or doing something in the future, repeatedly.
Traffic on reddits /r/SuicideWatch has exploded. [1]
[1]http://stattit.com/r/SuicideWatch/
I think the general point you were trying to make is good. Depression can crop up in the best of us. But acting like it's unavoidable and just something you have to live with is perhaps not the best way of approaching it either.
Remember that 'you' are running on top of a very complex biological computer consisting of billions of neurons, with hormones and other chemicals influencing its operation. It needs to constantly be supplied with nutrients and oxygen to function at all.
Sanity is actually a finely balanced thing. You need to worry about the appropriate things, but not too much, and not too little.
Little tweaks to neurotransmitter levels can have enormous effects on your cognition.
Edit: in addition to what the OP had said, also remember this: When you are well and truly depressed, you don't even want to get better. You don't want to feel good. Some part of you is fine with pain and suffering, and more pain and more suffering.
After 20 years of depression my death was averted by the words "I'd rather see you institutionalized than dead." Two weeks on the psychiatric ward and an ongoing series of changes later, I now lead the happiest life possible. You can, too.
So now, I give these words back to the community. I don't know who you are, but with all my heart: I'd rather see you institutionalized than dead.
But personally, I would rather be death than institutionalized.
I've also known some deep depressive years (after my mother committed suicide). The cure has been to read ( Nietzsche mainly), to embrace it, to listen to my brain, to little by little understand it. Understanding that depression is a pure symptom of our humanity : it's the moment you loose meaning in your life ( as Nietzsche says, the Human being is the only animal who needs meaning to live ). And then, you realize that the meaning of your life can only come from one source : yourself. We are easily trap by the need of approval, the need of existence within the eyes of the one who surrounds us. These approvals do not exist and are only projected, forecasted, approvals, it's our own devils. We are free to put whatever meaning we desire on our lives, as long as we respect others. Life is a permanent challenge to ourselves. This is the reason this is the most beautiful journey... Life is short anyway, let's make it a beautiful adventure. There is nothing to lose, everything to gain.
This is significant when Freud held his cures to be the primary evidence for his theories - and review of his published cases mostly found he was wrong about them.
If someone I loved were depressive I would seek out therapies which provided some real reason to believe they worked, not pseudoscience. Being European shouldn't mean that you reject science in favor of something which seems more local.
It may seem like I'm hair-splitting, but it's an important difference.
This is a critical point. If you know someone who is prone to depression, it's important to understand that they may simply be incapable of generating this kind of hope within themselves. Depression is not merely the loss of happiness, but the loss of the belief that you can ever be happy again. That's why intervention is so important when someone is suicidal: http://www.save.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewpage&p... .
Because it will pass.
But the hard thing is to believe it and that is where help is needed, I would say.
Thanks.
1-800-SUICIDE
1-800-273-TALK
Please if you are depressed or suicidal seek professional help.
At the same time, the general attitude towards suicide makes me even more uncomfortable being alive. I don't feel ill and it seems really condescending to say that I haven't been in my right mind much in years. I find it really consoling that some time I'll happen to die or get around to killing myself.
To me, suicide would bring immediate advantages. I'd never feel bad again. I'd never be happy again too, but that doesn't bother me and I wish it wouldn't bother you either. It's fine to say you feel uncomfortable with others killing themselves and it's definitely important to consider that prior to committing suicide, but please don't claim that not killing myself would benefit me. Maybe you think that's an example of my inability to make considered decisions/judgements. To me it just resembles any other moral or political argument where calling either side mentally ill doesn't help.
Suicide is wrong, usually. It just affects the people around you way to much. But for me and many other people it would also be really awesome.
I would love going back to that life. My father is a pastor, and he and the Christianity and Christians I grew up with were the 'good' kind. If I were gay, he'd be one of the first to know, for example.
The problem is that being a Christian without actually believing any of it is 1) difficult, if not impossible to keep up, and 2) less effective, perhaps almost ineffective.
And I can't just 'will' myself to believe it, unfortunately...
It's true that it's important to make sure that depression is not coloring your assessment of that: it's quite common for depressed people to have a view that things are hopeless when they aren't. But on the other hand, sometimes the world sucks, and not every situation has a good way out of it. For most people, things get better and what seemed like insurmountable obstacles will pass. But I don't think you can honestly tell someone that a major felony criminal case is a temporary setback, something that will pass, and only their depression is making it seem more hopeless than it is. In a large percentage of cases it doesn't pass, and the person isn't able to continue their life as a free person. A situation I hope never to be in, but I don't think the correct decision, if you're actually facing a choice of whether to go to prison for a long time or not, is obvious.
I can't say whether that was Aaron's own motivation, though, or how rational his thinking on the subject was.
Personally, I wish Aaron (and Lessig, and everyone) had made more of a stink. I wish he would have threatened suicide, and then not gone through with it. Maybe swallowed some pills and then rushed to the hospital. That would have gotten attention, and it would have saved a brilliant mind.
There is no doubt that life would have been the harder path for Aaron. But I think it would have been the better one for him, and for us all, had he continued to fight with every ounce of strength, physical and mental. I wish he had not given up in the face of even overwhelming strength and odds.
America has a whole range of prisons see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison#United_States
The lower levels have plenty of reading material and even internet access. There is little risk of abuse from the other prisoners since they too are there for non violent offenses.
And here is the Government Accountability Office on overcrowding in the federal prison system: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-743
According to Lessig, he was broke -- and even if he wasn't, his bank might have been under orders to refuse a large cash withdrawal.
The police catch defendants who run away from trials all the time; they're professionals. He's never done it before, presumably made no advance preparations before being investigated, and presumably didn't hang out with a crowd that had experience with law enforcement tactics and effective countermeasures; he's an amateur. He might have judged the probability of success sufficiently low that he didn't want to endanger family and friends for trying to hide him.
That being said, even if there was a very low probability of success, he might have been able to take a risk-free shot by running as best he could, then suiciding if it looked like the police were closing in. If there's a 1% chance he escapes the police and makes it, and a 99% chance he's forced to suicide, that's better than just staying at home and committing suicide -- a 1% chance of living is still infinitely better than a 0% chance.
He might have been taking nonzero risk in this scenario that he wouldn't have been able to suicide successfully. E.g. the police surprise and restrain him before he's able to suicide, or are able to revive him and now he has to live on wounded, permanently crippled and/or brain-damaged in addition to his other troubles. This risk may have been unacceptable to him. It's not unacceptable to me, but then again, I'm not suicidal.
The electronic monitoring bracelet scenario could be gotten around by chopping off his leg. Losing a leg would suck, but it would be better than losing your life. Then again, that scenario also has a pretty high risk of a botched attempt resulting in an even worse position.
For me, when my life is on the line and it's double-down and probably lose, or sit back and certainly lose, it's a no-brainer: raising the stakes is the only option of the two even worth considering. But I'm not suicidal.
The story goes like this... In senior year of high school I 'formalized' my atheism. I'll save those details for another day, however, it suffices to say that I was confident that I was drawing the correct conclusion about the nonexistence of god. In thinking about the implications of a godless universe I realized the vastness of time, the insignificance of myself, and how nothing actually mattered. There is (or so I thought) no reason to do anything at all because its all going to be washed away in time. My drive to carry on vanished. Everything was futile, hopeless. Nothing I did mattered so why do anything at all -- why feel happy about anything at all?
I constantly thought of suicide. The ways I'd do it, the statements I'd try to make with it. It was an awful time, and it was all right in the middle of my undergraduate college experience. This continued on for a couple years as I tried as best I could with school while investigating how other people are able to cope with the magnitude of this concept. The reality I found was that most people don't cope with it, or rather, they cope with it by never even considering it. That only made things worse of course, everyone I'd talk to about this had almost nothing to say.
One day I decided I'd actually go through with it. As I lay on my bed I thought to myself "Alright, its been long enough. I've felt terrible and thought of suicide for years now. Either I'm going to man up and get this over with, or I'm just going to keep dreaming of doing it every day." So I bullied myself into finally committing to finish it, and there was a sense of relief. I asked myself why I hadn't decided to do it sooner. That was when I made the most fantastic discovery of my entire life, but first, some other things you should know.
During this time I was also struggling with being gay and, as a gay computer scientist myself, I found Alan Turing very interesting. It struck me as awful that he died in 1954, not long before The Beatles, free love, and the full onset of the civil rights movement. Just a few more years and he could have lived in, and possibly even helped to shape, a much more liberal society.
When I asked myself why I hadn't decided to do it sooner, I realized it was because I was never sure. I always hoped that I would find some clue that would change my mind. So I thought to myself: am I sure now? Do I have conclusive evidence that killing myself is the right thing to do? Am I certain there won't be some dramatic unforeseen shift in circumstances that would improve my life and make me not want to kill myself (like Turing missed out on)? No, I was not absolutely certain that life had no meaning.
We know so little of the universe and theres no way that any of us can be absolutely certain that suicide is the best choice without research that would take hundreds of years in understanding physics, the mind, and probably fields that don't even exist yet. Its possible that life does indeed have a purpose and we simply don't know it. The optimal thing to do is to continue on and do as best we can to discover this purpose -- because if there is a purpose, then actively looking for it is the smart way to find it. If there isn't a purpose, then the time we 'wasted' in search of a purpose wasn't really wasted after all because theres no way to judge whether it was time well spent without an ultimate purpose.
Getting back to the discovery... Probably...
I have only a faint idea of mine, and it involves helping people and probably making things.
HN isn't a support network but I fully understand and appreciate your post.
His whole point is that there is no conclusive evidence that there is no purpose to life, and there will never be if there is none to be found, and that is precisely why the only way to find one is to keep looking for it.
Specific religions as we know them have nothing to do with this. Indeed, even he said he had logically convinced himself there is no God. It doesn't all have to be about God-in-a-book.
There are depressingly few subjects in the world amenable to anything like what the mathematicians would call "proof".
I have no "proof" of anything philosophical. No-one does. But in my experience, laymen banging on about "proof" are likely doing so in defense of some ludicrous belief whose nonsensical tenets they loudly invite all comers to "disprove" - an impossible task. Let's hope you're not one of them.
Purpose is essential. You can cut it out, claiming you're somehow above it all, but you're cheating yourself, ultimately.
What I mean by that example: even if life had some purpose (for whom, set by what?), why should it be a purpose you agree with? Why would some external purpose override your own values?
You can only have purpose to others. Life can only have purpose to something else other than life. Does that other thing matter?
Venus says life has no purpose. After venus makes that statement, what does venus do next? Lets say it is some action, X. Why did venus do X? Well, because of Y1 (Y1 could be 'to sustain living' or 'to be happy' or 'to help others'). Ok, but why is Y1 important? Because of Y2. Ok, why is Y2 important? Because of Y3. And why is Y3 important? And so on and so on...and eventually there is no answer because venus believes life has no purpose. Any action venus takes, at its core, is illogical without a purpose.
So that is why I am saying that I was depressed: everything I did was meaningless, I had no idea what I should be doing. Then I realized the most important thing I could be doing was figuring out the most important thing I could be doing. If it turns out that venus is right, and there isn't a "most important thing I could be doing" then the fact that I wasn't doing "the optimal thing" doesn't matter because there isn't an optimal thing to be doing and I can be confident that I gave it my best shot.
When I said life has no purpose, I didn't mean it was futile or nihilist or anything else. I mean that words like "purpose" simply do not apply. Purpose is an anthropological term and is meaningless in this context. To what "purpose" do mountains rise, volcanoes erupt, meteors explode in the sky? It is inappropriate to try to find purpose in these things. Purpose is a human concept.
This applies to life too. We are here because we, by whatever crazy turns of chance and happenstance, are here. There is no other answer; indeed that is not even one. We may be wiped out by a meteor tomorrow and the universe cares not one whit.
Why, you ask? Who on earth are you asking? There is no "why". Why did the coin come up heads or tails? Why does someone live and someone else die in an automobile accident? Why is that rock here, and not over there? There is no "why". For there to be a reason, someone needs to have thought about it, and there is no someone. There are causes and effects, yes, but no "why".
So what do we do next? We do what we are programmed to do, after thousands of generations of trial and error - we love one another, treat each other with kindness, some of us screw up, but mostly we try to pull together to improve our world and the lives of the people we love. Because that is all we are, animals with organic computers for brains and this is the program we are running, and there's no "why" for that, either.
"There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!"
If someone chooses to define a purpose for their life, then can be perfectly rational in doing so. Inasmuch as we accept that there is a reality (which we can't definitely prove btw), we can accept any number of truths based on our experience in that reality.
Solipsism proposes that the world is just a creation of the mind. However the only way to define the mind is in the context of the world outside of it. So no, the world isn't just imagination, and the imagination isn't just an artefact of the world. You can only define each one of them in function of the other. Just like you can't define good without bad.
No one I know has been able to define a rational purpose for their life. You can't have purpose to yourself, just to others. Either way it's an infinite purpose chain.
Just because the "purpose" of the cosmos is irreconcilable with the purpose that one being defines for themselves, doesn't mean that purpose is nonsensical.
I use the word nonsensical over the word irrational, because there are many things in the world which you would term irrational. One of them is the emergence of intelligence (yes, you can rationalize this as an evolutionary adaption, but the basis of everything is irrational, so who cares?). Irrational though it is, we are still, to some extent, rational minds trapped in this irrational world. To dispose of any presupposition as irrational, simply for the sake of logical consistency, is an irresponsible way to live.
It is neither rational nor irrational to live as a solipsist. It is simply an axiom on which you base the rest of your rationalizations. Choose your axioms wisely, and the world will unfold accordingly.
Bullshit. We don't know how long life lasts, nor whether supernatural purposes or intentful[0] beings exist, nor what (if anything) is after. That does not mean there is "no purpose" to it. It is its own purpose.
Personally, I am most in line with Buddhism and think reincarnation is likely, and that mind (consciousness) itself is a first-class citizen, but existence doesn't have to be eternal to be meaningful. In fact, if a finite existence were meaningless, then an eternal one would be meaningless and infinite, which would be far more undesirable than death.
[0] "Intentful" is not a dictionary word, but nothing else captures what I am trying to say so I am justified in making a word up.
Not in this state. The forms we take are conditioned by our karma. One aspect of the human form in this world is the inability to remember previous lives until extremely high spiritual states are attained, and even that latter bit is questioned by some.
The karmic effects and impulses continue on, invisibly. The memories (and much of the personality) die with the body. This is not a satisfying answer to some, but it's the most realistic.
And you could also ask how you are even reincarnated to a human when the probability of being a virus/bacteria is several magnitudes larger?
That discussion could go on for days: which lifeforms are sentient and which not, whether human birth makes future human birth more likely, etc. For sure: human birth is rare. Buddha compared it to an ocean with a wooden ring on it, with a turtle who rises to the surface once every 100 years. Human birth is as rare as that turtle surfacing inside that ring.
What makes you so sure of yourself? Smarter people than you have both believed and not believed in a greater purpose or in God. It's something that's been debated since man has existed, yet you seem unusually... certain... that you are correct.
> This is difficult for the non-religious to swallow, that's why religion exists.
If every human's behaviors and motivations were so simple as to be summarily condensed into one sentence like this, things like depression and suicide would also be easily assessable.
EDIT: In what strange circumstances is a post that says "Life has no purpose" upvoted, and mine -- that says "How can you be so sure of yourself?" -- downvoted?
The reason I sound sure of myself is because all of supernatural religion is impossible. It is all impossible. It is against every single thing we understand about the physical universe and, should evidence emerge confirming any of it, all we knew should be upturned - but that has not and will not happen because there is no evidence whatsoever. What would you do with a theory in total conflict with every other (working!) theory you have, and with absolutely no evidence in its favour?
Show me any evidence, at all, that any of it is even remotely possible, at all, and I'll promptly eat my hat, your hat, any other hats around, and join you at the altar. Until then, it's nothing but a bunch of ludicrous superstition.
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/16icpq/only_6_of_s...
If you haven't read his book, I would highly suggest it. It's called "Man's search for meaning". He was a holocaust survivor, suffering through perhaps the most pointless of tortures, and he developed a philosophy that not only brought him through the situation, but has touched millions of lives sense then. I've never known a prominent motivational speaker/life coach/happiness expert who hasn't read this book.
If life doesn't seem to have a purpose, it's because you haven't created one.
What we "lose" (it was never there actually) is the belief in an external, all-knowing guiding force that somehow makes everything we do ok. However, there are still guiding forces you can choose to follow. They are within us.
Personally I think if there was such an external guiding force, it would make life meaningless.
I don't agree that an external power that prescribes some random notion of purpose is necessary.
I think that this is precisely what drives many people to insanity. We are not brought up to think that we are free. When we experience freedom (either intellectually or actually) we become overwhelmed. We quite literally don't know how to handle it.
We (in most of the West) are taught from birth that we must always subject ourselves to some authority. In the beginning, there was the parent. If we didn't please him/her, we did not survive. Then there was the teacher. If we did not follow his/her instructions, we were punished (regardless of whether or not our undirected pursuits were fruitful). Then there was our boss. If we did not execute tasks handed down from said boss in precisely the proper way, we were terminated. The fact that most of our (this generation's) parents were not entrepreneurial means that entrepreneurship was generally looked down upon. The "get a job, obey your boss" gene was passed down to the vast majority of us.
This all not even considering religious commitments (pastors, imams, rabbis, etc.). Or Government Officials, who we must subject ourselves to if we need social services of any kind. Then there is The Community, who indirectly pressure us to live as they do at risk of shaming and/or shunning. Then there is ... etc.
All of this is an incredible burden to bear for anyone. That is why most people don't explore this line of thought. Religion, workaholism, or familycentrism are all a whole lot easier than actually facing the void. If you've legitimately seen darkness and have decided to let it empower you, damn -- I commend ya. Most of us can't do it. Even Nietzsche -- who was pretty much the first to verbalize our secular freedom -- lost control in the end.
Whilst I cannot tell you what life means to you, I can reassure you there is more to life than nothingness. As Descartes put it "I think, therefore I am"... to me, in a funny way this is a precursor to duck typing, it doesn't really matter the form that life takes, if it resembles life then it is life.
Life means nothing. There is no moral standard, universal ideal, or God to live up to or for. "Making" your life is painting a picture on a blank canvas. That is filling a void, and your saying "get out of your head!" is nothing more than your way of filling said void.
Regarding our conversation, yes, it is neat. However that it is neat doesn't magically infuse life with meaning. We are wherever we are, conversing, and life is still meaningless. I am still gazing into the void. And the void is still gazing back at you.
Regarding the cogito. That life exists in many forms does not give life meaning. The likeliest case is that life means absolutely nothing and that all there is is nothingness. We have no purpose here other than what we've invented for ourselves, and even then we have different conceptions of what that is. "I think therefore I am," and what next? That is the void.
There's an important point to consider here, and I hope you don't take offence... perhaps the reason you believe life is devoid of meaning is because you're asking the wrong question...
Let's consider the question... What is the meaning of a tree?
A person asking such a question has set out to find a succinct answer that fits with their understanding of what constitutes meaning. If they cannot find an answer, their conclusion is that trees are meaningless. However, this is us projecting our desires onto the tree, what we're really asking is 'what message do you have for me?', and message implies there was a sender of the message, so for those that do not believe in a higher power there is no sender of a message, so really you could predict the answer before its even asked (based on who is answering it).
Furthermore, it's important to understand just because a question is simple to ask, does not mean the answer has to be simple, or even mean there is an answer at all. Let's say I asked you... What do words mean? The question was posed in 4 words, and is a valid English sentence. However, when you think of answers, you see that the question is nonsensical, words don't have one meaning, each word has its own meaning. The same is true of the question... What does life mean? The English used to pose the question is valid, but the combination of words rules out any single answer.
Furthermore, there's a difference being meaningless and worthless. Going back to the tree example, if a tree was worthless the environment it existed in would not be changed depending on whether it existed. However, we can see that the tree has an influence on the world around it.
I've stopped the tree example there, because there's one more point that must be addressed otherwise this conversation is unlikely to progress. Whilst the 'meaning of life' question does not make sense, the reasons for asking it do, and that is to work out what we should do with our life. Whilst I still maintain that 'life is what you make it', I think it'll be helpful to share a little of my personal story and philosophy.
In 2012, I tried out a religious retreat, and whilst the people there were well intentioned, I reacted badly to it, which resulted in quite a bit of soul searching. Something that helped me balance myself what the teachings of Socrates, in particular that he was the wisest man because he knew one thing... that he knew nothing. This helped me change my perspective on life... instead of reaching up for answers about higher purpose (that I could never claim knowledge of), I instead chose to embrace the life I can experience now. I find value in enjoying life and in being a positive influence in the life of others. Seems like a perfectly fine approach to me, and you see I didn't need to find a universal answer to the 'meaning of life' question to choose this path either, your path is up to you.
As for universal ideal, perhaps the Golden Rule will suffice?
Thank you for reading this longish post.
Anything.
Should they simply do what makes them happiest? No, most people agree that doing what makes you happiest is not an answer for everyone. Some people like to murder, and as a society we agree thats not acceptable. Everyone would feel good taking heroin, but that wouldn't be good either. Also, simply striving for happiness is messy - when do you go for immediate gratification and when do you strive for long term happiness?
Should people's purpose be helping others? Maybe, but there are problems with that too. Mostly, when do you help others and when do you help yourself? Perhaps if you helped yourself just a little more you could help a lot more people. But if you help yourself you stop helping others...so the advice of "helping others" really isn't a complete thought/advice. (Though, I do agree I like to help others.)
Honestly I don't know how anyone can place any value on anything without a purpose for themselves, and while many people have assigned purposes for themselves, I'm curious how they came to the conclusion that that purpose was the right one. So many people base decisions on what others do, or what feels good...and not many people sit down and think through the logic of it, I think.
So, back to my point about not being surprised that it depressed me: without valuing anything, nothing feels good. Art is seen, understood, and neither liked nor disliked. Comedy is seen, comprehended, but not fulfilling. Physical rushes are felt, experienced, and let pass. There is nothing to base happiness on because nothing matters. That is, until a purpose is understood. Its the most important thing of all and so any time you take a step that supports it, you can give yourself a pat on the back for doing whats right. The purpose I understand is to discover a purpose. Every time you exercise so that you can think more clearly and live longer, every time you build something or accumulate wealth so that you can better yourself and put yourself in a better position to make life a little longer and promote research a little more, or even every time you relax you can actually relax because you know all these things will help you in the long run. Its a deep confidence in knowing that I'm doing as best I can because nobody knows the purpose, if there even is one, and so the only way we can have piece of mind that we haven't wasted the little time we have here is by doing as best we can to figure it out.
Next, you should distinguish between a goal or purpose and the means to achieve it. If you goal is to achieve world peace, it doesn't imply that you know about a sure way to achieve it, and you don't have a guarantee that the steps you take are the right ones. That doesn't imply that it is useless to try, though.
Ultimately, what I find sad is that apparently you need some external validation for your existence. You can not stand on your own. It is as if you were missing a leg - that would be sad, no?
I am not sure how to describe it better. I think if you are feeling emptiness and can't appreciate things, very likely the reason is much more basic than "a general lack of meaning in life". Personally I think it is much more likely that the root cause are emotional problems in your life, loneliness, not getting along with family and friends and stuff like that.
Good luck in finding your way!
Since no one before has ever extracted the purpose from the fabric of the universe, I knew I needed to be able to do things that none, or very few, have been able to do. I decided I cannot lead an average life. Even if the average life of an American in the 2000s offers much more than an average life even 100 years ago, my rough estimations suggest that this still isn't enough to find the purpose.
I also went about abolishing my depression. Depression served no purpose other than to limit me by sapping energy, making me disinterested in things, and disinterested in people. I forced myself to find meaning in things based on what they meant to my new ultimate goal, that is, discovering the ultimate goal. With a goal in mind that I actually believed in, I could feel happiness and accomplishment every time I took a step towards it. The depression ended.
I studied what it is that makes people successful. It appears to me that being valuable to other people is central. Luckily I'm already fairly smart, because large scale success (as opposed to just being successful in your social group) implies a higher bar of ability since your social group is now "the world". Being smart is good, but isn't quite valuable to other people in a large way. So, I'm developing tools to help people improve their lives and simultaneously aim to elevate myself by elevating other people.
The final piece I feel I should share is that eventually, my ability to search for the purpose will run out. Specifically, I mean death. However, unlike previous generations, my generation has the luxury of believing (through medicine and technology) that there is a small probability that we can escape death far longer than those who've lived before us. I am torn about how to approach this. Should I drop everything and go study medicine and be a direct contributing factor to possibly escaping death, or should I gain wealth and influence and promote research through those means? I have decided on the latter for now. It is a bet, and its one I'm unsure of. In the end, though, if it becomes clear I'm on the verge of death... I can at least have piece of mind that I did as best I could and have no regrets for the way I spent my life.
Either there is a purpose or there isn't, and I will find it or I won't. If there is a purpose and I find it, win. If there isn't a purpose and I don't find it, then things like 'win' and 'lose' don't make sense because there is no way to be doing the right or wrong thing without some purpose to judge it against. If there isn't a purpose and I do find it -- thats not possible. If there is a purpose and I don't find it then, while perhaps its sad that I missed out on discovering it, I can rest assured that I've done everything in my ability to discover it, and hold no blame on myself for not living more optimally / doing the right thing.
At least live for friends and family members who care about you and want you to live. That has to be some sort of rational reason to live right there. If not then find a irrational one like live to see what is new in comic books, movies, TV shows, technology, science, medicine, etc. Just live to see the new stuff come out and enjoy it. Some people live with no known reason or purpose to live, they live because they are alive.
You define your own meaning to life, don't let others force theirs on you. That is your rational reason and rational purpose to live, to find meaning in life. See you are on a quest to learn that, so live it the best way you can without harming others.
I tried to post the story here but it says my post is too long. I will just post the link to the story below. http://www.facebook.com/UbcCompliments/posts/222319324569761