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Essays on meaning in your life
Essays on meaning in your life
Essays on meaning in your life
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Philosophy 101 Essay 3 There are many questions that face human existence. Questions that we ask others and ourselves, while we try to find meaning. When there seems to be no clear or true answer then this puzzles humanity as we have a longing to understand and a longing for clarity. There are tons of philosophical questions one can think of or ask but they all seem to boil down to one single question. Does life have meaning? This question has been pondered over since human existence. After searching this world for an answer and not finding a concrete reply, this can be a frustrating experience. How can we continue to survive and live but not know what our actual place is within this world? When no answer is provided this is an act of absurdity as we do not understand but some how continue to be. This world and all that is finite does not provide an answer to our longing need to understand our position within the world. Human existence is absurd because human existence seeks an answer to our meaning within life and the world is quiet not providing us with a concrete answer. Absurdity connects two motives together that are seen as almost irrelevant to each other. An act of absurdity consists of ridiculous events that are wildly unreasonable. Illogical and preposterous can be used to better understand how absurdity is defined. To become absurd is to say that something is just not logically correct. To say that human existence is absurd is to say that the human experience is rightfully a feeling that is not correct. Human existence is absurd as a physical presence within this world along as a mentally absurdity too. The physical absurd presence of humans within this world can be understood if you take a step back t... ... middle of paper ... ...ical gestures, death, and intelligence revealing the absurdity. Suicide is not an answer to resolving but rather an act of running away from something that is not that big of a deal. Among the absurdity that life consists of we need to continue to live our life and strive to find meaning. We need to provide for ourselves first in order to have fitness and flourishing. We also need to help others find meaning in the world through fitness and being able to flourish. Eudemonia comes if we grow the better parts of our live while finding meaning in work, friendships, and expressing our talents. Though life is absurd it is only a feeling that can be dealt with through living, flourishing, and providing for others. Life will continue to be absurd and it’s a fact we cannot change so we need to continue to strive to flourish and find meaning elsewhere among our lives.
"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive...." Joseph Campbell made this comment on the search for meaning common to every man's life. His statement implies that what we seem bent on finding is that higher spark for which we would all be willing to live or die; we look for some key equation through which we might tie all of the experiences of our life and feel the satisfaction of action toward a goal, rather than the emptiness which sometimes consumes the activities of our existence. He states, however, that we will never find some great pure meaning behind everything, because there is none. What there is to be found, however, is the life itself. We seek to find meaning so that emptiness will not pervade our every thought, our every deed, with the coldness of reality as the unemotional eye chooses to see it. Without color, without joy, without future, reality untouched by hope is an icy thing to view; we have no desire to see it that way. We forget, however, that the higher meaning might be found in existence itself. The joy of life and the experience of living are what make up true meaning, as the swirl of atoms guided by chaotic chance in which we find our existence has no meaning outside itself.
In the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus attempts to give answers to some tough questions. He wants to know if life is worth living or how we can make it worth living, as well as whether or not it is possible to live with certainty. To him, the absurd man realizes that life is absurd after his expectations are repeatedly contradicted and he realizes the world is an unreasonable place that cannot be explained. These unreasonable expectations of certainty ultimately cause many absurd men to think that life is not worth living when they are faced with what they feel is a hopeless situation. Camus offers an alternative to the problem the absurd man faces and it is not suicide or “Philosophical suicide”. Other philosophers commit philosophical suicide by suggesting that there is enough evidence, whatever it maybe, that one should survive on hope alone or make some leap. But Camus thinks that if a person is honest and truthful to themselves that they know they are nothing more than “a stranger” in this world. So how does one live a life worth living when faced with absurdity?
The meaning of life is to find the meaning of life. Is it not? We all go through each day trying to figure out which road out the infinite amount of paths will lead us in a better direction where happiness is prominent and society is flawless. However, not every single human being is going to fit on that narrow, one-lane highway to success. Bad choices, accidents, fate, family matters, society, temptation, anger, rage, addiction, and loss of hope can all be deciding factors in opting to choose that wrong path to self-destruction. The adverse thing is, once you've traveled so far down the road, you get so discouraged that you feel like you can never turn back or make up for the "lost time."
He notes two instances of men who were planning on committing suicide who, once they were able to find meaning in their lives and their futures, were able to find the will to live. For one of the men, this was his child waiting for him in a foreign country, for the other it was finishing his life’s work (79). Clearly, discovering meaning in their lives aided them in surviving the suffering that they faced.
The problem of suicide ravages the minds of its survivors – of philosophers – and, more recently, of psychologists. We simply cannot understand it. Why suicide? While many non-biological scientists are inclined to define suicide as a conscious act – thereby excluding, perhaps, all non-human self-inflicted deaths (1), (2) – lets us stick with the more basic definition of suicide as self-murder, with or without cognitive "knowledge" or "intent" (***). And, as the concerned psychologists plunge on in their direction, let us examine this problem from a different standpoint, that of biology. In order to make sense of the biology of suicide, however, we must first understand the more general omnipresent phenomenon: death....
The ideas of Ernest Becker, one of the more influential figures in the new psychoanalysis, are used throughout this psychological examination. Suicide is the domain of the therapist.... ... middle of paper ... ... In the face of the overwhelming possibilities of life, a person will close up and reject life.
Where did it all begin? The creation of mankind has been and continues to be the most told and most changed story of all time. How did man come to be on Earth? How did Earth come to be in space? Who or what created all of this? There has to be some kind of explanation because without one, then nothing else makes sense. There has to be a purpose to life because without one, there is no point in living. Most importantly there has to be hope because without someone or something to believe in, you lose all belief in yourself.
puts it: “…though death alone can put a full period to his misery, he dare not…a vain fear left he offend his Maker” (On Suicide, p.55). On his famous paper “On Suicide”, he defends the act of suicide and concludes that suicide is at least sometimes permissible. This paper will examine the essay itself in depth and counter argues about his view since the commitment of suicide deprives us from the future possibilities.
Albert Camus posed the question, "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" It was in this question that my intellectual curiosity was truly awoken as a tenth grader. My fascination stemmed both from the absurdity of the question and upon further insight from the absurdist interpretation. If everything results in death what is the meaning in our daily actions? My response to this question changed twice before I came to a personal conclusion to Camus' seemingly rhetorical question. At first I conveniently believed that having a cup of coffee was the correct answer. However, after exploring absurdism I began to understand Camus' viewpoint and quickly switched to having no response, because even though I began to comprehend the 'meaninglessness'
If there is no point to living why do we continue to live? If this reality is absurd why don’t we recognize that and commit suicide? Taking one’s life shows the lack of will or reasons to live and also the needlessness of suffering. So what is living? Living is the Absurd. Living is hopelessness. Living is keeping the absurd alive. To keep the absurd alive you only have to live the absurd. 'Life will be more fully lived in so far as it has no meaning.' is a quote from Camus that shows this. Camus shows that you can “hope” for the best without hope. “Hope” is not the same as hope. “Hope” is optimism. Freedom from hope is freedom to your soul. You can no longer hurt yourself by living. It is hard to believe that being hopeless leads to living but living is an imprisonment. We try to be the best we can be but does not life limit us?
The problem with designating Beckett's work as Absurdist is, precisely, that this interpretation reduces his work. When a critic describes a work as "Absurd," she does not simply mean that the work is "outrageous" or "nonsensical" or merely silly. Coined by American critic Martin Esslin, the term "theater of the Absurd" can be defined as a kind of drama that presents a view of the absurdity of the human condition by the abandoning of usual or rational devices and by the use of nonrealistic form....Conceived in perplexity and spiritual anguish, the theater of the absurd portrays not a series of connected incidents telling a story but a pattern of images presenting people as bewildered beings in an incomprehensible universe. (Holman 2)
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus is talking about how suicide is the most serious philosophical problem. The question of whether living is worth it should be the most fundamental question to philosophy. Suicide is usually committed due to personal troubles, like Camus’ example of the office manager whose daughter had died. According to Camus, “killing yourself amounts to confessing.” A person who commits suicide has accepted that they couldn’t handle life or it’s not worth living. Many philosophers see the question of suicide as a simple yes or no question or they don’t take it serious like Schopenhauer. Camus claims that suicide is the result of life being worthless, whereas absurdity is connected with life being meaningless. Absurdity seems to have two escapes, hope or suicide.
To say human existence is absurd is to say human beings have a tendency to seek value and meaning in life but are not able to find any. According to Camus, we want to find meaning in the world but the world is silent and doesn’t give us any answers. As human beings we want an understanding of the world. We are all driven to find that greater meaning of life and if we did...
The meaning of life is a very confusing question but to be able to answer it you must realize that it differs for everyone. There is never only one real answer. Everyday it can change for each individual. Everyone has their own way of living; they have their own thoughts and beliefs so therefore each persons answer to the meaning of life will be their own private version.
Suicide has become one of the many means that problematic individuals take into consideration to exempt from an unpleasant or oppressive situation. Suicide can be generally defined as the act of causing one’s death usually out of despair. People who are likely to commit suicide are those who suffer from severe mental illnesses and are involved with alcohol and drugs. Other than that, individuals who are experiencing unemployment and divorce can also be possible victims to commit such act. Based on the study done in the year 1997, an average of fifteen-percent who are clinically depressed ended up committing suicide. Furthermore, suicide was the eighth leading cause of death in the US (“Suicide”). It is prevalent for depressed individuals to consider suicide when major issues in life do not work out well. The big question is, what makes a person thinks that ending his or her life can help oneself to escape from the reality when life has so much more to offer?