[This post is part of a series called Choose Your Life Purposes. If the issues addressed in these posts interest you, please consider becoming an Existential Wellness Coach. To learn more about our Existential Wellness Coach Certificate Program, please visit here. To preorder Choose Your Life Purposes, please visit here.]
Here is the new way in a nutshell. When you wake up, you hear yourself say, “What are the important things?” Not, “What do I have to get done?” or “What did I leave undone?” or “What’s on the news?” or “Another miserable day!” Rather, you hear yourself say: “What are the important things?”
Those important things might include having that hard conversation with your son about his drinking, making a sharp political statement, or creating your online business. Every day, you tackle as many of these important things as you can. You organize your life around your life purposes. This may not be easy—but it is the way.
By living this way, you feel like you matter. The contemporary person has powerful reasons for believing that he or she doesn’t matter. Let’s reject that notion, that simply because we may be the product of an indifferent universe, we shouldn’t act as if we matter. We decide to matter, in human terms, on our own terms.
We matter by living our life purposes, by acting ethically, and, absurdly enough, by taking responsibility for keeping civilization afloat. That is a matter of self-obligation, ordered by no one and ratified by few, and the primary way that we make ourselves proud.
But is civilization really worth keeping afloat? In one sense, absolutely not. Keep authoritarian regimes afloat? Keep grubby big businesses afloat? Keep endlessly warring cultures afloat? Keep the massing of the masses of humankind afloat? Keep the subjugating “wisdom traditions” afloat? No, certainly not.
But in that other sense, we know exactly what we mean. We translate civilization as “the best of us.” We choose our life purposes with one eye on other human beings. It isn’t that we hold our species in high esteem. Rather, it’s that we have a feeling in us, a humanistic impulse, and that feeling infiltrates our life purpose choices.
We live in a time when that stalwart phrase from the 19th century, “truth, beauty and goodness,” has been shredded by the analytical knives of linguistic philosophy. Today, it is hard to utter that phrase with a straight face.
Yet we are obliged to circle back around to innocence and to stand up for goodness, even though we know that badness is often rewarded, even though we know that our values compete and clash, and even in the absence of absolute moral principles.
That is, we decide not to give up and not to give in. Without quite realizing it, many people have given up on life. They’ve made the mental calculation that life has cheated them, that life isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, that life isn’t worth the candle. That conclusion leads to chronic sadness, sometimes called existential despair.
That conclusion makes it hard to stick with things or to believe in your own efforts. Therefore, a life-affirming gesture is needed. It is needed maybe a hundred times a day, given the depth of this despair. That gesture? You make the conscious decision to give life a thumbs up, even if you have ample reasons to come to a different, harsher conclusion. Let’s do that right now. Shall we give life a thumbs up?
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