Self Flashcards
We should start by saying that there is no meaning in life outside of that which we can find by ourselves as a species. There isn’t any kind of objective meaning written IN THE STARS, IN A HOLY BOOK OR IN SEQUENCES OF DNA.
We can extrapolate a theory of meaning from varieties of unhappiness.
Meaning is to be found in three activities in particular: Communication, Understanding and Service.
COMMUNICATION - we are, by nature, isolated creatures and it appears that some of our most meaningful moments are to do with instances of connection: with a lover, for example, when we reveal our intimate physical and psychological selves, or when we form friendships where substantial truths about our respective lives can be shared. Or when we are touched by books, songs, and films that put their fingers on emotions that are deeply our own but that we had NEVER WITNESSED EXTERNALISED so clearly or beautifully before.
UNDERSTANDING - the pleasure that can be felt whenever we correct confusion and puzzlement about ourselves or the world. We might be scientific researchers, or economists, poets or patients in psychotherapy; the pleasure of our activities stems from a common ability to map and make sense of what was once painfully unfamiliar and strange.
SERVICE - one of the most meaningful things we can do is to serve other people, to try to improve their lives, either by alleviating sources of suffering or else by generating new sources of pleasure.
So we might be working as cardiac surgeons and aware every day of the meaning of our jobs or else be in a company that’s making a modest but real difference to people’s lives by helping them get a better night’s sleep, finding their keys or thrilling them aesthetically with elegant furniture or harmonious tunes. Or else our service might be to friends or our own families, or perhaps the earth itself. We’re often told to think of ourselves as inherently selfish.
The idea of emotional education therefore remains at once deeply relevant and widely neglected. The challenge before us is to break down emotional intelligence into a range of skills, a curriculum of emotional skills, that are at work in wise and temperate lives. We should be ready to embark on a systematic educational programme in an area that has for too long, unfairly and painfully, seemed like a realm of intuition and luck.
BUT SOME OF THE MOST MEANINGFUL MOMENTS COME WHEN WE TRANSCEND OUR EGOS AND PUT OURSELVES AT THE SERVICE OF OTHERS – OR THE PLANET. One should add that in order for service to feel meaningful, it has to be in synch with our native, sincere interests. Not everyone will find medicine or social work, ballet or graphic design meaningful. It’s a case of knowing enough about ourselves to find our particular path to service.
The meaning of life is to pursue human flourishing through communication, understanding and service.
There are, sadly, a lot of obstacles to meaningful lives. In the area of communication: it’s things like an over-emphasis on sex, an underplaying of friendship, a lack of neighbourliness or an absence of nourishing culture. It’s also, at an internal level, bugs in one’s emotional software that make one afraid to get close to others. In the area of understanding, it’s a lack of good media, A SUSPICION OF INTROSPECTION AND PSYCHOTHERAPY, and a pompous and disconnected academic world.
To build a more meaningful world, we have to place the emphasis on emotional education, on community, on a culture of introspection and on a more honest kind of capitalism.
We may not have meaningful lives yet, but it’s central to affirm that the concept of a meaningful life is eminently plausible – and that it comprises elements that can be clearly named and gradually fought for.
Emotional intelligence is the quality that enables us to negotiate with patience, insight and temperance the central problems in our relationships with others and with ourselves.
It shows up around partnerships in a sensitivity to the moods of others, in a readiness to grasp what may be going on for them beyond the surface and to enter imaginatively into their point of view.
It shows up in regard to ourselves when it comes to dealing with anger, envy, anxiety and professional confusion.
And emotional intelligence is what distinguishes those who are crushed by failure from those who know how to greet the troubles of existence with a melancholy and at points darkly humorous resilience.
The Lottery of Life
We may not have a sense that we’re playing any kind of lottery – and yet we are: the Lottery of Life. The crucial place where this lottery-like behaviour happens is in relation to our hopes of happiness in two areas in particular: love and work.
We don’t quite grasp just how rare and strange ninety years on earth without major disasters in love and work might actually be.
Our brains – the faulty walnuts through which we assess reality – have a habit of fatefully misunderstanding statistics. We might suppose that half of new businesses are a great success. In fact, it is less than two per cent. In the UK about half the population feels worried about money on any particular day; half of marriages collapse and sixty percent of the population feel that no one really loves them.
If we could really see what love and work were like for most other people, we’d be so much less sad about our own situation and attainments. If we could fly across the world and peer into everyone’s lives and minds like an all-seeing angel, we’d perceive how very frequent disappointment is, how much unfulfilled ambition is circulating, how much confusion and uncertainty is being played out in private and how many breakdowns and intemperate arguments unfold with every new day.
The Consolations of History
The point of news is to make money by terrorizing its audience
People behaving very badly is a normal state of affairs. There have always been existential threats to the human race and civilisation. It makes no sense, and is a form of twisted narcissism, to imagine that our era has any kind of monopoly on idiocy and disaster.
In Praise of the Quiet Life
Busy lives turn out to have certain strikingly high incidental costs that we are collectively committed to ignoring.
Visible success brings envy and the competitiveness of strangers. We become plausible targets for disappointment and spite
Winning higher status makes us increasingly sensitive to its loss; we start to note every possible new snub.
When we come to know the true price some careers exact, we may slowly realise we are not willing to pay for the ensuing envy, fear, deceit and anxiety. Our days are limited on the earth. We may – for the sake of true riches – willingly, and with no loss of dignity, opt to become a little poorer and more obscure.
The Pursuit of Calm
If your life is rather more difficult than a saccharine social media image, it must be that you are a freak or a failure
We need to change our points of reference about what life is like.
Difficulty is normal. Very decent couples have long-running and extraordinarily vicious conflicts over apparently small things. In a good relationship, two nights out of five you will wonder what you are doing together. That is success. It’s worth repeating: two bad nights a week is lucky.
We over-personalise our fates, taking too much credit in the good times, and then, too much blame in the bad ones.
To be calm, we must reduce the weight of our proud and unrealistic modern individualism.
To restore calm we need to become strategically pessimistic. That is, to spend more time getting used to the very real possibility that things will work out rather badly. A lot of good projects fail, most things go wrong, at least half our dreams won’t work out. Pessimism dampens unhelpful and impatient expectations.
The secular age maintains an all but irrational devotion to a narrative of improvement
It’s worth adding that a pessimistic worldview does not have to entail a life stripped of joy. Pessimists can have a far greater capacity for appreciation than optimists, for they never expect things to turn out well and so may be amazed by the modest successes which occasionally break across their darkened horizons. It’s quite possible to be both pessimistic and, day to day, a real laugh.
The way to calm is through analysis. We need to spend time on self-knowledge. We have to try to isolate the genuine cause, which might lie quite far from the surface eruption. The pursuit of calm isn’t about making every single moment perfectly tranquil. It’s to prevent agitation turning into catastrophe – which involves a constant effort to take apart moods of anxiety in order to pinpoint their real causes.
We need to remind ourselves – on a regular basis – that inexpensive, simple things may often have much more to offer us. A capacity for appreciation, not money, is the key to a certain kind of calm.
People who might belittle you for actually unimportant reasons are, themselves, fraught with insecurity. They threaten to attack because they are so fearful that others will mock them.
We naturally exaggerate our own importance. The incidents of our own lives loom very large in our view of the world. Yet, really, we are minute and entirely dispensable. The world would trundle on much the same without us.
Everything that happens to us, or that we do, is of no consequence whatever from the point of view of the universe.
We need a reminder that life can be lived perfectly well in ways that are quite different from our own. The resentments, longings and ambitions which agitate our days might have very little meaning elsewhere. The totems of local status become ridiculous when seen on a global scale.
Just as the expanses of space and geography offer a valuable perspective that takes us out of our local preoccupations, so too the encounter with things that are very old can have a moderating, tranquilising effect.
We should regularly seek out places that speak to us of the extended passage of time.
Perspectives on Insomnia
We don’t only suffer from spending insufficient time with our true deep selves. We also suffer because we are presented only with the daytime version of other people.
Philosophy, according to Aristotle, should be focused on the higher-order questions. It doesn’t focus on HOW to do things, so much as on WHY they might be worth doing.
But creativity involves being unusually willing to entertain the ridiculous and the fragmentary.
On the Wisdom of Space
The function of the Hubble telescope is to give us access to a state of mind in which we are acutely conscious of the largeness of time and space and our own smallness and weakness.
To be made to feel small by something so much more majestic and powerful than we are has something redeeming and enhancing about it.
The Importance of staring out of the window
The potential of daydreaming isn’t recognised by societies obsessed with productivity. But some of our greatest insights come when we stop trying to be purposeful and instead respect the creative potential of reverie. Window daydreaming is a strategic rebellion against the excessive demands of immediate (but ultimately insignificant) pressures – in favour of the diffuse, but very serious, search for the wisdom of the unexplored deep self.
