Published on 12, July, 2020
How do you all make your life feel meaningful? I am 42 single living with parents. No children no great achievements. I wanted to do more but feel life life never got started because mental illness got in the way. I cant save money because I spend when I feel bad which is often. I'm tired of feeling like lofe is going nowhere.
You have to "create" a meaning. Simple, but not easy. Sometimes imagination won't cut it, sometimes you have to go out (I know!) & find it. It's almost impossible for meaning to find you, because not many things have inherent meaning; they just exist. (My opinion of course)
defo zen buddhist thinking there (the very last sentence).......
I didn't want to go full Nietzsche, but mixed a bit of Albert Camus in, that I read recently. Heavy stuff.
funny
aidie said:perchloroheteroaromatic
Sounds like a sneeze to me!
Didn't Camus also write 'The Fall?' (which gave Mark E Smith the name of his band)
i didnt sneeze
Bless you! aidie
We didn't get any choice in staying away from Camus at school, as his novels The Outsider and The Plague came up for French A levels.
This whole existentialist thing can be quite disturbing for a 17-yesr-old as done say all.hr big existentialist questions come up at this stage of adolescence anyway.
Robert Smith must have been on the same syllabus too, hence his first famous hit, Killing an Arab.
What I lived about L'etranger was the way Camus emphasises that he was condemned just because he did not respond to life in the way conventional hypocrisy expected him to. He was supposed to be piously cut up about his mother's death, but he wasn't.
Still, Camus certainly knew how to shock and in retrospect I liked him for that, too. 'My mother died yesterday. Or it might have been the day before, I can't quite remember.'
As for The Plague, that's got popular again, no prizes for guessing why. I liked him for his humanity and the way he expressed so much disgust for capital punishment. But I first read it at 13.
maybe when i get more time I will read some of his stufff i find u can always learn new ways of thinkin it actually helps ime n my work to approach things from a new angle new ways of thinking.
For example the thing with camus and Sisyphus, he's using it as a metaphor about the meaninglessness to life. He tells you that despite the meaningless, endless day to day of Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill for the rest of his that you should 'Imagine Sisyphus smiling'
He said that suicide was the only rational idea (something akin to that) but he didn't suggest suicide was a thing people should do. But instead to accept the absurdity of life.
how perchloroheteroaromatic of you beat that !
I just like words ending it "matic" & you can make of them what you will, by adding those prefix's.
Maybe just a Western mind
I may read a bit about Camus. He was an emotion-driven and quite existentialist kind of guy so should/could be up my street.I'm interested by your name matic319. When I think 'matic', I think 'Metamatic' a 1980 album by John Foxx. I gather the Greek suffix matic means 'willing to [x]'. (where x depends on the prefix)
i like the part of Zen which is "just do" just do" i love that, it keeps me out of trouble . in Zen nothing exists as well. i read it regularly but cant get a grip of some of it , alot of it I have a weak western mind
Yeah, that's before he realised he was just being dramatic & turned his life around. Same with Carl Jung, who was probably bipolar.
He's a French philosopher who wrote theories of absurdity, & a book called "The Myth Of Sisyphus"; the bloke who was destined to roll a rock up a hill, in the Underworld of Greek myth.
As a metaphor for work I guess. We think that's a terrible punishment, but if Sisyphus derived "meaning" from that, then who's to say it's meaningless. So in a sense, we derive our own meaning. That's what I learnt from skimming a couple of chapters. I'm lazy, & didn't read the whole book!