Here are a number of possible "meaningful lives":
- To acquire a skill that has the capacity of influencing a large number of people.
- Saving/helping many people.
- Doing something so incredible that your name is remembered by history.
- To be able to sustain one's family.
- ...
When I wrote down the title of this blog, my idea of a meaningful life was somewhat different. In order to explain this feeling, I need to regress a little into the chain of events leading to the creation of this blog.
I am a "successful" student. I study well and get good grades. I do what I am supposed to do (as a student) when the time is right. I can set goals, make plans, and follow them. But somehow it does not make me happy. It is true that achieving a goal, or finishing a project makes me feel good about myself (for sure much better than if I had failed). But it does not make me happy.
During the whole process I know how to "make myself" interested and find reasons why what I am doing is so cool. The problem is, ... I feel empty inside.
For sure this is not the feeling one would expect from a fulfilled, meaningful life.
I realized that, from a very subjective point of view, it is not what I do that makes me feel fulfilled, but how I feel while doing something.
Helping a handicapped person open a door, is more fulfilling to me than sitting down the whole day in front of a computer in a stable, well paid job (I am an architect too).
So I ask myself this question, " In life, what do I have but my feelings? What do I carry around with me, what follows me everywhere, around every corner, every moment? It's the way I feel. Day or night, awake or asleep, feelings are living at the same speed as I am. For as far as I am concerned, I cannot distinguish my conscious experience of life from the way I feel. My feelings are who I am. They are the ink telling the story.
Those feelings are influenced by my actions, by what I do and how I choose to live my life.
So to me a meaningful life is not an evaluation of what I've done, but how fulfilled I've felt.
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