A Meaningful Life/What makes life worth living?

When I googled, "What makes live worth living", I received 6,120,000 hits. I thought I would check out a few to see what they said. Some talked about having a higher purpose, some religion, some, perhaps thinking they were being funny, stated "the answer is blowing in the wind." I believe the answer is not that complex. A couple of the sites hit the nail on the head.

I believe we become dissatisfied with life when we do not achieve or are not participating in the activities listed below - Paul Thagard a writter, and Dustin Wax, a blogger, have similar views.

According to Paul Thagard in Psychology Today*, happiness is usually the result of having a meaningful life. While there have beeen many theories, love, work, and play seem to be the keys to happiness. Paul Thagard argues that these three activities make life worth living over "nothing, religion and happiness. "

Love includes friendships and family relationships as well as romantic ones. Work includes diverse productive activities such as community volunteering in addition to wage slavery. Play includes all forms of entertainment such as reading and watching movies, not just games. Surveys and other psychological studies indicate that love, work, and play do indeed enable people to have lives they value. Neuroscience provides a deeper understanding of how brain processes generate needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence that can be satisfied by the successful pursuit of love, work, and play. Such satisfaction yields happiness, but even the pursuit is enough to give life meaning.

A well written blog** by Dustin Wax states "what makes life worth living" this way:

...Instead, I think we need to address the question with our own actions, the things we do that make life worth living. Verbs, not nouns. When I think of how I would answer the question, the following behaviors come to mind:

• Creating: Writing, drawing, painting (though I’m not good at it), playing music (though I’m not especially good at that, either). For others, it might be inventing something, building a business, coming up with a clever marketing campaign, forming a non-profit.


• Relating: It’s not “family” that makes life worth living, I think, but the relationships we create with members of our family, and the way we maintain and build those relationships. Same goes for friends, lovers, business partners, students, and everyone else.


• Helping: Being able to lend a hand to people in need – however drastic or trivial that need may be – strikes me as an important part of life.


• Realizing: Making, working towards, and achieving goals, no matter what those goals are.


• Playing: Maybe this is a kind of “relating”, but then, play can be a solo affair as well. Letting go of restraints, imagining new possibilities, testing yourself against others or against yourself, finding humor and joy.


• Growing: Learning new things, improving my knowledge and ability in the things I’ve already learned.

Those seem like more satisfying answers to me – they strike deeper into what it is I want for myself, what makes it worthwhile to get up in the morning.

I don't think one needs to research much further, but the next step is to look into one's life. Are you doing the things above? If yes, you are probably pretty happy with your life. If not, you may be feeling dissatisfied or worse. Do you need to be ecstatic every moment? No, because then you would not be learning, overcoming challenges and realizing goals.

I do find the happiness and satisfaction factor are higher the older you get. A recent study confirms that (don't have a cite, but I heard it on MPR last week). I notice younger people have the drama factor that can prevent them from realizing a meaningful life earlier on. What a waste. I wish we could skip that age that is so filled with angst and despair, seizures of joy and exhileration. It seems to me many younger people are manic-depressives, and "just being" totally consumes them. I am afraid I was one of them once, narcissistic, searching for meaning and hoping someone else would give it to me...when only I could do so.

Well, I will just sign off by saying that angst and lack of meaning is only a temporary phase, if you are in it. Perhaps, if you are one of those people, you will read the above and it will make sense.

Or, maybe not. Yet.

* http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hot-thought/201002/what-makes-life-worth-living

** http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/what-makes-life-worth-living.html#