You’ve made yourself clear. I’m sorry.
At the end of life, what’s left but relationships? Accomplishments only go so far. (A few animals grieve too, just FYI.)
I get where you’re coming from, but I can’t agree with your framing of the question. Productivity as the meaning of life? That leaves most of the elderly, disabled, chronically and mentally ill out of the equation. Are their lives without meaning because they’re not contributing?
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They were also talking about the futility and meaninglessness of life in their more jaded years. Less than childlike.
That’s the main part that I read. But I think the main point of the book is exploring “what we mean when we talk about meaning.”
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And there’s only one that really counts, at the end.
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I just don’t see the need to write out a thesis on it. The typical person when they talk about being productive members of society are not referring to the people you listed. Just like I don’t have to accent that I’m not referring to babies. Plus in my comment uncovered that.
“ They choose to be a burden to their families and society. Like those who could work full time but only want to work 16 hours a week so they can continue to get a government check and they live with someone but choose to not get married solely because they want to be able to collect more checks and they just let everything around them fall apart waiting for someone else to feel bad for them and fix it but if you ever went to them for help, they just can’t for a million reasons.”
That clearly lines out what I’m referring to and frames it very well.
All I’m saying is that it takes a forced leap to get from “ lazy dude who chooses to work 16 hours a week so he can collect a check and who is not getting married to the woman he lives with solely so they can get a bigger handout” to the disabled elderly woman. I’m referring to the son that lives with his disabled elderly mother and yet pays none of the bills and complains about how hot she keeps the house type of guy and I think that’s clearly laid out in my original comment .
True, and there in comes some of the questions of how meaning in life perhaps also evolved.
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Of course you don’t need to write a thesis, but I spent a huge chunk of my life working among people who received government checks, and none of them fit this gross characterization:
Like those who could work full time but only want to work 16 hours a week so they can continue to get a government check and they live with someone but choose to not get married solely because they want to be able to collect more checks
Seriously, what are you saying here? Because I’ve known many single moms whose daycare bill would exceed their paycheck, and who needed child support payments to put food on the table. I don’t know your life experience, but this sounds like recycled political propaganda, not real life as people in dire straits actually live it.
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I think relationships must be enormously important to most individuals’ perception of their own meaning. [I’m making this statement by feel based limited observation.] People don’t do well alone and can come to feel intense hopelessness, when they are.
This is clear in places like hospitals, nursing homes, even prisons. And we see it with older people, whose family members have died off and/or moved away, and whose other community connections (like churches or neighborhoods) have eroded.
At their core, human societies exist in groups. Agreed, that groups serve other purposes than to helping humans maintain a sense of meaning. But I think the sense of meaning that comes from being in relationships within groups is likely a powerful motivator for living that way.
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Here’s OUP’s nutshell description of *What do we mean when we talk about meaning":
- Traces the shifting meanings of the word “meaning” from antiquity through the present day
- Covers a wide range of Western culture, linguistic, religious, and philosophical understandings of “meaning”
- Reveals the fluidity and ambiguity of a term that is frequently used but seldom explored
Well just think of the garbage humans you’ve met in your life who don’t contribute to anything. They are perfectly fine mentally and physically, but choose to be garbage. This is not complicated or a trick Jay.
So what political party and arguments are my statements coming from?
I’m confused… are you under the impression that everyone you’ve met in your entire life or heard about are all doing their absolute best and that you don’t know anyone who is simply a dirt bag that is leeching off of everyone around them when they could go out and do stuff but instead they want to sell stuff they stole and use the money to buy drugs and video games?
Maybe you can also explain to me why a single mom who is working and doing her best would fall into my category of a lazy leech?
I’ll also edit this in.
So there is a guy and this guy is a normal dude with a normal life like the majority of people. He’s 35. He could work 60 hours a week if he wanted too, but he chooses to work 16-20 hours a week. He recently was fired from job for calling in way too many times. In a month he already exceeded his annual leave. He called in because he stayed up too late playing video games. He lives with his parents and sometimes buy his own food but they literally pay for everything else.
Do you think those kind of people exist? Do you believe someone like that is just a vampire sucking up resources because they are lazy? So you think lazy people who don’t apply themselves exist?
Now I personally don’t take the majority of these verses as anything political. I don’t think saying laziness is being political. In my experience, the majority of people understand what laziness is and that’s for the conservatives, capitalists , liberals and socialists. This is the first time ever in my life that calling out laziness is attempted to be swept under the “ political rug “ and I’ve talked to men and women about this several times in the last few days online from several different political and cultural backgrounds.
I’m curious what word would you use to describe someone who chooses to not contribute to society even if they can because they just would rather not have to get up and do something?
I feel like based off that simply link about Bible verses with laziness in it that this is a pretty common thing that people have witnessed throughout the world for the last several thousand years.
I’ve met more than my share, and I know you’re a person of goodwill, which is why I’m willing to engage on this topic. I don’t disagree that there are some who game the system. They’re no different than Christians who treat others like garbage Mon-Sat and think everything’s fine when they pray “Forgive me my sins” every night and show up for services every Sunday.
No reason for you to remember my personal story, but I spent 5 years teaching Bible study in adult prisons followed by a decade teaching English in juvenile detention. I’ve met them all.
Many poor single moms are caught between a rock and a hard place. If they go to work full-time they lose benefits, and daycare costs can quickly exceed a $10-15/hr salary if she has more than one kid. Many people on the outside looking in might think to themselves, “She refuses to work. She’s just lazy.” Lots of other people fit that description. I’m simply saying not to be too quick to judge from the outside. You don’t always know what people are going through. That’s all.
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I understand. This will be my last comment on it. My point is simply that nothing I said by most people would make them think of a single mother struggling. When I say lazy people who are simply not trying because they don’t want to put in the effort and instead just want handouts… I’m talking about the same people you and anyone else in here would think of that fits that description. Able bodied, sound minded people who choose to be lazy instead of being productive. Those who like to take and are not willing to give. If someone reads my comments and they leap to a single mother immigrant with several kids who lost her husband to a war and now she’s struggling with keeping it all together…. That’s just someone in my opinion choosing to not look at what I kept typing and giving examples of.
I’m under the impression that the bulk of people in here understands that marginalized people exist who are victims of trauma , systems that oppress and fall on hard times. Only one aspect of my examples was about not being a productive member of society.
There are people who choose to be lazy. There are people who choose to ignore environmentalism. I’m thinking of those people who just take. Never give. The ones who want to gobble up resources and leave the planet in bad shape because they will be dead before it’s their problem types of people.
To me the meaning of life is being someone who serves others. That’s irrelevant to being rich or poor. It’s irrelevant to being homeless or a millionaire. I’m sure everyone here knows being lazy is not the same thing as being poor, jobless or homeless. But we also probably know of people who we think will end up homeless because they are poor because they don’t work.
So to reinstate the whole point behind what inwas saying. I think being someone who serves others and nature is someone who is fulfilling my definition of the purpose of life. I don’t think life is about being someone who just takes and takes and takes such as a lazy person who chooses to be a drain on society , family and friends when they could choose otherwise.
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Sure. I’m fine with that. What bothered me was your wording of “productive,” which brings to my mind a lot of evil applications. Nazi Germany, for instance, sought to exterminate “unproductive” members of society, including the disabled. (I’m absolutely not saying you fit that description! I know you better than that.) I just don’t like how your wording frames the question of the meaning of life. It implies a sort of economics to the situation. Maybe giver-taker is better? I know many “unproductive” members of society, economically speaking, who give much more back to people and society than they take from them.
Terry, you’re going to have to connect some dots here to show how this applies to or explains “meaning of life.”
Like in many things, I see myself as taking a median position…
When I was in college there was a fellow student buying into the ideas of some philosophy class he was taking claiming that there was no such thing as meaning. My response was and still is that such philosophy is completely meaningless (tautological conclusion frankly).
On the other hand, I was not raised Christian and thus this typical issue of a “meaning of life” we see in Christian apologetics is not a part of my thinking. If someone were to ask me what the meaning of life was, my most likely response is to talk about the meaning of the word “life” and talk about what this phenomenon consists of. I never had a reason to buy into this evangelical methodology to go from this question about the meaning of life to the existence of a divine creator providing a source for this meaning. I am more likely to give an existentialist answer that existence precede essence and we decide what the meaning of our existence is for ourselves.
So what about this challenge regarding whether there is such a thing as “meaning.”
Frankly, “meaning” can be understood in term of both biological and psychological sciences as the process of perception by which we understand, interpret, and find significance in our perceptual data making a connection to our responses.
For most organisms the connection is made by a set of instincts which are largely a product of evolution. But human beings also have things in the mind such as reasons, desires, beliefs, goals, and choices to make these connections between input data and our responses.
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One reason is because it leads to many new, refreshed and restored relationships.
Then you’re missing the point. In absolute terms he’s meaningfully right. Looking out on my little garden as I write that means a lot to me. Waiting for my wife to come down. Before I go to work. Ah here she is!
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