An important part of feeling meaning and fulfillment in life is being proud of your actions. Your actions are how most people judge you, and those actions are judged based on both what the people see and how they perceive or interpret those actions. You also judge yourself based on your thoughts, beliefs, desires, ethics, and actions, but you hav...
Read MoreYou might not have chosen to be born, but you're surprisingly better off acting as if you had. You know the scenario: a parent and child get into an argument. There's usually some sort of pressure on the child to behave in some way or meet some set of expectations that results in the now-cliché response, "I didn't choose to be born!" What is caus...
Read MoreCognitive dissonance occurs when there is a conflict between a belief you hold and a behavior, new information, or a conflicting belief. The "dissonance" in this case causes discomfort, necessitating a change in the person's behavior or beliefs to alleviate it. The most famous example in history is the Aesop fable of Sour Grapes. In the fable, a...
Read MoreWhen people ask about their purpose, they often want a "greater" meaning or "higher" purpose in life. But what do they mean by this? Greater/Higher than what? Does this mean a divine meaning? And, if this exists, what is it for you, and is it the same for everyone? Well, while this sounds like an impossible question, it's actually fairly simpl...
Read MoreI've been analyzing the search queries that people are using to search for answers around meaning. Here are a sample list of some of the top ones that get them to stumble upon this blog: The list goes on. First of all, it's interesting that I seem to be quickly becoming the go-to site for people who haven't found any answers elsewhere and are loo...
Read MoreEveryone asks about whether money can buy happiness, and research says that happiness increases with income up to a certain point (~$75,000/year is where monetary increases no longer reduce stress; ~$200,000/year is where there's no further impact on emotional state). In a related question, people might ask whether money can buy meaning in life....
Read MoreThe pandemic has caused a lot of soul-searching and deep questions on the meaning of life. The biggest one is whether people can find deeper meaning in their lives through COVID-19, but they are also asking why things like this happen. Let's address these questions in this post:
Read MoreSimilar to last week's post on objective morality (or the lack thereof), this post is focusing on the lack of a definitive "Why" in terms of life origin (i.e., the cause) or end state (i.e., goal/objective). I have to say, nihilism seems to be a popular conclusion when people can't get a definitive answer. I always chalk it up to people being rai...
Read MoreI am really sad to report that my highest-performing blog post of all time at the time of this post is 8 Types of People Who Don't Find Life Meaningful; another post that gets a lot of clicks via search engines is Eight Reasons Life Can Seem Insignificant and Meaningless. Unfortunately, it appears (for my work at least) that my posts that start wi...
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