Throughout my life I’ve struggled to find meaning. I’ve wondered, am I alone in this? I’d like to hear what others have to say. Particularly others that are more knowledgeable in philosophy.
Throughout my life I’ve struggled to find meaning. I’ve wondered, am I alone in this? I’d like to hear what others have to say. Particularly others that are more knowledgeable in philosophy.
“I’ve struggled to find meaning” could mean quite a few things. You’re not giving people much to work with.
But here’s something with respect to one interpretation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx’s_theory_of_alienation
Reason it’s so vague is just because I lack the proper philosophical terminology to express it.
I’d like to read what Marx had to say about this.
I suppose Marx’s discussion on alienation is less about some ultimate meaning of life (which many people have already talked about here) and more about how people find meaning in their work, their humanity and the wider world, and how the way our society currently works alienates us from those things and from finding our own meaning, instead pushing us to act like cogs in a pointless machine. For example, if someone’s waking hours are mostly spent making useless things for people they’ll never meet, or denying people medical coverage, they’re going to develop a very different sense of their meaningfulness than someone who builds houses in their neighbourhood, or who grows or prepares food for their family and friends. Both are labouring in order to survive, but the latter can see much clearer how their actions matter.
(I’m probably butchering it, this isn’t a theory I know much about, so check to see if someone else has corrected me)
Makes a lot of sense. I can’t help but feel like a lot of the work people do is completely detached from their own community. Which inevitably begs the question, if it’s so detached is it even worth it?
That’s a great point. At the end of the day, I’m confident saying that lots of jobs are not worth it, from the perspective of ourselves and our communities. Many jobs actively harm our communities. The people who create jobs are the people who have the money to pay people, and if you need money to live or to thrive, it’s tough to avoid taking those jobs, so the work our society does is largely dictated by who has money, and especially by those approaching billions of dollars. And the solution must be to take away that owning class’s power to dictate society’s direction (easier said than done, of course!)
There’s a whole world of world which has been labelled “bullshit jobs”, named after the book by David Graeber. I haven’t read the book, but even their article with some great examples and quotes from people with nonsense jobs and the wiki page I linked show a variety of these jobs not worth doing.
Please consider Leo Tolstoy’s non-fiction—Confession, What I Believe, The Gospel In Brief, The Kingdom of God is Within You.