[Snow Leopard]

I was reading the following thread: Have you found meaning in your life? and started to consider the corollary of this question, Why are you looking for meaning in your life? To some, at first glance at least, the answer may be obvious. But at second glance it is less clear.



So I pose the question to you: Why are you looking for meaning in your life?

[Snow Leopard]

Additionally, at this stage I've posed the question in its most open-ended way, but I do have some thoughts related to this if we wish to take the discussion in certain directions.

[snowbell]

To... find meaning???

*thinks*

Yeah this is not as easy as it looks lol.

I guess it's a quest to find out why I'm here. I feel like the world is a giant puzzle and it's up to me to find out what my role is in it. I feel as though the skillset that I have isn't one that is necessarily common and that the strengths that I do have aren't ones that are common either, but there's this persistent and somewhat clear picture of the world as it can be so perhaps that is the light shining towards clues for the puzzle pieces, their arrangement, and the picture at large. In the end the meaning is something I need to find - something arbitrary and I need to use the information I've been given to work towards that. After all I could easily have been different - better at other thing but worse at others, maybe had a different personality etc, so why am I the way I am and what is that supposed to translate to?

I don't know if that makes sense?

[jkschwartz]

To find peace and happiness

[bellisaurius]

Because it's a tough, unanswered question. Maybe the answer will be useful, maybe not, but it's there.

[Alediran]

Because I can't stop doing it, and since I can't stop I might as well complete the search.

[cue5c]

Because I have the capability.

[Vin The Dreamer]

I've lived years of life with a sense of meaning (or at least the search for meaning) and years of life without considering any meaning whatsoever. The ones with meaning were a whole lot more... well, meaningful to me. It gives substance, flavor, depth to life.

[dann]

I used to search for meaning in life as a teenager, but now i realize that there is no meaning to it and am perfectly content with that

[ImINFJ]

So I pose the question to you: Why are you looking for meaning in your life?[/QUOTE]

My answer to your question reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from a book I've been collecting them in since I was a teenager. The following is written on a fictional tombstone in a fictional town. It's from the book Spoonriver Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, which is nothing but a collection of what is written on the tombstones in this fictional town.

I have studied many times the marble which was chisled for me -- a boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. In truth, it pictures not my destination, but my life. For love was offered me, but I shrank from its disillusionment. Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid. Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances. Yet, all the while I hungered for meaning in my life. And now I know that we must lift the sails and catch the winds of destiny wherever they may drive the boat. To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, but life without meaning is the torture of restlessness and vague desire -- It is a boat, longing for the sea, and yet afraid.