My meaningful life.

The existentialist philosophy of the 20th century takes as a primary starting point the acknowledgment of the inherent meaninglessness of existence. With the death of god and with him the immortal soul went any notion of a transcendental source or grounding of meaning. Indeed there seems to be no identifiable external source of meaning. Far from being problematic, I would argue, this is an ideal situation. An external source for meaning (God or the ambient culture) might imply certain constraints that we might deem to be unfavorable. The point is that any prospective source of meaning must be judged by our own lights and deemed worthy of acceptance by us only to the extent that it suits our nature. A meaningful life is a life filled with things that are meaningful to us; meaningful as determined by our own standards, judged by our own light, suitable for our own natures.

Problems arise, it seems to me, when we fail to recognize the active role we have in judging and accepting what is meaningful to us and integrating these meaningful things into our lives. We tend to assume that meaning is something that happens to us, something we are fortunate enough to find ourselves having at any particular moment or we are not.

Moreover we tend to passively accept the standards of meaning offered up by our surrounding culture. A meaningful life is a life where you are, say, popular or good looking or own a lot of stuff, or are the best at something a lot of people are interested in. The problem is that these standards of meaning, because they are widely accepted, are mistakenly assumed to be the only standards that matter. It fact they happen to be merely the standards by which modern consumer culture determines a meaningful life. Perhaps these standards are suitable for some people, but they are clearly not for everyone. Some very good looking, successful people have lived miserable lives, lives lived under someone else's standards of meaning. Most likely they never thought about what standards of meaning they were subjecting themselves to and they never thought about what standards would better suit them, or else they never had the courage to reject popularly held standards of meaning and forge something better, more substanitive to live by.