That obviously doesn’t mean a sincere belief in one’s own omniscience, more that the the aura of ‘importance’ bestowed upon things naturally emanate from the centre of the Universe, which is you.
Mind that humans are already pretty much hardwired to do this. Removing external factors of pressure and adding validation in the form of the mass market gospel of ‘find yourself’ just made this a lot more visible.
Funny enough, the people who end up going down to the deep end of this road of finding yourself often find that there is nothing to find, since all your life, you’ve spent it looking for yourself and you never added anything to it. It’s an empty box. You’re the pot at the end of the rainbow that you never thought you needed to put gold into.
From there, people usually split to a few branches. The more transcendentalist amongst us call it the Buddha, the folks with a more philosophical bent call it existential nausea.
The more practical, most of us, go ‘oh.’ and they move on with their lives. Which is probably the most healthy way, anyway.
I think it's important to subscribe to some kind of overall framework with a worldview and community. We're hard wired for it and if you don't choose it, then consumerism will fill that vacuum and you will find yourself ensnared in mindless consumption.
I have an 80 year old aunt who is a nun who I consider to be one of the wisest people I know. I'm not religious and I have frank and honest discussions with her about religion and philosophy, completely free from judgement. Once we were sharing a drink at a family event and I asked her something to the extent of "at what point did you find yourself?". She replied that she's still finding herself will continue as long as she's alive.
> you will find yourself ensnared in mindless consumption.
Funny how you're both following the religion thing only on the surface. Take a bite, already! Western culture is based on a specific religion whose philosophy hinges around the realization of slave morality as the superior state of being. Following a school of fish is all you get from consumerism, but all those fishes take away things. The reason why it's not going to fill you up is exactly that there's no interest between you and the next fish, and you weren't going to give them anything, anyway. The only thing you effectively give is a few cents towards blood, sweat and tears in some Asian factory or sweatshop. And you're feeling that somewhere, deep down there.
Mind that humans are already pretty much hardwired to do this."
I had trouble parsing your perspective as it was written in a unique way. I don't think humans are hardwired for this, can you back up that claim?
If you study evolutionary biology, there is a wealth of information and studies suggesting we are reciprocally altruistic and help others if they have helped us previously or we think they might help us in the future i.e. reciprocal altruism.
From a innate neuroscientific perspective, mirror neurons respond to actions that we observe in others which, if I recall correctly (correct me if I'm wrong), suggests several counterpoints to people in the west believing they are the "only one that matters" when our brains are constantly lighting up by noticing the actions of others which we are inclined to notice and react to (e.g. help those in need, whether family, friends, relatives, or stranger on the street).
This is a fascinating subject, hope others who know more about Neuroscience can chime in, I only minored in it in undergrad. Also, fusiform face area might be worthy of exploring w.r.t. noticing other and what this implies for the notion of human altruism.
Sadly, this reflection is quickly forgotten.
Yes, there are issues, the incentivisation around publication etc makes it easy to game the system. However, to extrapolate this to a blanket attitude of distrusting science, "especially when it conflicts with one's own common sense", is incredibly dangerous because it's partly what has made large numbers of us so susceptible to overt manipulation.
"Common sense" is no such thing, and much of proven science could be construed as contradicting common sense. The light-speed limit, quantum spookiness, spacetime curvature, biological evolution - all were once considered contrary to "common sense" - mainly because "common sense" is ultimately derived from the extremely narrow and limited range of human experiences.
It's not about trusting or distrusting "science," it's about trusting or distrusting people who put too much trust into "science," on the principle of it being "science" that "scientists" have determined is truth. I'm not saying let's all go full Amish (or Kaczynski) and live off the land, I write code for a living. I'm just saying that it's easy to fall into the "religion is an old and outdated concept, only idiots and traditionalist fools would believe in such a thing, yet putting complete faith in anything said by anyone who calls themselves a 'scientist' that gets sufficient attention, that's completely totally different, Because Science" trap.
So yes, I would argue that even if someone doesn't understand all the scientific principles behind climate change, they can still reasonably trust "science" and "scientists", since that work is built on top of empirically-backed, peer-evaluated research. In fact, this is necessary since the expertise required to have a critical opinion of the vast majority of scientific research is well beyond us.
Imagine trying to convince someone of incredible religious conviction that their earthly Church demonstrably has repeatedly fallen victim to corruption over the years, only to have her respond to you with, "but that can't be; the Word of God is unquestionably infallible!" There shouldn't be any problem in holding both of those ideas ("the Word of God (Bible) is literally Gospel and infallibly true" and "absolute power corrupts man") in your head at the same time (if anything, the former explicitly reinforces the latter!), and you'd be hard-pressed to find a Catholic today that won't admit that their earthly Church hasn't gone through periods of incredible corruption and downright evil.
Nobody's going to argue the validity of the scientific method, but when you look at the innate nature of man (demonstrated time and again over the course of all recorded history), it's easy to believe that modern "science" is just as corrupt as any other institution man has made at any point in time that rose to power in the minds of the people, i.e. "very"
Let's break it down into a few constituent parts. We have a thing (scripture / spiritual belief OR the scientific method as applied to the world). Then, nasty, messy fallible people who probably don't floss... do stuff with that thing: they teach it, they do it, they investigate it in their own messy wayd. And then regular joe-schmo's who aren't so involved in the doing-something-with-the-thing get reallll impressed by these doing-stuff people (priests/rabbis/gurus whatever OR scientists of all sorts).
Okay, well here's the thing. I agree that everybody is messy and fallible. I agree that hand-wavy "Science people are right!" talk is wrong, imprecise and has potential to be harmful. At the same time, I believe in the scientific-method-applied-to-the-world. I believe in its power to reveal truth. I do not have that same belief in scripture-or-organized-religion-applied-to-the-world. And I think that's REALLY important. Of course people do stupid things and make mistakes, but when someone puts blind faith in people-trying-to-adhere-to-science, it scares me a lot less than when someone puts blind faith in people-trying-to-adhere-to-a-religion. In fact, I'd much rather people put blind faith in "scientists" than in... any other type of group, really, at least when it comes to revealing knowledge.
Hopefully that made sense, if anyone has thoughts or disagrees, I'm more than happy to hear it.
Both are institutions constructed by greedy, corrupt, stupid, fallible human beings. It's just that the latter has built in several mechanisms to address this. Like science.
So over a long period of time, democracies have proven to be less corrupt then monarchies, and like-wise, science has proven to be less wrong then religion.
But even putting that aside, and accepting for sake of the argument that the political system in use in countries such as the United States is a "democracy" ...still, yes. Did political corruption magically disappear overnight when we stopped being ruled by monarchs? Were all monarchies corrupt to begin with?
"Democracy is to monarchy as science is to religion" is an incredibly muddled comparison that does not make much sense when you break it down. Modern Christianity would not be where it is today without Protestantism questioning core fundamental beliefs and then-current leadership. When does what is accepted as "Science" get to have its version of Protestantism, questioning not just the dogma of "settled science" (the most hilarious oxymoron of all time), but those who spread it to the masses as well?
Why is it that Christians, even Catholics have no problem admitting to the fallibility of what they consider to be their holiest of institutions, yet atheists seem to believe that "science" is inherently always impossible to be anything but utterly pure use of the scientific method conducted with nothing but the utmost honesty, at every level?
The motivations of man are not always pure, especially when in positions of power and/or authority. Even if you want to disregard religion entirely, at least take lessons from the history it has given us.
Science had its "protestant" moment - it was called the Enlightenment, and it result from questioning the dogma of settled knowledge as promulgated by religions through the infallibility of scripture.
I'm not knowledgeable about philosophy or metaphysics but is there even anything approaching consensus on whether or not there even is a "knowledge ceiling" that an individual or even society could ever achieve? (If so, I'd love to know how anyone came to that conclusion lol)
>Science had its "protestant" moment - it was called the Enlightenment, and it result from questioning the dogma of settled knowledge as promulgated by religions through the infallibility of scripture.
You seem to have misunderstood the analogy I was making. I'm a practicing Roman Catholic, yet view Protestantism as having been a positive thing for Christianity as a whole, including Roman Catholicism. When is dogmatic belief in whatever passes for "science" these days going to be scrutinized? Systemic corruption of any sufficiently powerful institution of man is inevitable, and just because the scientific method is about as pure of a means of reasoning about the world around us as we can come up with and has led to profound advancements in technology and our understanding of our world... doesn't mean that everyone's just going to ignore the fact that using the now-widespread dogmatic belief in its infallibility is a pretty powerful means of achieving external political and personal goals unrelated to the pursuit of truth. It's naive to think otherwise.
Yes, agreed that human systems have a tendency to corruption, however the scientific method at least has within it the seeds to "keep the bastards honest" (as we say where I come from). i.e.
1. Nothing stops you from learning and becoming a scientist. 2. Nothing stops you from attempting to repeat published experiments, or if you can't, then to point out why (which are likely to be faults in either the description or execution of the original experiment).
In other words, there is transparency and a basis for objective comparison. Lack of transparency (either through gatekeeping or lack of detail) is considered a bad sign in science. That's what differentiates the scientific method, from say, the "political method", or "the religious method".
As a system, science has brought about a better understanding of the physical world around us and has dramatically improved the lives of every human on the planet.
1. It places empirical observation as the ultimate form of evidence, as opposed to scripture/existing knowledge.
If you observe something that contradicts existing theories and other people can make that observation then existing theories are disproven, the end. This still takes time to propagate, but really only for highly complicated abstract theories(of which climate change might be one!)
2. Science has a built in competitive market type process for selecting 'scripture' and an incentive to constantly be updating it.
Religions have more bureaucratic/despotic approaches to updating knowledge(college of cardinals/pope, influential preachers etc).
3. The core questions science tackles are physical and amenable to observation and maths. The core questions religion tackles are metaphysical, or to put them in evo-psych terms to do with selecting and reproducing rules of behavior that produce good societies in which to live over tens/hundreds of generations.
In as much as science tries to enter into that hyper-long term planning game it should be treated with extreme suspicion, it's a different statistical environment to that of physics and the existing statistical tools of science are probably not up to the task. It's the land of Taleb's fat tails and iterated games and exponential chaos, not statistically modelable quantum experiments(top pick a complicated but tractable problem).
Shitty metaphor: Hard sciences are about solving P problems, or at worst approximating NP or worse, but still computable, problems. Religion and social science are about providing heuristics to uncomputable problems(if you have a C program and all it does is return then it definitely halts etc). In as much as people take the NP approximations as seriously as the P solutions, they're in for some rude awakenings. In as much as a lot of our society does then we're in for a bumpy ride.
Yes, day to day there's a certain level of trust put in what scientists say based on their research, everyone can't know everything, but it's not blind faith. With priests, ultimately there's an expectation of belief without evidence.
An alternative would be a community-outlook. I am part of a greater whole. I don't really own anything. We are living a story, together.
Ultimately, the author is making a case for a modern version of Stoicism.
More like objectivisim or individualism. Many of my small talks with people in the west include discussion about Ayn Rand and her work on FountainHead and Atlas Shrugged. After hearing about it for a long time I read the book. And frankly, the whole concept of individualism is strange to me.
I fundamentally agree with you.
We need things (that we imagine to be) outside of ourselves that are good in order to structure what we do. That otherness can be in the form of God or in the form of ethics, or in the form of whatever we unconsciously pickup as meaningful.
Culturally (in the US at least), I don't think that there are a lot of serious options just laying around for people to pick up if they aren't into religion, and so we unconsciously pick up other people, transient material successes, short term goal fulfillment, or novelty seeking as a substitute for these long term orientations.
When we unconsciously adopt those things (human relationships, solving our short term projects, being smart, or whatever) I think that we're bound to be disappointed because all of those things are pretty finite in what you can do with them: there is always a limit to how close a relationship can be, how healthy your body can be, how much professional success you can attain, and so on.
I have a 17 year old who lives with me, and when he goes off to college, I will be happy. I am glad that I have a lot more in my life than just my children, because in the end it's important that they leave, eventually.
Even your closest human relations need to have limits.
So the choice seems to be between living with short term successes, picking up religion, or doing a lot of intellectual work to try and find meaningful stuff that doesn't have the same frustrating limits as the short-term goals.
At this point, I have been finding that last option much more useful... finally, after two decades of being a dead weight of alienating drag, my degree in philosophy is starting to work out some things.
So, yeah, I think that you're right: an ethic where you place meaning in your life in the wellbeing of humanity in general is a strong idea.
Today we are experimenting with new phenomena that have never been available to humanity en mass. Effective birth control, gender equality, freedom from restrictive social norms, all of these are very new, and indeed evolutionarily novel. We have not yet learned a tradition of how to operate in this space, we are the pioneers, and unfortunately a lot of missteps befall the pioneers.
Eventually through trial and error, and a kind of evolutionary process, we’ll figure it out, and then that will get passed down as the new value system. Then we’ll have kids again more or less following in the footsteps of their parents, they’ll just be footsteps we wouldn’t necessarily expect.
The difference is that the social structure which promotes the value system is valuable in and of itself (this said as someone who grew up religious but is not anymore). A lot of people can't "walk the path" without others to walk with them.
The only issue is that sometimes that social structure has downsides like occasionally becoming politically charged, self-serving or abusive.
Pretty sure every generation from the beginning of time has thought of itself as a pioneer exposed to new forces and new phenomena. It's a bit arrogant to think that you're the one and only.
There are a multitude of other changes that have transformed our environment (agriculture, spoken language, written language, barter, commerce, etc.) over the millennia.
> There is no need for anything mystical to be involved.
And yet something mystical has been involved for thousands of years, in virtually every culture. When we tried to eradicate it forcefully (communism), bad things happened. Perhaps there's more to it than you think?
> And yet something mystical...
People need explanations for things, when they don’t have them they invent them.
This is a little disingenuous.
Yes, states described as communist attempted to eradicate religion; to do that, they merely replaced religion with the state. The state became the church, its leaders became the saints.
Don't conflate the example of failed, corrupt Stalinist communist states with the concept of the eradication of religion, they're not at all mutually inclusive.
Can you name a single attempt to eradicate religion that didn't end up with the very description you provide?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_t...
> After he was done with the Nazis, he went back to his old tricks.
According to the article you yourself linked, he was pretty soft on them from after the war until his death.
What if at the end, we end up realizing that all there is to life is a struggle in order to propagate our own DNA, and that really this struggle may not be worth it? Humanity as a whole could decide that this is all there is, and then that ultimately there really is no point other than what you make it. What if humanity bucked it's genetic programming, recognizing it for what it really is. And recognizing that what we are really up against, is the laws of physics themselves. That we've been dealt a raw deal, meaning that we must work in some way to sustain our own being, and that only the laws of the universe stop us from being truly free. That in the end, birthing children really isn't a blessing, but a curse. And that truly the best gift you can give your unborn children is the gift of non-existence.
God?
Those questions are semi-rhetorical (although I'd love to hear an answer if you want to have a convo about it), but your paragraph rings some alarm bells for me. Have you read Thomas Nagel's "The Absurd"? I think it directly and decisively addresses many of the concerns you bring up.
Here's a link to the paper: https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Absu...
The message in religion, particularly in the message of Christianity, is that life is suffering because of ubiquitous sin - BUT - God came here bodily to teach us how to live, freeing us from the sin of broken laws, and died as a final blood sacrifice to wipe the sin slate clean.
Jesus is definitely the superman to model one's life after (be charitable, be loving, forgive, don't lead others to sin, speak truthfully, don't be a hypocrite, etc...) But, the main point the religion teaches is that salvation can only come through faith that Jesus is God and not by any good works you do.
You can get all rational and say that's all magic mumbo jumbo, but it's actually really good psychology. Belief in a higher power that saves leads to good people. It's beneficial to mental health when you can surrender the notion that anything you do will fix the world and that life isn't hopeless. And there is a power to prayer. We can definitely make things better here, and we are, but no works can eliminate all of the evil in the human heart.
For my parents and their siblings that meant the furthest apart they were until mid life, ignoring war service, was around 50 or so miles. Not by choice, but there were jobs, opportunities and housing locally. Not in each other's pockets like in a small village, but near enough to meet up regularly, visit when passing, take me over to my uncle or gran if they needed to go somewhere. There was some overlap between friends. There was always someone pretty locally.
For me and my siblings, friends and cousins, we are a far flung bunch, and it is the same for most of my friends. I have a relative 300 miles one way, one on another continent, another 200 miles the other way who I've almost completely lost touch with. Some friends have even more far flung friends and family. For the most part that seems to have come at a high cost. Not just when someone is taken ill, or at Christmas, but in day to day life, in our ways of parenting, in our closeness (or more accurately our lack of closeness) in day to day life. The lonely mum stuck miles away from relatives, the dad trying to keep it together alone. Maybe it even explains some of the addiction to social media.
Maybe I read far too much into it, having reached an age where mortality is far more apparent, and people I thought as young have died. My parents and their peers seemed to have had a level of contentment with their lot, even though many were in WW2 - sometimes at great cost, that me and my peers have utterly lost.
I have no answers. I wish I did.
I think this is something that VR tech good enough to make you feel like you're really in the same room as someone (meaning not just visuals, but sight, sound, touch, smell) will help with. That may be hundreds of years away though.
Interestingly enough, this line of thought is not new. People like Auguste Comte in the 1850s saw the industrial and technological revolution as an engine working to erode religion, and he wanted to work towards an alternative.
For many people, religion generally provides two things: 1) An overt faith-based explanation of why we're here, how the world came to be, and how important events are driven (God), and 2) a system of ethical and moral rules evolved over centuries to allow everyone to life their "best life".
As science and technology advanced, many people lost the need for #1, and started to abandon religion entirely. That kind of makes sense, because #1 is often the marquee headline of religion. But in abandoning religion, they also lost #2, the quieter, but perhaps even more important, aspect. There is nothing in today's modern society that can seriously fill that gap. (In the past, fraternal organizations played that role to some extent, but they are largely irrelevant today.)
Comte put together a "Religion of Humanity" in an attempt to provide people with point #2, couched in the familiar structure of religion and ceremony, but without the faith-based belief of point #1. It saw some medium-level success in its day but is now defunct. It was perhaps too early for its time.
However I think the idea is more important now than it ever was. People need an ethical, community-based, traditions-based societal structure they can attend regularly and fall back on, but without the requirement that one believe in faith-based myths and legends. We need a new "Religion of Humanity".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_of_Humanity
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/auguste-comte/a-general-vi...
If, on the other hand, moral rules and ethics are due to the natures of things then there must be someone who intended things to exist in the manner they are intended to exist. That being must be a person because of the principle of sufficient cause (since we exist). Faith is the response to communication from this person. It does not require abandoning of reason, but simply picks up where reason cannot ascend to because of its lack of perspective.
This is not at all clear to me. Can you clarify?
I’m not sure that there is such an absolute reference frame for morality, but this is too long a conversation to get into here!
Matthew 11:28-30 - “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. [29] Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. [30] For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
If anything she is blessed to have finally reached the end of her self-effort and encounter the weighty truth we find in Ecclesiastes -- that everything under the sun is indeed meaningless (vanity).
"“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn
“ ‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—
36 a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’"
Or maybe Mark 11:12 and on:
"12 The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. 13 Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. 14 Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it."
We don't want happiness out of life, we want meaning. And we have the most meaning when we're impacting other people. Impacting people can start small, like your wonderful examples, or be huge like starting a successful company. There are so many ways.
Of course, I understand that achieving happiness can be challenging, and that seeking meaning can be a meaningful step on that path.
But it is possible to have happiness without meaning, and that seems more valuable than meaning without happiness, or happiness that relies on a sense of meaning.
The pursuit of a meaningful life puts way too much pressure on identifying what is meaningful and worth our energies. That would probably decrease my happiness.
What if I can't find any pursuit that I consider to be the most meaningful? Am I OK committing to something that could potentially be less than optimal in terms of meaningfulness?
It isn't that important for me to evaluate my actions on meaningfulness - I'm bound to disappoint my self by that metric.
Prioritizing meaningfulness over happiness is putting the cart before the horse, in my mind.
Upon deeper introspection, my own personal experience of “happiness without meaning” is closer to “the meaning is just the universe/physics unfolding (and I happen to be a part of that)”, which is so all-encompassing that it has little meaning itself, in the Kolmogorov complexity sense. And concomitant well-being, which I would define as closer to “completely neutral affective experience” rather than the “positive affective experience” described as hedonic well-being in the study you referenced.
There isn't anything to 'do' to solve this - because there is no problem. She's made trade-offs she wasn't fully aware of and now she's coming to see them for what they are. She'll pout for a few days/months/years and then move on with her life.
This 'become something that is worth being' aka Jordan Peterson cult of 2018, is going to run it's course too, because most people are average, and this 'worth being' is always something an average person isn't already doing. When they start doing it, 'worth being' will become something more difficult surely because it's never enough. What a great way to view yourself as above others and continue being an ego-maniac (what Jordan Peterson is)
Most people are average, which means they can become well-above average at some one useful thing that is "worth being." Most people do get there. "Worth being" clearly implies, that being enough.
If J.P. were actually an ego-maniac he would have been chewed up and spit out by society long ago; standing against the crowd isn't easy work.
There lies the rub. What if you don't find anything to be meaningful to you. This implies that there are some activities that are inherently more meaningful that others and you just have to find them. Now you are back to square one.
Can it be rewritten to
> You can always find meaning in anything you do
This doesn't handwave the problem away. Main task is to find meaning in yourself not keep looking for activities that will give you meaning and hope you get lucky.
As you expressed, you see the task as "find meaning in yourself," a concept that can maybe be expressed as "meaning comes from within." This sounds nice! I think what OP was getting at is that this perspective has two problems: 1. It requires you to produce your own sense of "meaning" (whatever that means) that is self-satisfying, AND that works well in the society/community in which you exist; and 2. it is fundamentally self-centered. A hypothesis could be that this perspective seems to most frequently result in a failure to find "meaning" (probably better called "contentment") in anything.
As OP said, faith/religion traditions tend to hand you a set of pre-defined "here's what's meaningful" morals, and these also tend to be skewed towards group value instead of just self-satisfaction. When handed this outlook on meaning/morals, it seems possible there might be benefits - not having to come up with a self-fulfilling sense of meaning that also meshes with broader society, as well as a focus on being useful to the community instead of just yourself.
I personally find the whole "be yourself" / "do what you love" dogma-du-jour to be terrible, and prone to actually resulting in depression and shame. It is at the same time selfish, and self-sabotaging.
There is no such thing as not worshipping.
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. Or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mothergoddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles –
is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level we all know this stuff already – it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
David Foster Wallace, from This is Water, a commencement speech he gave in 2005.
The only reason he has to assert it like that is because it isn't true. He has a lack of imagination if he's not able to imagine someone who doesn't worship anything. I imagine he'd just move the goalposts though, and say "oh well they worship their lack of worship, which is a form of eating them alive." It's disingenuous at best, but probably just ignorance, so that he can sound profound without really giving a convincing argument.
Perhaps they should read your dissertation on it?
/s
https://www.youtube.com/user/DaveRamseyShow
This man specializes in this.
It's clear to me how all of the reaction and distraction we've started to discover that the current Internet lets us cling to will drive people to start seriously evaluating teachings of mindfulness and Buddhism.
Mindfulness interest is trending the highest it's ever been: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...
Also interesting, searches for Buddhism peak yearly in the fall/winter?: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...
I both agree and disagree with you. On the one hand, you're right that most people would be happier if they committed more and gave more. Human relationships are a positive-sum game.
But people who mindlessly follow that advice are asking to be exploited. History is full of dictators who grew rich and powerful off the backs of people whom they persuaded to think of something other than themselves. "Blut und boden." "Deus, pátria, e família."
What religion is supposed to be (whether it succeeds is a different question) is a moral compass so that one may find happiness and meaning in service to others, without your good intentions being exploited or usurped against your interests.
Then again, perhaps religion is just helpful here in the sense that people -- especially those going through emotional/existential crises -- might find it easier to climb out of a hole with dogma as a guide rather than rational thought.
That being said, religion does a pretty poor job of spreading the gospel of loosing oneself in the service of others. It tends to focus on religiosity instead. But imho it does a better job than almost any other institution we have.
Which is to say that as a culture we are pretty terrible at it.
If you strip away all the industrial entrepreneur worshiping, there is a beautiful lesson about the ethics of expressing what you want and allowing loved ones to do things for you, because they want to see you happy, because they love the real, full you. I guess one can come from many sides but in the end I agree with the writer of this piece, it is about accepting yourself, including the things you don't like. If you've seen Naruto, this is the height of the series for me: [0] (None of the movies will play though.)
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=naruto+hugs+himself&t=ffsb&ia=vide...
That said, I'd also encourage this person to seek therapy. Sometimes knowing the answer isn't enough and you need help getting there...perhaps with the benefit of medication.
As long as the US will demonize socialism, people who have nothing won’t get help from the government.
Otherwise, we definitely agree. We are fallen creatures and will drive earth to hell, regardless of which car we decide to drive there in. Only external help can save us from ourselves.
In the past, without the safety net, and with anti-vagrancy laws, the street people would have been doing the work now done by low wage legal and illegal immigrants. It was a hard life, but better than slowly poisoning themselves to death with opioids while living on government aid.
Following an ethical life path does not provide the same value as rediscovering it.
I feel like, if you strip away the outward trappings and dogma, this is what religion is good for. Not in a "believe in Jesus" or "trust in God" kind of way, but in a "how to orient your life" kind of way. Which is to say, the actually useful portion of religion generally teaches that your best life is probably not focused on you. It isn't about finding yourself, or being true to yourself, or really thinking about yourself at all. It's in being of benefit to the human beings around you. And in serving those around you, you become something that is worth being.
It doesn't matter who you are or where you live, there are poor people around you. There are parentless children, drug addicts, parks that need cleaning, animal shelters that need dog walkers. You can always do something meaningful with your life. Try that, and see what kind of relationships you make. Look at and actually see a homeless person. See how that makes you feel. See if your worrying about your own future maybe drops away, or gets morphed into something you can do something with. See what kinds of other people you run into that way. Focus on, if not bringing joy to other people, then at least making their lives better. See if that doesn't - as a pure byproduct - change your own self-worth. Or maybe just make you less focused on it.