Looking Forward to 2020
The New Year is a time to look forward to the next phase of our lives. Another calendar cycle begins and the days are getting longer (in the UK at least). It’s a period to make plans and prepare, to take stock and forecast for what could be if everything turns out as well as it could.
I have already touched on some ideas of what I would like my life to look like by the end of 2020, i.e. totally Facebook free. That’s a year specific goal for 2020. On top of this, I would also like to have made much clearer progress towards the goals I set in the early months of last year.
There are eight of these life goals and all are very much concerned with where I want to be in 2024 and how I am going to get there. Yet, when I recently came across a text-based conversation with a wise friend from 2009, it got me questioning, the why.
2019 has been some ride. I have lost count of the up and downward swings of the crazy balancing act. On the one hand, there have been days in the last year when I have felt so much gratitude for the way things are that I have almost turned to a supreme being to express it. On the other, I’ve experienced mini-episodes when I have felt so fed up that I was convinced any higher power is certainly evil and revels in watching individual struggles play out.
Perusing the text of that conversation from 2009 I dug out my youthful four-point philosophy. It was a shortcode for how to live which I took to heart at the time.
My original four-point philosophy
1) Do what makes you happy
2) Try not to harm others
3) Remember those who have provided for you
4) Give back on a larger scale when you can
In response to this, my wise friend said:
“Great philosophy but what’s the point? Who are you doing it for? It answers the question ‘How should I live?’ but not ‘Why am I here?’ or ‘What happens when I die?’ Maybe you’d say we’re here for no reason and it’s just random chance and when we die we just rot. But if those statements are true, why does it matter what you do? “
The friend was pointing out that my four-point philosophy does not contain a reason to be. It is pretty much a to-do list, and as such, wouldn’t stand up as a code for life when things get difficult. The four points contain no substantive force to keep motivation. One’s underlying motivation is important. The often misunderstood German philosopher Nietzsche put it:
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how
There is possibly some debate on what Nietzche meant specifically, but I’ll take it as follows: if you have a reason to live you can bear any manner of living.
As a slight aside, I have been thinking recently about technological convergence, the ever-ubiquitous tracking and the perhaps fanciful concept of the Singularity. I am struggling to work out whether the unstoppable march of technology will reveal higher truths over time, or just complicate our human quest for such knowledge. Will there be more need for a why to live in the not too distant and potentially dystopian future?
The direction of my musings in 2020
As we get started on this new and exciting decade, I plan to revisit some ideas about belief, faith and the notion of one or more Gods. Following that, I’ll feel more prepared for a dive into the literature on consciousness and the essence of being Human. Essentially, I wish to explore what it means to be a Human Being in the technologically enhanced reality we increasingly find ourselves in.
Therefore, the aim for my more philosophical musings in 2020 is two-fold; primarily to work out what the driving force of my life is. Not necessarily why I am here but in a more practical sense, what is the why to live for. In tandem with this, I want to solidify a position on whether I am a techno-optimist or truly believe that we are doomed to be the architects of our own destruction.
What does it matter Why we are here. We are and therefore have to get on with being and mostly to feel good internally most of us need to feel we are achieving something either creative or seeing gratitude of others from our actions. We are hard wired to achieve–just watch a child learning a new skill such as walking.
Hi, thanks for this.
I would disagree we are hard wired to achieve, unless by achieve you mean ‘attempt to survive’. It matters why we are here because people who have a strong ‘why to live’ or rather, purpose, are better equipped to deal with whatever life throws at them.
Cam
I agree that what is most important to us as individuals is largely a matter for our own discretion, and that the “why” for each of us must, of necessity, be determined by our own wits and life experience, but one of the most well known axioms in philosophy states that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Whether or not we choose to examine the “why” of our existence or to pay any attention at all to what our distinctive human nature has “hard-wired” into it, plodding along mindlessly or oblivious to any sort of significance that our lives might have as a result of choosing to live mindfully instead, if nothing else, mitigates the potential benefits of what life COULD be about for each of us, and it seems to me that we ought to give serious consideration to figuring out what it is that makes living significant.
Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and author, once wrote, “The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” I’m with Jung on that.
Thanks for you attention to my writing and I look forward to reading more here in the coming year…..John H.
Thanks for this, nice quote from Jung, very apt.