All bhuddist philosophy takes the understanding of your impending death, and the background fear of it, as absolutely critical to determining meaning in your life.
I can not highly recommend enough "The Meaning of Life : Perspectives from the World's Great Intellectual Traditions". It's one of The Great Courses and I found, extremely easy to listen to. The topics covered range from the Bhagavad Gita, to the Book of Job, to Stoicism, to Daoism, Confucianism, Bhuddism, and all the way into modernity (Hume, Mills, Kant, Tolstoy) and post-modernity (Nietzsche).
A pervasive theme of ALL cultures with a philosophical tradition is the necessity of living one's life with the moment to moment realization of one's death.
I like Nietszche, Emerson (especially 'Self-Reliance'), Walt Whitman and the Tao Te Ching. For fiction Zorba the Greek and Dune are two of my favorites.
I like Emerson's Circles essay. It's helped me maintain some humility many times.
Kant's CI for ethics.
Tao Te Ching for perspective and focus.
Nonviolent communication by Marshall Rosenberg for confrontation and interpersonal communication. The concept of NVC and, through its negation, violent communication underscores so much of what's currently going on in the world.
I think a big factor is that many people here are surrounded by people who are steeped in Biblical culture, yet living objectively terrible lives. The dominant religious narrative of any culture is inevitably corrupted by temporal pressures.
Also, while I agree there are many valuable lessons to be learned from the Bible, the New Testament is not a book for people who strive for wealth, and HN attracts strivers. Not to say you can't be a Christian and strive for wealth, but the striving is going to come from some other part of your life, and it's going to force you to compartmentalize Christian values to some extent. Seneca, on the other hand, was unapologetically wealthy, and his philosophy was consistent with that.
A particularly important read concerning the meaning of life is the book of Ecclesiastes. It tells of Solomon’s great experiment of finding meaning in knowledge, pleasure, wealth, accomplishment, etc..
I am often bewildered by those who pour a great deal of energy in planning for retirement and ignoring the fact that they will soon thereafter be pushing up daisies. Death awaits us all.
I pour a lot into retirement because I don't want my final days to be a time of financial hardship or to be a burden on my children.
Today, I can easily move around, feed/wash myself, and but that won't be true forever. Putting money away for later gives me some measure of confidence I'll be able to pay someone to help me when the time comes.
Why not kill yourself when you get too old to wash/feed yourself? I'm being serious. I've asked myself that many times and can't find a good reason why not.
It's not even about washing/feeding yourself. I simply don't want to have to work all my life. I'd like to spend my days reading, watching movies, traveling, eating out, etc.
To your question though, I find that as I get older life is increasingly more interesting. I suspect that will be the case regardless of whether I'm hobbled by my body.
Also, if I have grandchildren I can imagine wanting to hang around to see them grow up.
The Book of Job might be one that the Stoics could appreciate, as in it Job is robbed of every worldly good, his health, his friends, and his family. Though they'd probably point out that if only Job had practiced Stoicism he'd be able to meet all of these privations with indifference.
If you like Job you should seek out the play J.B. by Archibald MacLeish. His take on the story is that Job in the end forgives God, making him superior in some way to the God he loves so much, which is a view of the story you don't often hear.
Yeah the Bible is typically overlooked these days. Even most Christians probably don't read it. And many of the type who discovered Seneca or Dogen through a self-help blog probably take pride in how intelligent and "rational" they are (for flowing along with the dominant current of our culture ha) in rejecting Christianity. But the Bible is literally just a library of different writings, the whole point of which is to give a complete picture of life, to furnish the imagination with stories and characters and lessons. Proverbs is a place to start I guess, though I'm hardly the person to ask. I remember liking the Gospel of Mark as a kid?
> edit: For those of you down voting me for whatever reason, can you at least contribute to the discussion and explain how my answer was a poor one?
> The bible is one of the greatest stories ever told containing a myriad of different ways at looking at life.
By itself, it wasn’t a very compelling comment. You made no effort to support your position. Given that the Christian bible is considered to be a religious text first and philosophy second (if at all), you should have made a case for why it was relevant in this context.
The Essays of Montaigne. While it is a massive time, he wrote in so much detail into his own thought process, we are given a peek into his mind. He also digests thousands of aphorisms, maxims, parables and quotes from the classics and the works from antiquity. I have heard people referring to it as a sort of a secular Bible. I recommend the translation by M A Screech.
The bible reveals that the basic problem humanity has is not lack of a robust life philosophy but rather that we're inherently sinful and thus deserving of death (physical and eternal). That's an offensive message.
It then explains that the remedy to the judgement we deserve is believing in Jesus Christ, who by bearing that judgement, causes our sin to be imputed to himself and his righteousness to be imputed to us. Accepting this requires us to admit we are totally helpless and at God's mercy. That's an even more offensive message.
In the current era, I think the bible has gotten enough press. Far fewer people have read Seneca than the bible - and the bible permeates US culture. It's like telling someone learning about IT who's only ever worked with Windows to keep right on developing their Windows background. It's not awful advice, and it's not comment worthy.
But there's so much about Windows that the average end user doesn't know - just like there's so much about the Bible that the average American doesn't know. If you want to learn about operating systems, NT is genuinely worth taking a deep look at, for both the successful and unsuccessful things about it, and "I've been using MS Word my whole life" isn't a reason not to look at NT. And even if you just want to work at the operational level, running a Windows environment with AD / Group Policy / etc. is so different from maintaining your personal Windows laptop
The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton is a very approachable introduction to Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Shopenhauer, and Nietzsche and the practical takeaways from their teachings.
I can not highly recommend enough "The Meaning of Life : Perspectives from the World's Great Intellectual Traditions". It's one of The Great Courses and I found, extremely easy to listen to. The topics covered range from the Bhagavad Gita, to the Book of Job, to Stoicism, to Daoism, Confucianism, Bhuddism, and all the way into modernity (Hume, Mills, Kant, Tolstoy) and post-modernity (Nietzsche).
A pervasive theme of ALL cultures with a philosophical tradition is the necessity of living one's life with the moment to moment realization of one's death.