| As others here have said, look for meaning in your life in other places, both in the way you do the work (process-orientation) and in your relationships. But there is an important lesson you'll have to learn to make any of that work, which is nicely summed up in the considerably under-rated "Julian Comstock" by Robert Charles Wilson: "Just because nothing lasts doesn't mean that nothing matters." Everything you do, everything you are, is transient. The work you are doing to day will be bitrotted away to nohthing in five or ten years. The relationships you have will grow and change, and just as surely they will die, or the people you have them with wil die, or you will die. The appeal of religion is that it's a trick that allows people to live with this reality, but the cost is extremely high. The challenge for those of us unwilling to accept the epistemic and moral compromises religion entails is to find ways for our lives to be meaningful that don't require quite such massive self-deception or accepting even a tiny bit of moral authority based on things that "just made sense" to pre-modern high-status men who knew less about the world than the average intelligent high-school student today. Looking inward--meditating and whatnot--doesn't help much on the transience issue, because everythat that you are will also pass away. It can help on some practical things, though, including developing an awareness of all the good things we have simply by being clever enough to be born in the right time and place. Looking outward, to help others, to contribute to the world, to develop a braoder network of social connections that are not purely self-indulgence (although a life without self-indulgence is a life not worth living) can help, although it comes with all the frustrations of dealing with human beings. No good deed goes unpunished. I'm not a natural helper or teacher of others, but I've found the greatest satisfactions in my life have come from mentoring and managing in ways that make people's lives a bit better. One of the things that makes that work is an awareness that if I help someone learn something, the good I've done will last. The potential positive effect of mentoring goes on pretty much indefinitely, long after I've been laid-off from my job or my project has been shelved or my girlfriend has dumped me or my marriage has ended or my friends have died or all the other things that really do happen to people in the course of a long, full and successful life. |