Two things :
- These last months I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions. I don’t have a meaningful job, I’m far away from my family and old friends, and to top it all, relationships keep wrecking my heart over and over again. All this is leaving me asking myself : what should my life mean? Is drawing an owl every day enough? Should it even mean anything? Who cares? That kind of stuff…
- I really like youtube. I think a lot of creative and talented minds are proposing quality content there. I find a lot of things that stimulate my mind.
The other day, I watched a video from John Green, on the vlogbrothers’ channel.
It’s a Q&A session, and he says a lot of things, but here is what I took away from his metaphor on the meaning of life. It’s a transcript of his answer to a question, along with some illustrations. As you may know, the answer is important, but worthless if you haven’t got the question attached to it, so here you go :
How do I cope with the fact that there is no real meaning in life?
Imagine you’re walking through a forest one night, and you come to a clearing and you find an eternal fire.
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It’s the perfectly sized fire and it doesn’t need anything from you. You don’t have to put wood in it, it just burns and burns.
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And you can spend your whole life seeing by its light, and being warmed by it, and so on.
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I think that’s an awesome fire and if you find one you should be grateful, but imagine that you don’t
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Imagine on your travels you never come across an eternal fire.
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In that case, you have to build a fire and then find fuel to keep it going
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and sometimes it’ll go out and you’ve got to start a new fire.
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Now, in some ways that’s worse, but in some ways it’s better because unlike the eternal fire, you understand how and why it works.
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Point being, I would argue the light and heat from both fires are equally real.
Now that’s quite a philosophical post, and maybe it left you without a clear answer to the question. But to me it means a lot that you don’t have to follow the beaten tracks, and can create a meaning out of your own work or inclinations. And if this question remains open then it’s cool, let me know what you think about all this!
Take care of yourselves until next time
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