Final Essay

he topic for LDH2BM students is - "What makes life meaningful?". If that is too hard, feel free to tweak that topic - perhaps to - "What makes my life feel meaningfuler?" You should connect to specific areas we've investigated - including dominant and marginal corporate messages, your own thoughts, the elderly, animals, physicality, health, food, and the fundamental energy basis of our society. Please include some quotes from your own or others' earlier work that expresses strongly what you believe or what you don't (any longer) believe. Feel free to include an explicit quote like, "This is the way I'm (mostly) thinking about this topic now - but my understanding is evolving!"

Some starter suggestions and questions:
You should share your own orientation to living a meaningful life. Contextualize your point of view in terms of the dominant perspective, other individuals' perspectives, and your own evolving understanding. Is meaning possible given death, infinity, and the Universe? What's your stance on happiness (the dominant easy answer for a meaningful life) - what is it, how important is it, what causes it? What about the other dominant answers - family, success, self-improvement? How about the "marginal" answers - authenticity, creativity, physicality, or deep understanding? What is the significance of the social - should we strive to be "above" our desire for acceptance and affirmation or should we accept our desire and channel it (how?)? What is the significance of our animality - of our physicality and desire for touch and sensation? Feel free to include a disclaimer like, "This is the way I'm (mostly) thinking about this topic now - but my understanding is evolving!"

In our time, a ”meaningful” life has become only superficially meaningful, as our values are so greatly conditioned by the media, popular culture, and the premium placed on success and sex appeal. With the tremendous concern for materialistic things such as monetary gain and social status, physical appearance, and power, the core from which we derive “meaning” has become warped and depleted. The truly “meaningful” life, it would seem would comprise of peace, love, happiness, community, friendship, family. Corporate media such as Rap music, Reality shows, and Commercials, warp reality to the point in which you don’t even know what YOU want. You know what the media wants you to want and you end up getting sucked into that idea of a “good” life. People are so blinded by what mainstream media tells us is a good and meaningful life, that we can’t even see the real meaning in our own lives.

In order to live a good and meaningful life, there are certain non-materialistic things you must have, or will at least help. You need mental, emotional, and moral health. It also seems to help if you have physical, social, and spiritual health. In class, we have been doing many activities to test the theory that in order to live a good and meaningful life you must have those things. We rolled on top of each other, played tag inside, and outside, we put each other through therapy sessions, and more. What I have decided is that when you are physical, you are much happier, but it also bleeds into the mental, and emotional health, because you feel better. This weekend, I did nothing but play basketball and just walk around. I was out the entire time just being social and having a good time. I honestly felt like I was high off life. It was such a good feeling that I actually wanted to do homework. Everything is connected. My theory goes as follows: If you are physical, you feel mentally and emotionally better because you feel good about yourself and that you are actually doing something useful in your life. Not only do you feel better about yourself, but you feel like you want to do better, like me wanting to do my homework. That’s moral health. That also bleeds into social health because you want to do good for people, and to make friends because you feel good about yourself and you want people to see it. But to top it all off this all leads into spiritual health—Everyone wants to believe in something, and wants to know that their life has some meaning to it, that’s it’s just for no reason. That its for a greater good, that they were put on earth for a reason. If you enjoy life more, because of the healthiness I talked about, you will want to know the actual meaning of things, and that’s where religion ties in. There are many things that help to make life better. Some people find fake reasons to make themselves “think” that they have meaningful lives, but if you just take time to do the simple things you know you should do anyway—be physical, eat right, etc. your life will be meaningful, and you will feel better.