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"Meaning" is a human concept, and only humans can fill its definition. It's also an individual concept, so everyone has the right to write its own definition. So indeed, as long as you have any desire(s), you can walk a path towards them. Any desire is fine if it's fine to you.

There's one commonality though: we kinda have to align with other humans. Maybe you would be able to be happy meditating alone... but if there are others around you who find what you do weird and criticize you, meditating alone itself becomes harder as you will have to additionally be able to remain unaffected by the criticism you receive. In the other side of the spectrum, if what you do is enjoyed by many other people, you will more easily feel reassured that it's a good investment and that it makes sense to do it. Plus you will be more likely to connect with other people, which is like, the main desire for most people: no better way to feel that your life is meaningful than having others tell you that you mean a lot to them. And we kinda keep rolling in that loop.

So those guys have found each other and Spyro will have enough depth in some aspect that they can keep walking around it meaningfully (to them). It's all cool.

As you also hint, putting some effort to make others suffer less is also an interesting idea: suffering is kinda at the opposite side of happiness and meaningfulness in life, so reducing that is also another way to increase positively the meaningfulness score.

It's rather bizarre that we are so dependent on others to make a positive evaluation of our own meaningfulness. Like, it doesn't even compile in most languages.

But maybe god is ok with circular dependencies. Let's ask in the next code review.

> Then I realised that if heat death of the universe is our ultimate destiny (and certainly our own death before that), then life really is all about the journey anyway and I suppose nothing is really more meaningful than anything else.

And yet, some activities leave me feeling empty and others feel like they were time well spent. Is that distinction a genuine insight, or just another socially imposed arbitrary judgement?

I suppose everyone’s journey is unique. It’s just good to find your passion even if it is “pointless”, because everything is “pointless”.

Until you've learned to notice automated judgment and unlearned automatically running with it, it'll take more analysis to answer the question.

You may have genuine needs being denied by the activities. You may have unacknowledged trauma patterns matching with some aspect of the activities. You may have socially conditioned judgments moving too fast for you to currently notice.

Do you want a simple practice in noticing and unlearning such judgments?

Please share the practise of noticing and unlearning the judgments! Sounds intriguing.

It's very simple, and yet difficult enough that most won't do it by free will. The ones that do are very likely to have tried all other options.

Because it involves seeing things for what they are, changing perceptions, letting go, forgiving, facing pushed down trauma and all sorts of nasty, emotional stuff.

But the method is as simple as it gets: remove all inputs, stay completely still, close your eyes, observe your body breathing all by itself, and wait, and have patience with yourself, it takes practice.

It's very much like establishing a connection; the method will allow you to reach deeper from where you are right now, but with practice it becomes who you are. Self realization, or realizing who you really are; is a one way street, you can't go back. And it never ends, there's always more to discover.

You can get glimpses using psychedelics but from my experience you still have to do the work to fill in the blanks if you really want to know the truth. Maybe the more shamanic ones like Ayahuasca, but I count that as doing pretty intense work.

I'm assuming that you are talking about the practice of meditation.

If you are an avid practitioner, I have a question for you. I have attempted following some one-size-fits-all solutions before, Headspace and others, and only when I broke through the time limitations, and managed to meditate for over an hour, have I seen any progress.

My issue is that my ability to focus is not constant, and on most days I can't manage to get in the zone for more than an hour. Do you think there is any benefit to short bursts of meditation, or is the real treasure buried deep, and you essentially have to live in an ashram or a Buddhist temple and meditate daily for multiple hours to get to the level you are mentioning in your post?

Indeed, but the word means so many things these days and they all sort of miss the point from my perspective.

I stayed for six months in an ashram [1] way out in the middle of nowhere, I'm sure that helped a lot.

It takes more time in the beginning, time for the mind to wind down, time to figure out which way is up, we did 4h sessions every morning in the ashram and 1h sessions regularly during the day.

But every step in that direction; I feel that regular practice is more important; and quality over quantity, 5 minutes of awareness is worth more than sitting for 1h with your eyes closed and worrying about this and that.

[1] https://www.yogameditation.com/

I responded with the instructions to someone else who responded to the offer. Joyful experimentation!

I'd be interested in hearing details on this practice.

I call this a Self-Healing Reality-Untangling Gesture (SHRUG). Here's what I did:

1) Choose to believe it's possible to joyfully abandon all judgment.

2) Choose to do so for some internally/intrinsically motivating reason(s). I chose to do it for science and for learning Nonviolent Communication.

3) Every time one hears, thinks, or reads a word with an opposite (the "trigger word", do this:

While performing a gesture that conveys uncertainty (I literally shrugged my shoulders while putting my hand out, palms up), say something following this speech pattern: "meh...<trigger word>...<opposite of trigger word>...meh...<reframing of what was said in terms of descriptive observations without words with opposites/judgment, related non-blaming/judgmental feelings coming up related to the observations, and the underlying human needs being expressed through the feelings>...<request for confirmation that the reframing was accurate>."

Notes:

A) It's very helpful to familiarize yourself with Nonviolent Communication and to identify feelings and needs. And if not, carrying around a list of feelings and needs (I find longer lists to be more useful to gain deeper nuance...if anxiety arises around long lists, sit and breathe through it...take time and patience with the process...learning new things often comes with initial frustrations and anxieties until one gets comfortable with learning new things without judgment/expectations. In a sense, discomfort from the long lists is good fortune because it gives an immediate thingt o practice with: "meh...long...short...meh...this human body is complex. I feel uncomfortable with not knowing what some of these words even mean and with taking time to process myself this way. I'm needing patience, to learn more about my feelings and needs, and self-compassion. This is definitely meeting my need for challenge and I can learn to enjoy the process, which can help meet my need for effectiveness in the context of learning."

B) If one recalls a time in the past when one encountered a trigger and didn't SHRUG, then immediately SHRUG

C) Maybe this can be done silently in the head or through writing, and I did it aloud. My thinking around this is the brain gets to process the SHRUG through both the initial thinking as well as through hearing it being spoken. Could maybe string all the things together, so writing it, internally speaking it, and externally speaking it.

D) Let people know you're doing this, unless you're wanting to also learn how to navigate people offending themselves because the initial part of the process involves dismissal of something they've said.

Another example trigger phrase: "That site's UX is so cool!"

Response: "meh... cool...uncool...meh... I'm noticing novel design patterns that are the opposite of dark patterns and feel grateful someone's out there meeting the need for mindfulness through their designs."

Another example: "I don't like seafood. "

Response: shrug "meh...like...dislike...I can learn to enjoy eating food that nourishes this body"

I'm noticing there may be a more nuanced and broader description of the shrug than documented here, based on my examples. I'd love help trying to tease it out. If people share examples of judgments they're wanting to let go of, I'm happy to give my own reframings to help clarify the general pattern. Coming up with really clear instructions most people can understand is something I want to do in the coming days ago I can really spread this thing around.

Do this every day for a month and then let me know what effects the process has had. I'm the only person I know who's done this and it was incredibly transformative. Especially helpful in accepting things a person under the age of 3 might do. I don't want to go into detail about the effects I experienced because I'm wanting to see what happens without setting expectations.

Feel free to reach out to me through social media, email, and/or phone for support.

Happy New Year and joyful shrugging!

It is probably evolutionary imposed judgement. Probably the activities which left you empty neither increased what you think your status among society or close peer group is, nor did they help spreading your genes.

Heat death is one theory. I ascribe to the theory that, the fact that cosmic inflation has separated some galaxies by far more than 13.7 billion light years.. then that degree of ‘causal separation’ is proof that structure, complexity, and richness is our future, rather than fatal cosmic homogeneity.

Cosmic inflation and gravitation have worked together to produce incredible amounts of ever-increasing structure and complexity in the universe.

The universe may be quite unlike a closed system like a box full of idealized gas particles - where the traditional analysis of entropy has its roots.

I get a bit dismayed whenever I see folks say that the prophecy of heat death is a lesson they use to influence the resigned destiny of their lives.

Consciousness exists in part to stay the heat death by way of clever manipulation of the natural world. We are here to save the universe, and our first lesson on loss starts with planet earth.

>heat death of the universe is our ultimate destiny

We have bigger and more urgent and realistic fish to fry before worrying about heat death. Insofar as you care about the health and well-being of humanity as a whole, and the biosphere in which we are embedded, then you cannot let yourself zoom out so far in ethical concerns, or else you become effectively antisocial.

We have nested problems at the global, national, and local level that all need attention. But of course it is relatively easy to get to the bleeding edge of Spyro speed-running than it is to get to the bleeding edge of solving real-world problems that have faced humanity, in one form or another, for thousands of years.

Life is partly about the journey, but if a side effect of your life is to chew up the biosphere to make cool new toys and experiences for you, then yes, I think you're better off taking up Spyro. Even better, though, if you recognize a challenge that some larger group faces, and apply yourself to solving that, at least part time.

> but if a side effect of your life is to chew up the biosphere

The biosphere will be chewed up with or without human activities.

There's just absolutely no evidence to support this statement. We don't know enough about meta/xeno-biology to say that life isnt a self-sustaining phenomenon in a thermodynamic sense. It may be that human-like "intelligence" is actually an emergent phenomenon, not unlike cancer, that has the potential to disrupt an otherwise homeostatic set of processes.

I think he was referring to the eventual expansion of our star such that our orbit is smaller than its diameter. Of course that's no excuse to be a jerk in the meantime.

Well, our sun will eventually explode, which will certainly chew up the biosphere.

The sun will make Earth uninhabitable in a billion years, give or take several hundred million, and depending on how long extremophiles can hold on.

What do you mean? The expansion of the sun, or a meteor strike, or a caldera explosion, something like that? Well, yes of course those are all likely on some large time scale, but they are entirely out of our control. Meanwhile we have every likelihood of having a 1M year existence, as a species embedded in a biosphere, if we can "get on the same page" with respect to our behavior. I propose that we adopt the universal rule that we all act "consistent with our survival, and that of our species" in an exact analogue to Issac Asimov's Zeroeth law of robotics. It is a small jump from that to the protection of the biosphere in general, if you are willing to ignore the strong emotional pull of science fantasy narratives that imply that we can survive without it.

> real-world problems that have faced humanity

I would argue that the leading problem facing humanity is humanity. (Evidence: the last century is more than adequate.) Our supposed best were using their combined wisdom to create atomic weapons (regardless of the ecological problems created). One of them reportedly recalled the phrase 'I am become death' from the Gita in reponse to seeing what he'd wrought ... suggesting a distressing fatalism.)

If harmless distraction works, yeah, maybe we'd better go with that ... until mindful leadership emerges. (Breath-holding is discouraged.)