I regard a search for meaning or purpose to be bass-ackwards.
Instead I seek value. The things everyone is listing here are things that you value.
Add enough value to your life, and discard enough things that leach value from your life, and you wake up in the morning with the subjective feeling that your life has meaning and purpose. In other words, meaning and purpose are emotional responses to sufficient value. Life isn't meaningful; it FEELS meaningful. Or can, anyway.
So what adds value to my life is satisfying my various curiosities, my professional endeavors, my hobbies, and (unevenly) my family. And I have enough of those things that I wake up in the morning, and, provided I studiously ignore the 500 hundred pound gorilla in the room (my past losses and accumulated disappointments, sorrows and aches and pains and such like -- which, after all, are on balance no worse than the next person's) I feel reasonably pleased to continue to enjoy that value for another day.
Instead I seek value. The things everyone is listing here are things that you value.
Add enough value to your life, and discard enough things that leach value from your life, and you wake up in the morning with the subjective feeling that your life has meaning and purpose. In other words, meaning and purpose are emotional responses to sufficient value. Life isn't meaningful; it FEELS meaningful. Or can, anyway.
So what adds value to my life is satisfying my various curiosities, my professional endeavors, my hobbies, and (unevenly) my family. And I have enough of those things that I wake up in the morning, and, provided I studiously ignore the 500 hundred pound gorilla in the room (my past losses and accumulated disappointments, sorrows and aches and pains and such like -- which, after all, are on balance no worse than the next person's) I feel reasonably pleased to continue to enjoy that value for another day.
