Meaning of Life for Men by Jordan Peterson

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX2ep5fCJZ8

This is technically Day 3 of the One TED Talk a Day initiative. I started this on  27th July 2018 and today is 29th July 2018.

The series in which the blogs have been published is a littled messed up but this will be on track from tomorrow.

Jordan Peterson is an incredibly knowledgable professor to follow if you have slightest of the flair for human psychology based topics. His lectures can easily be found on Youtube and I haven't used any other platform as yet to follow his lectures and ideas.

In this talk he explains about the meaning of life for men. He argues that women in a way, either biologically or psychologically are created in such a way that they don't dwell so much on the meaning of life question as much as men.

He finishes his talk by saying that meaning of life for men is responsibility. They find / would find happiness to be responsible for accomplishing something they care about.

This sends me down the memory lane and makes me re-connect the ideas I have read so far about the meaning and purpose of life. I have internalized that essentially there is no such holy or eternal purpose of life that you have to hunt for and live. It is in the simple thought of being useful to yourself and for others that you find the meaning of being alive.

May be that is why a lot of people find ton of happiness and contentment in dedicating their lives towards helping others and that becomes their life mission a.k.a. purpose of life. If you think about it and try to connect this with Jordan's talk, they are taking the responsibility, in this case not just their own and of their family but of a lot more people and that makes them happy.

So, may be what Jordan is saying is right that meaning of life is in finding a responsibility that you deeply care about and then simply working towards it.

Although I would differ from his idea that this is true only for men. I believe this is true for every human being irrespective of their gender.

The Journey

So many choices. One life. If you think about it, perhaps, a very brief, almost negligible bleep on the canvas of life on Earth. Non-existent in the Earth’s lifetime. But this bleep, is our life. For most what we know, an opportunity, the only one that we have right now. The only one we are sure of. Then why are our choices mostly confined, constrained by factors such as our upbringing, our innate tendencies as humans (evolved from animals), why do we not realize these barriers being only in our minds, why are these shackles tough to break.

Because choosing an offbeat life is difficult, extreme, disagreeable to society or to the construct of society. But how do you choose, how do you define the offbeat life you may fantasize about. Should we give in to this whim to ultimately lose a lot of time, money, relationships and eventually long for coming back? How do you test the waters without disrupting your current life? How do you finally take the call and take the plunge?

This is about finding answers, about the process, of discovery. It may not look like it but perhaps this is a whole lot internal rather than external. Discovery of ourselves. Realizing what you truly enjoy. Designing a life, you enjoy. Making it sustainable. Prioritizing life over traditional way of living. Taking a leap of faith.

The journey eventually may make you experience immense bliss. You may experience life in its full glory. A tale to tell, a life truly lived. On the flip side, even if you don’t find what you longed for. It may take some precious resources, time away, but it would perhaps still be worth a shot. The traditional life would always be available, open to embrace. One may fall a step or two backwards in the traditional sense. But in the larger canvas, in the larger picture of one’s life, this perhaps would surely be worth. After all, finding oneself is a long pursuit, the journey like this is going to be the first step. A step in a direction with some hope of being right should definitely be worth.

Your personal goals - Shout out loud or keep them to yourself ?

The new year 2015. I know it is kind of late to write about the new year but still as the first quarter of the year has ended I realize this indeed is a good time to write about it. As per my opinion, the problem with being too much energetic or enthusiastic at the beginning of the year is that we end up making too many commitments to ourselves and then end up not being able to live up to them.

Now, since those commitments had been made to ourselves alone, we fail to monitor ourselves well enough to check our progress time and again and hence we lose the track. The cycle repeats itself over and over again every year.

The solution to this, I believe, is to become accountable to someone for your achievements and goals. What I mean here is that we can try to be explicitly vocal about things that we want to achieve in the year to some people we can trust and we know are going to push us when we feel like drifting away. These people can be your best friends, siblings, parents etc. But a minor detail that is important here is that that person(s) should motivate you when you are going off the track and should not rather draw energy out of you. 

So, when we are accountable to others about what we do and do not achieve, we tend to push ourselves in the times of crisis because there is a certain aspect of social reputation that is attached to it. This is something to be tried and tested to see the results.

If we do try and implement this, we would not impractically over-commit and would also have a feasible method of going about our goals as we would know that the status of our progress is being monitored.

Ah well now you may or may not agree with whatever I just said but still you should watch this TED talk below by Derek Sivers that is completely opposite of what I just discussed.

The blog link for the same is here http://sivers.org/zipit 

I personally do not agree with Sivers here but you may choose one of the two methods and see the results for yourself. I would love to know which of the two methods you tried; being socially active about your goals or keeping them to yourself and which one worked for you, do let me know in the comments.

P.S: Reference link that goes in my favor is here.

Your idea of Success, is really Your Idea?

Today's TED talk was about the current society's idea of success and failure and its repercussions on the humanity as a whole.

The speaker started with the days of grief that he used to have on the weekends when he was dealing with the career crisis thinking where is his career headed. He talks about how these days snobbery has become a global phenomenon. Snobbery i.e. the practice of observing a part of a human being and assuming and making image of the individual as a whole based on that. 

This happens a lot in the social settings where "What do you do?" has become the most prominent question and we make the whole image of the person in our mind based on response. So, what is written on your Business Card has become important for the people than the real you. 

We are living in the times where it is a general belief that if you have the right talent, resources and hard work anyone can achieve anything There is nothing particularly wrong with this ideology apart from the fact that this also means that if someone is not very successful then it is because of their own reasons and hence are responsible for it.

Because of this, in general, there is more career related anxiety in people these days. Earlier people did not used to expect much from themselves and from their careers but now with "anyone can achieve anything" mentality most of the careers are in grief.

In previous days human beings used to centre the life around other forces like God, Universe, Nature etc and used to worship them to find the answers. These days, on the contrary human being believes he doesn't need any of that and can pray to himself and believe in himself to achieve anything.

Due to this situation, there is a contrary thinking that if I am a failure I am because of my own; which increases the suicide tendencies in humans while the truth is that Success and Failure are just random events and should not be made to be the centre of the human lives. 

This also takes us to the reasons as to why this sort of mentality has prevailed. Primary reason is the media that keeps highlighting the success stories of the people making it sound easy, logical and likely rather than being random.

Because of all the media hype, the idea and definition of success for people has not been unique rather, has been dictated by what they consume from the media. It is such an unfortunate moment when you achieve someone else's definition of success and realise; after investing a significant amount of time and energy in it that you did not want it in the first place.

To conclude, it is important that we think deeply about what our idea of success really is and then go about achieving it rather than running around the media's or society's idea of success.