{"id":1315,"date":"2022-02-17T21:16:13","date_gmt":"2022-02-17T21:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damianruiz.eu\/?p=1315"},"modified":"2024-12-17T11:39:30","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T11:39:30","slug":"finding-the-meaning-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damianruiz.eu\/en\/finding-the-meaning-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding the meaning of life"},"content":{"rendered":"

A part of the population, especially but not only young people, has difficulties in finding a deeper meaning to life, especially in times of crisis. And sometimes there is a predominance of “business as usual” and a more positive or more resigned adaptation to the environment.
\n<\/span>That is why it is important to stop and think and try to trace a path to answer two fundamental questions: Who am I? and What have I come to this world to do?<\/span><\/p>\n

But the first thing I must say is that for a sector of “thinking” these questions make no sense because the answer they would give you would be: “you are whatever you want to be” and “you have come to do what you set out to do”.
\n<\/span>This would be the prevailing thinking of our time, in which clearly relativistic sociological and psychological theories predominate, but it has its counterpoint, a position in which I place myself quite clearly.<\/span><\/p>\n

My answers, and those of the more deterministic, would be: “You are only what you already are, and therefore, your mission is to discover it”, and “You have come to do what you are genetically, biologically and psychologically configured to do, in clear interaction with the environment”.<\/span><\/p>\n

This dichotomy is historical and universal, from Aristotle to Plato, from Skinner to Jung, from chaos theories and the entropic view of the cosmos (the tendency to disorder and expansion) to the existence or not of God or a higher entity, or an energy. Everything passes through these two basic conceptions of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let’s go with a sentence of Einstein and a question.
\n<\/span>Einstein in the last years of his life said “Past, present and future are nothing but an illusion that the brain needs in order to function”.
\n<\/span>If we give it a couple of turns we can deduce that time, according to his criteria, would not be linear, but would exist in parallel dimensions or in a not necessarily chronological order (Chronos, god of matter).
\n<\/span>The I Ching, the Chinese book of wisdom, which I spent a lot of time studying, says that the present is nothing more than the materialisation of a future that already existed, therefore we should consider that we live in the past because what there is has already been. And it was in conditions that were not physical, but energetic. Very platonic, true, but it gives food for thought.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the million-dollar question, the big question: “Does chance exist?”
\n<\/span>We’ll do like in the old adventure books where you could choose an answer and continue on one page or the other depending on what you had decided.
\n<\/span>In this case I will say that if your answer is Yes, you may not want to continue reading.
\n<\/span>If you answered No, then welcome to the club of determinists, those of us who believe that you cannot be more than what you already are and that your life will be no more than what is predetermined by your biopsychological configuration in interaction with the environment and that, of course, the universe responds to a perfect mechanism of which we are all a part.
\n<\/span>Does that mean that you have no room for action?
\n<\/span>Of course, but within certain limits:<\/span><\/p>\n