lyfe

I just read an article on Thought Catalog about, if I understood it correctly, things in your youth having profound influence in your later years when you have experienced more and lived longer so that its true meaning can be revealed. Like you're baking a cake and you assembled all the ingredients, mixed them together, stuck it in the oven, and seventeen years later it finally got baked. Maybe all the things we experience now are really just the mixings of the cake and we won't have the full, meaningful product until we're much older and have experienced much more. 

Anyway, creation. I've wanted to ramble on about this for awhile now and this is as good a time as any. And what exactly is living a fulfilling life? Also, what is the difference between 'happiness' and 'contentment'? 

First off, I don't mean to sound like a pompous know it all. I think these are true, but they are my truths, not necessarily the truths of the world. And that's really all we can ever definitively say. 

Actually I will start out with living a fulfilling life. 

1) Living a fulfilled life is NOT making yourself so busy that you go from thing to thing, filling up your hours...that is distraction. But what is it distracting from?

So I'm not sure how absolute this one is and probably people would disagree with me on this. I believe that despite how good it feels to wake up in the morning and start going, going, going from responsibility to responsibility, doing it well and getting things done, such a life runs the danger of not being actually as fulfilling as it seems. It strikes me as almost a distraction; as if being busy is a way of distracting the mind. But what is the mind being distracted from? If it's being distracted from petty thoughts, then doing a million constructive activities would appear to lead to a more fulfilling life. But thinking can also be one of the greatest forms of personal growth and to me, a fulfilling life is one in which you strive to grow yourself--as opposed to a life in which you do things you have to and then just hedonistically take in what you find pleasurable on your down time.

Life is defined by struggle but struggle doesn't necessarily have to have a negative connotation. Struggle is what makes achievement meaningful. Without struggle, you can't achieve or grow, you would simply do (maybe a better word to use than struggle would be effort). A life of just passively taking in what's pleasurable requires no mental effort. If effort is what makes achievement meaningful, then a life of passively taking in what's pleasurable is not meaningful. Conversely then, a meaningful life requires expenditure of mental effort. And if personal growth is an expenditure of mental effort, then it is part of a meaningful life. Therefore if being busy is a way of distracting the mind, the danger lies in not devoting enough time to growth, thus not having a wholly meaningful life. 

wtf I hate proofs. I didn't intend to wander into one and there's probably a big ass logical loophole in there somewhere, but I'm just trying to analyze why it seems so obvious to me that you have to devote time to thinking, wondering, reading, discovering what things are meaningful to you, finding out what you want to achieve and questioning your motives for why you want to achieve those things in order to live a meaningful, fulfilled life (sorry oxford comma, I pulled a Vampire Weekend on you in that last sentence). 

And all of that takes time. So you can't just be bustling around, going from thing to thing, feeling great and checking off boxes. In no way does that mean you shouldn't be doing that, i mean that you can't only be doing that.

And so this doesn't turn into a very long post, I'll post about separately about:

2) creation as a necessity in life

3) Happiness vs. contentment

ooooo