I'm coming to a view of life in which the only worthy actions are personal and idiosyncratic, incapable of being described as meaningful in uncircular language but meaningful nonetheless. The basic "points" or worthy actions of life can easily be identified. One need only examine cats. They eat and sleep, and long to mate. These actions need not be described in other terms (such as "desire to propagate the species" or "to extend individual life"). They are instinctual and, for the cat, at least, ends in themselves. Mulder need not contemplate the reason that he watches birds; he wants to eat them. He sleeps for sixteen hours a day and has no reason to regret it as lost time; it is simply part of "life" for him to sleep sixteen hours a day, and he is not missing anything because there is nothing more important or worthy of his time. He plays with Flagg not out of an ill-defined wish to remain in contact with his brother, define his own identity through others, or anything else. It's just fun. It's not even a way to take up time. It's just fun.

Humans have problems coming to grips with life defined this way. They need goals, causes for which they are willing to fight. They need entertainment in order to fill time, and are not content with sleeping sixteen hours a day (it's quite possible. I've been on a schedule of sixteen hours of sleep, sixteen or even eight hours of wakefulness). The reason for this difference, broadly speaking, is that humans have language. This has effects which are not immediately obvious. I don't have the capacity to explain why, but language leads naturally to questioning one's life, feeling a need for more than the basics of life, just generally having needs associated specifically with humanity (some examples: wanting to provide for oneself and one's family and not being satisfied with having others provide for them; feeling nostalgic for events and associations of early life; keeping in touch with friends; educating oneself); these desires are dependant on language, as they can be articulated, and thus existant, only through langauge. Take as an example the particularly human desire of wanting to "do" something (in which the vocal emphasis is placed on "do"; frequently appears in cheap fiction and screenplays. "You know. I want to do something with my life." It means, in general, doing something worthy or fulfilling, something seen as important, "making a difference". The statement is so cliched and specific to movies that people generally don't say that precise sentence, but most people, if questioned, would express this desire and it is, really, quite a broad unspecified desire; it is banal until it becomes specific); this idea is inseparable from the concepts like "doing" and "meaning", which in turn are dependant on language.

This need arises from langauge, and is met only through personal language. General terms of our culture like "having a career", "helping others", or "feeling excitement" only have empty meaning, but they are inevitably personalized into individually meaningful terms like "making modern poetry", "creating a home for experimental artwork", "understanding and appreciating indie rock albums". People get medical training and may or may not achieve fulfillment by becoming local doctors or doing medical research and experiments. Politicians obviously desire power, but also desire to enact policies they perceive as beneficial to the community they "serve" in. Students study business and get jobs at specific companies doing specified tasks, which are fulfilling for some people, and not for others. A public relations position, for example, might fulfill a person who wants to challenge himself and see how well he can deal people and their concerns, although he probably doesn't care much about the company he works for; a different person who doesn't have this goal, or another goal which a public relations job meets, would likely feel unfulfilled, bitter, and depressed in a public relations job. It is the same for any action. There has to be an individual desire which the action fulfills, or else the activity seems pointless. These desires obviously gets incredibly specific, since there are countless possible actions, and each person chooses his activities out of these possibilities based on which incredibly specific actions suit him.

This theory of life sees "happiness" as the supreme goal, though not the meaning. Meaning can only be found when general concepts are ignored and one focuses on the actions which fulfull him. These actions then take on metaphorical meaning, such as (in one of my personal action-goal sequences) "I go to work in order to make money so that I can pay off my debt to my parents, which I find desirable because I wish to no longer have them as an authoritative force, because they prevent me from realizing the fulfillmlent of my desires by looking over my shoulder; also, it allows me to buy things without going into further debt, and I want these material things to fulfill various desires too numerable to state here; also, it allows me to socialize, which fulfills my desire to create an understanding of, and give meaning to, "myself" and "my personality", past events, the communaction of concepts, etc. The job itself is immaterial, and perhaps demoralizing, for a variety of reasons which I've been meaning to get down in one place eventually.

In this example, it can be seen how actions which are not inherently meaningful (paying off debt, buying CDs) becoming meaningful because of their relationship to each other, my past, my understanding of myself and the world, my goals etc. It is a circular meaning, vague and almost entirely unquestioned, shaky, illogical, and unjustifiable (either to myself or to others), but nonetheless meaning. If there is some "higher" meaning to life, I'd like to know it.

As a sidenote, though an important one, the same thing can be said of goals which are generally seen as more lofty, like "benefitting society" or "bettering oneself". These rest on morals, which are just as idiosyncratic and personal as the goals described above; the only difference is that the are shared by "societies", or at least perceived that way. As moral philosophers of the past have shown (sometimes unintentionally), these morals are just as shaky and illogical, even unquestioned and vague, definitely unjustifiable (despite what Ryan Mowhar and the Christian moralists claim). Even so, they help to provide meaning to the personal goals. This creates the metaphysical assumption (or, to use a less derogatory term, "belief") that there are layers of existence, since morals appear to be above personal goals. There are some morals, and some desires like "the search for truth", which seem to the metaphysicians to extend beyond individual societies to include all of mankind. God, although conceived of before all this philosphy, came to be seen as inevitable, as, if there are the layers of the individual, the society, and humanity, there would logically be a supreme "layer" and authority.

Just some thoughts.