(loose translation: "I shouldn't be surprised if the greatest rule of all weren't given to pleasure.")
- Moliere
"The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it."
- Jung
"We like to believe that there is a type of magic in certain things in this world. A shred of sanctity we call 'meaning'. Against our senses and reasoning faculties we make illogical but beautiful romanticizations of the things we see, feel and do. This is the curse of the human being, the ironic result of a fusion of incredible imagination with a pitifully limited knowledge."
- taken from a jc friend's blog, Jason a.k.a Yuen Hoe a.k.a Mr.Chan-magnet ;p (I never could forget this paragraph...It's beautiful...)
Quite some time ago I asked a friend what's his motto in life, and he answered something like, "To find pleasure wherever I can..." . Admittedly, at first my mind was thinking of kinkier stuff, but he explained that pleasure could be simple things... sunset, food... and it got me started on the different ways of thinking about Life, Pleasure and Meaning... maybe it's just me, but I think in more conservative societies if people say they wanna live for the sake of a pleasurable life, the reaction would be like, "But it's so shallow! But life's not about pleasure only! But what about higher ideals, values, morals etc?" The perception is that a pleasurable life is ultimately selfish and meaningless. On the other extreme, the "pleasure people" will say that a disciplined, purposeful life is likely to be boring, rigid, and pitiful if the happiness of the individual has to be suppressed. (Classic case: arranged marriage to uphold family values..) Gotta say that for the most part this is a result of a successul "religious" campaign to label anything remotely related to pleasure as sin...
Hmm... relating it to my own life...i'd want my life to be filled with BOTH pleasure and meaning hehehe... (like WHO DOESN'T WANT THAT???) Well, deep down in me there's a person who wants fun for fun's sake, who'd do things spontaneously, keep exploring, keep pushing boundaries just because it gives me a giddy, youthful pleasure... But it's true that pleasure for pleasure's sake can only keep me satisfied for so long, before starting to feel hollow (and the same friend who told me his motto also said that the thing about pleasure is, you gradually need more and more things to feel the same amount of pleasure...). I thought about how I think (does this make sense? yes right?), about how I see the world, and ultimately, I'm a meaning-driven person.
What this means is, I realize that each time I do something, I JUST HAVE to try to find something more, something beyond, something meaningful as a reason....doing things not for myself but for other people or higher ideals.. For example, when I was in junior college, I had to keep telling myself that I wasn't studying just for the grades (looking back and seeing the amount of stuff that I've totally forgotten, I gotta admit it was just for the grades..), I just had to say I'm studying for the sake of knowledge and curiosity, that no way am I your typical "how-to-get-straight-As" nerd.... Architecture? Well at first I wasn't passionate about it (and even now sometimes) and I have to tell myself it's not just about me..when I study sustainability it's about helping the world, helping people blah blah blah... Relationships? Part of why I could "survive" being single for so long is that I can't see any meaning in getting together just for the sake of getting together..
And yeah, there are lots of other examples where I'm either not interested in things because I don't find them meaningful, or else I'll be "inventing" meaning for something that I'll have to do anyway. Because if I have to do something that I feel is utterly meaningless, I just won't function. Wonder how come it's taken quite long for me to realize my own "mechanism"..
In the end... well.. the ideal is of course to find meaning in the things you think are pleasurable, and to find pleasure in the things you think are meaningful... At the end of my life (Wonder when it is..) I want to be able to say: "Hey I've had fun and I've contributed.." (like WHO DOESN'T WANT THAT???)
Oh well, so Reader, are you meaning-driven, or pleasure-driven? ;p
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