Discussion On Personal Values And Perceptions Of Meaning Of Life

By: Aaron Schwartz
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:41:45
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In my opinion, almost all people have a period in their life when they have to sit and think over their existence, its development and the directions of it. This period is neither good nor bad, it is just one of the crossing points in life that make people wiser. From the very childhood and youth we tend to think sometimes: “What are we living for? Where are all we going to? What is the sense of living?”. These are the eternal questions, which have been discussed by a lot of philosophers and scientists, but during the whole history of the mankind no one managed to find an answer or a solution to this problem. Socrat once said: “I only know for sure that I know nothing”. This is true for a lot of moments in our life, but especially this sentence is fitting the situation of trying to find sense in life. Sometimes it seems to us that we know all about this world, but then new and new horizons appear, new possibilities and different challenges of destiny show us that Socrat was still right in his doubts...

Another well-known person, Zigmund Freud once said: “A person that started thinking about sense of life is not sane”. By this phrase he wanted to express that if everything is going successfully, a normal human being is not tending to think about such things as sense of life; only if there appear some problems, with health, private life, job, personal success etc., i.e. when the person is not satisfied with his or her existance, this person starts deepening into these eternal questions. In my opinion, this statement of Freud is partly true; I agree that when people are totally happy with their life position, they don`t usually ask these questions, but in my opinion, such moments in the course of life are inevitable for any person and they symbolize changes: in the outlook, in life style, an personal life, these moments help people to understand themselves and the surrounding world better and in general, such thoughtul situations are helping an invidivual to improve oneself morally, spiritually and even physically. These moments are similar to the commander`s state when he sits and thinks over the plan of war actions.

Different people naturally find their sense of life in different things: for some people work and financial success is the most important thing, for others family values and good communication are extremely important, belief is life pivot for some other persons... The system of values depends on the upbringing of an individual, on genetic tendencies, on the current environment etc. In general, people with similar understanding of life sense are a lot more likely to become friends and form families than people with different understanding of what they are living for. One of the philosophers expressed an opinion that the sense of life is the very process of living. It is probably the most widely accepted opinion. In my understanding sense of life is in self-perfectioning, becoming better during the course of life and there`s one more thing that could be found acceptable (for me for example) – it`s living for the sake of making other people happier. As a conclusion there could be used a rephrase: “Tell me what your values and life sense are, and I`ll tell who are you”. Indeed, one of the most important things that illustrate character and personality of an individual are his or her main values and understanding of the sense of life.

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