What exactly are you living your life for? Have you considered the obvious that you won’t be here forever? Sort of forces us to step back and consider what, exactly, are we doing here?
One path from this philosophical vantage point would be to “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.” While that could be fun for a while, the evidence indicates otherwise. Whether reading about young college students who spend their youth in drunken pursuits of excess or about lottery winners whose lives fall apart, its easy to see that merely pursuing such a path isn’t the wisest.
Another path could be the way of the ascetic. This person chooses self-denial in things, typically having only minimal things. What most consider normal, the ascetic chooses much, much less. Of course, in America, we could probably do with some discipline that reigns in our free-wheeling ways, especially in the realm of consumerism. But to move to this path seems to be a walking death that has little to no fun ever.
I would offer a path in the middle of these two. At the core of this path is the admittance that we won’t be here forever, that we aren’t even promised tomorrow, so while we are here, we should seek to build something bigger than ourselves. To do that, we give our lives to others.
That’s right, if you will live your life in an attempt to serve others, to work with others, to collaborate with others in the creation of bigger than yourself moments, your life will become rich with meaning. I’ve spent the past 25 years trying to walk on this narrow road. It is not easy and sometimes I slip and fall, yet as I look around at the world, I am reminded that my life becomes bigger than itself as I invest myself in the lives of others.