What is a decent life? I have often thought about what a valuable life means for me and what it would take to live one.

There is of course the legacy option where the value of life is what one leaves behind. This could be money or the ideas one generates for future generations to live with. Some kind of collector process to gather belongings.

Some may live for a heaven of some kind or another. They live the best they can to give them what they think is the best chance at entry into an afterlife of their own design. This is not my idea of what comes but I do understand that it can lead to a valuable life of service to a god, even if there is no god to serve. Does a life worth living require reality?

There is also the hedonistic lifestyle, a life filled with pleasure in the moment with no energy put into what does not increase pleasure. This type of life is very attractive to many where they work only at what affords them the next dose of excitement. I do not see that this leads to a valuable life as it would require a continual ramping of input to get the pleasure like any addiction and quite soon the work outweighs the high gained, defeating the purpose of the position.

Rather than a general approach, I wonder where I want to be when I die. If I know that will the life I lead follow a path towards it? This could be a physical location but, how do I want to feel about the life I have lead? Perhaps it is important to feel like one has lived a valuable life in that last breath. Perhaps if we look into the future and think about how we want to feel, we will live our life accordingly to the future self.

I wonder if there is something even higher than the emotional self. After all the emotional self has the tendency to justify behaviors to make it feel better about it self. It is very likely to reframe life to protect its ego. As good as this may feel in the moment, does it equate to a good life in the lead up?`

What interests me the most at the moment is the consideration of consciousness. What makes me aware of life, what I am. This has interested me for several years now and is a big part of the reason I spend so much time thinking. It is not in contemplation mostly though, it is in observation of my interactions with life but one day I will have the time to meditate 'properly'.

What I am thinking at the moment is in what state of mind do I want to be in at the end, how much of myself do I want to understand. The problem is, I want to understand all of it. I want to know what I am fully and to do this is going to take a fair amount of work I think.

Some say they want this or that but it is mostly through words only, they are not actually serious about exploring what these things mean to them. Perhaps it is a fashionable trend to 'explore the self' without ever actually taking many steps into the journey and definitely not into where the going gets tough.

I am quite serious in this although I am not completely immersed in it still. I do not have the time or energy to take the journey fully in my opinion but I wonder where that will leave me at the end. Is it enough to only make it half way to discovery?

Perhaps it matters nothing how one lives life or how one gets to the end of it. Thinking about it at all might just be a huge waste of time that eats into the time of other things. Every movement carries an opportunity cost with the expenditure of energy and if there is no right way, moral path or ethical action, why think at all?

Morals and ethics seem to be there regardless of religiosity and they seem to point that nearly all of us believe that a life worth living is something that has intrinsic value, that life itself is valuable and to not use it effectively is to waste life.

Some may say, waste what god or nature has given us but it doesn't really matter. Because, we seem to be conscious beings and no matter how this consciousness came about we believe that it is beneficial to use it well and not waste it. When someone takes a life of another or their own, when natural disasters strike and claim their victims when accidents happen, we say 'what a shame or what a waste' of life.

This indicates that no matter what we believe, there are right ways and wrong ways to live in relation to ourselves and the environment and when others are unable to live well, we are disappointed in the result. But, how often do we think about how well we ourselves are living up to our expectations of what is a valuable life?

I find the problem messy as you can see in the writing but, I also find it very important to act upon. There is discovery and value in here somewhere, potentially a lot of truths too. Who knows, let's see where this life leads and who cares when and where it finishes.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]