I have been off work for 3 months following an accident in early December where I fractured my spine, sprained my ankle and knee, and ended up with a severe hematoma from my lower back to my upper thigh. While I’ve been off work I’ve listened to a lot of pod casts on all sorts of topics, as especially initially it was one of the only things I could do while lying down that didn’t cause me discomfort. This has led to a lot of thinking and reflecting on my life and who I am, and what I want from being here. I feel like I am searching for something but I don’t know what it is which makes it very hard to find! It’s like there’s something floating around in the ether, just out of my view but every time I try to focus on it, it slips away.

One of the topics I have approached from many directions is the idea of meaning, and that if you focus on the meaning in life you are more likely to be happy. Happiness is a seductive concept for someone who spends a lot of time depressed so of course the idea that finding meaning can help you feel happier holds a lot of hope for me.

So what is meaning? To me, finding meaning is about finding purpose. Why am I here? What should I do with my life? Is there a point to anything I do? My brain, especially in depressed/low mood state often answers this question with ‘no’. That there is no point as my life is fleeting in the grand sweep of humanity, and within 4 generations (if I’m lucky, 2 or 3 if I’m not!) I will be all but forgotten. Mexican people believe that there are “three deaths” – the first when you physically die, the second when you are laid to rest, and the third when you are forgotten. If all of life is a march toward certain death, then what should that journey be filled with?

I have always been fascinated with the various religions and cultural beliefs surrounding death, and with death itself. I know I am not alone in this, my quick google search on just the word death brought up more than 3.3 billion results!  There is much written on the fear of death, and the glory of death, but I am more interested in how to be comfortable with the knowledge life is fleeting and that this doesn’t mean there is no point to being happy.

When I write this it seems obvious that we should live to be happy if life is fleeting. Which is what I understand the central tenant of hedonism to be – that if life is a flash in the pan of humanity then it should be lived to maximise pleasure and minimise pain. That self gratification is the only sensible purpose of a life that may be cut short at any minute. A ‘you only live once’ philosophy. So I explored the concept that I could live focusing on what would give me the most pleasure, only to ‘run in to’ my ethics and values, which were dictating to me that I could only be happy if I was not hurting anyone else (or at least minimising that pain) while pursuing my own ends.

So then I explored what it might look like to live your life devoted to a cause you believed passionately in. There are many examples of people like this, from ancient times forward. These people fascinate me and I admire a great many of them. What I found though is that you can be passionate about a cause and dedicate your life to it, and cause other people great pain at the same time. Some times people are so focused on achieving whatever it is they believe to be the greatest good that they are prepared to sacrifice a great deal to achieve their goal/s. Great dictators spring to mind here.

I read, listened and explored all sorts of events and ideologies from here. From the Crusades, to struggles for independence in various countries, socialism and communism, facism, the French and Russian revolutions, terrorism, the stolen generation, various wars, Vikings, the Underground Railroad, NZ history, Chinese dynasties, stories of shipwreck and tragedy and exploration….you get the idea. Anything I could get my hands on about the history of the world and it’s people I read and listened to. 

And I learned that life is a paradox. There is not one truth. All sorts of contradictory and utterly illogical points of view can exist at the same time, and be at least partly right from various perspectives. People view the same event from different angles, using their unique perspective to decide what is acceptable and not, to them. An individual’s perspective is influenced by biology and genetics and life experiences, but also culture, world events, religion, the pervading ideas and government of the time. Their genetics may cause them to be more or less interested, or more or less involved in events of their time, but sometimes there is just accident or coincidence, or being in the right (or wrong) place at the time when something impactful is happening.

So all this brings me back to me. What is my purpose? What do I believe in? For, as many revolutionaries as there are out there, there are just as many people like me struggling to make sense of it all.

I remembered listening to the hedonism podcast and the research I had done, months ago, on that ideology. For some reason it had stuck in my mind and of all the concepts and things I have learnt, that one continues to fascinate me. I’d also heard about a short, non controlled, study done where researchers gave participants a camera to record 10-12 photos over the space of a week of the things that gave their life meaning. And from that they discovered that where people were physically involved in the things that gave their life meaning (by taking pictures, as opposed to talking about them), there was a discernible increase in happiness levels. The reason this study interests me, and why I have related it to the theory of hedonism, is that when I think about the things that give my life meaning, these are also the things that bring me pleasure. 

At this stage I need to do more research on the items that bring my life meaning, as I’ve only been able to come up with a couple. I feel stuck on this issue, so I’m going to go back and do some more research all the different types of Hedonism (and surprisingly there are at least 7 types), and the related philosophies, to see if I can figure out meaning and it’s relation to me.

And I wonder – this is a passing thought at this stage – whether my attraction to the concept of Hedonism is due to my tendency to think in dichotomy, and push away any pain I feel as ‘bad’ using self harming behaviors……