SENSE OF LIFE

The way people make sense of life:

- Religion gives people hope, and friends who agree with them, and a sense of belonging on a personal level, and of belonging to something bigger than themselves, i.e., as much access to a “higher power” as they want or might feel that they need.
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- Sports give people a way to talk about a topic that rarely brushes up against their personal life, and it provides a framework for warmth and laughter with little risk of self-exposure, and also friends, and a sense of belonging.
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- Business tends to be a consuming passion because it feels so important. What could be more urgent than providing for one’s material needs? Especially if it enables one to be a part of a group that, in a society that values wealth, seems so respected and convinced of its right to power. Business, as a worldview, seems almost enough, until it isn’t.
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- Art is a source of compatriots, if not-quite friends, and much self-satisfaction. Art, if in fact one searches for Truth and not just a way to make a living, which then resembles more the Business model, can provide not just a sense of belonging to the here and now, but also belonging in an historical sense, to Traditions. The protean artistic vision can also adapt to changing circumstances.
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- Military life affords a person with a framework with which to judge the positives and negatives of life as it unfolds, who is a good person and who isn’t, which is a good course of action and which isn’t, in short, a template for valuing worth. The Military certainly provides friends and a feeling of belonging to a larger idea.
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- Outlaw living certainly binds people together, in a sort of Brotherhood of the Damned, but a brotherhood nonetheless. Sometimes, people have little else. With very few other options for belonging, in a society that esteems “worth”, anti-worth presents itself as an attraction.
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- Intellectualism bears some resemblance to Art as a Reality filter, but where Art feels almost a compulsion to produce “objects d’art”, intellectuals know that one can, ultimately, “think one’s way through”. Intellectualism is conversation, and, by definition, needs “conversants”, someone to converse with. Intellectuals can feel pretty proud of themselves living, as they imagine, on mountaintops in small communities.
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- Science affords the scientist much fellowship throughout many disciplines in a great dialectical chain that appears unbreakable to its adherents. Once a scientist, always a scientist; its more a system of thinking, even if one is not “scientist” in the strict sense. Truth is just so damned unassailable. Between one adept and another, there is always something to discuss.
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- What do people have who share none of these templates? The question seems similar to the one asked of Taoists: how is a proponent of Taoism different from a very young child? Can one imagine a person with, seemingly, no conceptualizing tools? Almost like asking one to think of nothing.
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- Sleep unites Reality and Superreality.