On Life
I think the most interesting way to live one's life is to change it all the time. Change the jobs, professions, hobbies, places. Sometimes it might feel highly uncomfortable and stressful. Sometimes it's thrilling.
I remember when I quit my job, decided to change profession to a different one I knew nothing about, basically making a step into the abyss. And I had no idea whether this was going to work or I'd end up broke.
A similar experience I've been told had the people who suddenly decided to move to a different country. It's scary; it's thrilling, it's a giddy feeling of a victory if you succeed.
The same feelings I had when I still studied as well as at my first jobs because everything had been unstable and unpredictable and required struggle and taking risks. But it was cool, and I felt alive.
When my life settled, I had a stable job, a stable income, and everything became steady and safe, I started to miss this feeling of the thrill of life. I felt bored, depressed.
As a result, I came back to living my life like when I only started living my life, taking risks, going outside my comfort zone and trying new things
On Purpose In Life
According to the existentialism, the meaning of our lives is what we think it is. And it's not even a self-deception.
There is a bridge between the reality and our ideas. Many imaginary things that we'd just made up throughout our history became the things in the reality afterward.
So our minds can shape the reality. Like in a Platonic sense the dimension of ideas influences the dimension of reality.
If you believe that your purpose in life is to create some meaningful art that can positively alter the world, it will become true. Like with Van Gogh. Or you might believe in compassion and helping people.
Our ideas come from the deeper things which were engraved in our instincts reflecting a deeper purpose of the universe and the reality itself.
Also, why do we think we should create something in order for our lives to have a meaning?
What if you choose instead of being a creator to become a receptacle of what had been created by the others and the beauty of the world in general.
What if everybody wrote books, drew pictures, composed music but nobody would read, watch and listen it. What would be the point of doing all those things?
I think our life is not defined by what we produce. If you spend your life reading books, listening music, and watching art without contributing anything yourself; do you consider your life meaningless?
First, it's an interesting life, and second, your consuming creations of others makes what they do meaningful. Which makes your life meaningful in turn.
Like in the modern economy the most important are those who consume stuff. Those who buy gadgets and fancy food and clothes.
Those things now can literally be produced without the participation of humans by robots toiling at the automated factories. But what would be the point of all that, if nobody consumed it?
On Social Obligations
I believe that the society is organized in a way that some of its members contribute more and some less. It might seem unfair, but it's also about the paradigm of the personal freedom. If a society forces all its members to perform this social contribution as a duty, it would feel like I don't have a choice about how to live my life. Like the interests of society are above my own personal preferences and choices. The same situation is when the society refuses to support those who don't reciprocate that support or not reciprocate enough.
Take an example. There is a genius artist or a musician who has a great potential but is unable to get any money out of this at some point. Maybe, this is only due to the specifics of the market. So he has to rely on the social benefits. This way the other members of society support him while he contributes nothing. To make things fair, I would have to support an idea of either forcing this guy to find a decent job which would pay the actual money or to let him starve. Although, I might think that even if he doesn't contribute anything worthy at this moment, his potential could pay off ten-fold in the future. So I'd let him live his life and pursue his long-term goal literally on my account.
Ok, if we take a wider look at the typical structure of society we'll see that it doesn't resemble a system where the individuals equally contribute to the common wellbeing. I'd say paradoxically the group of people who makes a real contribution is a relatively narrow stratum of the grown-up, healthy, and educated man and women who work and pay taxes. Apart from them we have children, elderly people, permanently and temporarily disabled, women on the maternity leave, students who don't have yet enough skills to work, unemployed people who cannot find jobs due to the situation on the job market, etc. So in practice, the society is a structure where a small group of hard-working people is supporting a lot of parasites.
I think considering that in practice a number of the society members who can make a valuable contribution is far less than a number of those who can't, we eventually come to an idea that we don't value the individuals by how much they contribute to the society. I believe this is a part of human nature to be willing to contribute because, after all, we have developed as the social animals. But due to the complexities of the modern world, it's not that easy.
I'd last to illustrate this last point by an example. Imagine that twenty years from now due to the progress in the AI most of the manufacturing and office jobs will be automated. There will be no jobs for the accountants, salesmen, cashiers, financial analytics, programmers, lawyers etcetera, etcetera. The only valuable human skill, for example, will be an ability to create the original art, music, and literature. It will produce the situation where there'll be an extremely narrow group of people having these skills who would be able to create something marketable. All the other 99 percent of the population would be compelled to live on the social benefits or UBI or die. But the latter would also lead to the destruction of the society in general. So the fairness, in this case, is not a good option at all.
It's interesting that one of the core principles of Communism is expressed in a slogan "Take from each according to his abilities and give to each according to his needs" So basically the utopian model of the Communist society doesn't concern itself with the problem that some members would contribute more and some less.
On the Purpose of the Society
If we get to the very bottom of what is society and how it came into existence in the first place, we realize that what the society is based on is a principle of following the common imperative. This is its main purpose. The relation between an individual and the society is a mutually beneficial exchange. First, it's a system of exchange where I can get all what I need in exchange for something I can produce. The system of assessing the value that each of the members contributes and the common currency are the things that make it possible.
The second important and beneficial element of society is its security. And here is the point where the individual freedom begins to get curtailed in order to accommodate the needs of society. Literally, if I live individually in the wilderness, completely supporting myself and not relying on anybody else, I'm just as well not bound by any laws apart from my own ethics. I mean, I can kill strangers.
The only reason I abide the laws of the society (as any other member of society) is that I find it beneficial to be a member of society as opposed to struggling on my own. In other words, curtailing my freedoms in this way is my own conscious choice; this is not something that has been imposed on me by somebody. In ancient Greece, one of the punishments for the criminals was an expulsion of a guilty citizen from the city-state and stripping him of his citizenship. Which meant that the laws protecting the citizens didn't apply to him anymore. Which seems natural in accordance with this basic concept of society. You either choose to be its member and reap the benefits associated with that, or you can reject it altogether. It's your choice.
So the main requirement the society puts on an individual is to abide its laws. Which sounds reasonable because this is the only way to guarantee the security for all its members. In this context, a well-being of society is more important than a well-being of the individual. For example, as a smoker, I might resent the laws and regulations limiting smoking, but at the same time I realize that they have been put in place to protect the health of many other individuals who might suffer as a result of my actions
The more questionable aspect of living in a society is the obligation to follow its ethical and cultural guidelines, e.g., customs, traditions, religion, and values. I cannot see how my personal opinions and beliefs can harm the society. Also, I consider them as the most important integral part of my internal freedom. Meanwhile, the societies often impose their values and beliefs on individuals making them obligatory. For example, the religious societies require from its members the strict adherence to the religious rituals.
The question is, whether this following of common ethical and moral norms is crucial for the functioning of the society or this is just an unnecessary and not justified by anything limitation of personal freedom. I think it has something to do with the maintaining of balance. If the society as a whole is based on some set of moral norms and principles, then breaking those norms and principles, even if it wouldn't lead to an immediate harm to other individuals, would produce eventually a sort of the chain reaction.
An individual having a different set of ethics while interacting with others would undermine their perception of ethics. They, in turn, would introduce the changes in ethics further and this would lead to a domino effect. Whether this system of norms and morals makes sense in the first place is debatable, but its collapse would inevitably lead to at least temporary turbulence, which can have unpredictable and harmful consequences.
The liberal societies are characterized by an absence of a strict set of cultural rules. This makes them more robust and less prone to being disturbed by such changes. At the same time, they allow the maximum level of personal freedom regarding beliefs, personal ethics, and moral principles. Basically, they support the existentialist approach, encouraging each to figure out those things for themselves. As long as those ethical decisions are within the limits of common sense and what we consider universal and unquestionable values.
One of the interesting things is how the system of industrial, market economy tries to propagate its own system of values and beliefs. On the other hand, it's obviously artificial; it has nothing to do with any values and beliefs we developed during the thousands of years. It looks more like the marketing that got out of hand, trying to assume a position of the system of moral norms.
To be more specific; we believe that money and possessions bring happiness, that making more money is a virtue. Also, spending money and buying stuff is a virtue and also leads to happiness. This view is disseminated through commercials, that in our modern world became somewhat akin to the sermons. Being repeated multiple times they form beliefs ( This is, by the way, how religious systems technically work, and I wonder if the system of marketing and advertisement hadn't been designed in the same way purposefully )
Many people lately refer to this paradigm of consumerism when they talk about their personal freedom from the common opinion and values. If we get to the bottom of it, this system of beliefs and values is designed to maintain the stability of the industrial, market economy itself, that in order to stay balanced needs this constantly expanding production and consumption. Realising that this is a totally artificial system of beliefs that has nothing to do with any real human values, makes it simple and obvious to make a choice not to follow it