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The Importance of Finding Meaning In Life
Credit: Jill Wellington- Pexels
The Meaning of Life is to Give Life Meaning
It’s important to find meaning in life as it is the core of who we are. It is what drives us to do better, be better what fulfills us.
If you find meaning in your life, you’ll be able to better discover what is your purpose in this world. The truth is there are two ways to live.
The first is living consciously, you’ll live along the same lines as others. Yet, you will experience the same things differently.
The second way to live is to live unconsciously. Broadly speaking, if you live without intent, life will just happen to you. Think of it as a massive wave that keeps pushing you along. By living life this way you give up control over where you’re destiny. This is a surefire way for life to pass by and missing out on living with meaning.
This kind of life isn’t exactly ideal since you don’t have much say in it. Yet, many of us live this way.
Meaning Gives You Purpose in Life
When you learn the meaning of life, you have a better sense of purpose. You tend to understand why you’re in this world. Just like that, you will have a clearer view of how you can contribute to the world. If you don’t know your purpose, you’ll hate getting out of bed.
Your motivation to last through the week would be looking forward to the weekend. Put you in a challenging situation and you’ll feel burnout even before trying. On the other hand, if you lead a meaningful life, you’ll love the grind.
Tips for Finding Meaning in Life
Here are some tips on why it’s important to find meaning in life:
Gives Clarity and Focus
Look around yourself and you’ll see so many people running after a host of popular ‘things’. Common offenders include earning more money, getting a house, and then getting an even bigger house.
Goals also include getting a car, the latest technology and everything along those lines. Incidentally, all these are also material gains and rewards. And while they may seem very important to you right now, do they really matter that much in the long run?
How about looking for something that:
- you’re passionate about instead?
- that you thoroughly enjoy doing?
- brings out the best in you?
It isn’t uncommon that while running after money and luxuries, you become side-tracked from your real purpose.
Finding your life purpose will help you become aware of things that are important.
Once you learn to look past these common needs, you’ll see what’s important. It’ll help you set your goals and eliminate unimportant things from your life. If you keep pursuing things you don’t need, knowingly or unknowingly, you’ll end up nowhere.
By distinguishing between the important and unimportant, you won’t feel empty and unaccomplished in 20 years’ time.
You can also achieve success by finding the meaning in your life.
Remember this one thing: Your success will be different from others. For you, success might be becoming the next Mother Teresa.
For someone else, it might be owning the latest Lamborghini
But worry not. This is exactly what meaning brings in your life. Uniqueness and contentment.
Every day, you have to become a better version of yourself. You have to get up and conquer the world. To achieve, succeed or excel, you have to first find the meaning in your life.
Meaning Teaches What Defines You
Have you ever felt that external factors are defining who you are? What your parents expected from you. Society? The media?
That you’re being told what works for you instead of you figuring it out for yourself? Why does this happen? Probably because you don’t have a life purpose or haven’t yet figured it out.
When you lead a meaningless life, society is quick to step in pushing you around and molding your life. If you keep living by others’ definition of you, you’ll find yourself in unfulfilling jobs, relationships leaving you feeling empty and stuck.
But as soon as you find some life purpose, you will start making choices that serve you and that better fits your purpose.
If you’re leading a meaningful life, your means of sustenance can also become your passion. You can find yourself in a workplace that you enjoy and coworkers who are compatible with you.
Once you have a meaning and a purpose, you’ll clearly see the people you need. In addition, you’ll also be able to cut out people who are toxic. It’s important to find compatibility in people and surround yourself with those who support your meaning.
Being around likeminded individuals who can help you become your best self can add even more to your life purpose.
Keeps You Connected with The Present
The more you engage in a purposeful life, the more it grows with you. At the same time, it also makes you happier. Remember how we talked about the important vs the unimportant? Well, a purposeful life will be no doubt vastly different from the pleasurable (unimportant) life that is transient, current and illusory.
In contrast, a meaningful life can become demanding and quite often a stressful one. More than worldly goods and luxuries, it requires planning, patience, ownership of actions, and the responsibility of the consequences of choices made.
It’s definitely not as accommodating as a pleasurable life because purpose requires you to be patient, delay gratification and think for the long term. When you do all this, it keeps you connected to the present. What this means is that you learn to live the best that you can in the present.
When you have a purpose you are grounded to your present rather than postponing it into the future. Lets say you’re working on a book and need to get it done by a specific time.
Now you also have a family, work and other responsibilities to take care of. Your purpose, in this case is to get the book written. So despite other commitments, you make your best effort to give time to your book.
At the end of the day, you’ll know that you were able to squeeze time for what you love to do and fulfill your purpose, even though in a small way. It’s one small step forward towards completing a project which is important to you.
At the end of the day you are putting what is meaningful to you at the forefront. This by no means shows is selfish but by doing what is meaningful to you is a sign of self respect.