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Notes -
You started your post with:
You followed up with 20 different ways society fails men, whom you depict as passive victims in your narrative. None of these actually answer the question you started with - okay, in the past men could be decidedly average and the church would still furnish them with a doe-eyed virgin and 20 acres of land on their 18th birthday. Even if you and all the NEETs lived in that world, what's the point of getting married? Of having children, raising them well, working to feed yourself? Why do you bother to call your elderly parents?
If your answers were orgasms, economic utility, economic utility, not starving and I don't talk to my parents on a regular basis then your problems run a lot deeper than dating market hard and my life is pointless because the state won't let me starve. If you don't want to do your job then don't, but quitting to pick pineapples isn't going to make you any happier until you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for.
What's your personal solution to this problem? I ask sincerely but also by way of justifying the comment I actually wanted to make, which was that I haven't seen you around for a bit and am happy you're still here.
Carrying on, one of my major frustrations in modern discourse is that there doesn't seem to be much individual reflection on what the point of life (or anything) even is, let alone widespread agreement. "Gratifying the human limbic system" seems to be what we're settling on and that puts us squarely in OP's dilemma.
Deeply in this boat and curious how they respond. Having kids is probably the single best way to add purpose to your life, but this gets circular very very fast.
Yeah, I have a friend who says that 'meaning' is just another word for kids.
It certainly helps! But I find Christianity to be better on a personal level and it has the advantage of applying to the many, many people who won't (and some who shouldn't) have kids.
The Christian perspective is that there are two valid paths in life. Marriage-and-children-if-possible, and monasticism, which equates to a life of service to others and the greater good, in both cases as guided by the Church. I think this is a healthy perspective and would help a lot of people trapped in the modern abyss.
I am decidedly atheistic, although I do sometimes wonder if it's worth it to try to psy-op myself into a belief system. Not sure if I could though.
When I was younger, I thought Western societies abandonment of religion in favor of enlightenment/science/whatever was the natural progress of civilization, and an amazing thing. Now I think we've made a horrible mistake, but I don't think we can really go back.
Whoops!
Pursuant to a few posts up the chain, what do you think the point of life is? Or, if it hasn't one, what do you think is worth doing while alive, and why?
Yes, it was a horrible mistake, which validates Christian priors. Re: going back I'm not so sure. Seems to me that the problem should work itself out over time, though with hellish collateral damage.
The Old Testament is basically a long list of examples of what happens to a people when they stop worshiping God and start worshiping anything else. Eventually the survivors come back around and the cycle starts anew. Humanity is generally a faithless bride, which is why the example of Mary is so vital.
I'm not sure. I think I've been having a gentle ~third life crisis about this for the last year or two.
I think the "point" of life is to procreate at a base level. Because life seems to be a self-replicating collection of molecules that enjoy being alive, and replicating ensures this process continues. However, procreating is hard these days, and so is a while away yet.
I'm going to think on this more and maybe my answer will change after a few hours of writing, but my initial gut response is that aside from procreation, life is about maximizing your subjective sense of pleasant/enjoyable experiences, and minimizing the bad ones. The logical endpoint of this is wire heading however, which I don't like and is not inspiring at all. You should also seek to increase other's enjoyment of life, and not make their lives worse, this is slightly more inspiring.
I like how you anchored it in actions (and their "why") though, that I will need to think more on.
Incidentally the novelty you're finding here is reflective of a split in Christianity.
In Western Christianity, 'faith' has become somewhat conflated with 'belief', i.e. a sort of propositional system where one evaluates a statement and says "Yes I think that's true" or "No I don't."
The New Testament says that "Faith without works is dead", which has caused much consternation in the West. Which is it? Believing a proposition or performing actions? What 'saves' us?
In Eastern Christianity, faith is understood to have much less to do with propositional belief and more to do with action. Let me explain my perspective here a little.
Faith is acting as though something is true despite not knowing for sure. When you sit in a chair it might buckle and injure you, but you're operating in faith that it won't. When the plan is for someone to pick you up at a minor rural airport at 10PM with no other transportation options available, you're engaging in faith by showing up expectantly, even if he might have forgotten or died in an accident along the way.
To have faith in Christ is to behave as though following Him should be your highest priority. To believe that but act otherwise is to break faith. Make sense? As the Bible says, even the demons believe that Christ is who He says He is.
It would be too great a digression to go into Orthodox theology a la Palamas but long story short I think it's basically correct to say that all propositions re: God are approximations and therefore necessarily partly incorrect. There's not really anything that I intellectually think is 'true' about God, because all truth about God is beyond mortal understanding.
To be a Christian requires some (possibly temporary) dogmatic intellectual belief, yes, but of surprisingly few propositions, and those universally of the sort that we might call unfalsifiable. But the much greater part of being a Christian is acting accordingly. Go to the liturgy. Receive communion in the hope that it's actually doing something. Confess your failings and strive your hardest to be more Christlike.
Like passion in a marriage, belief comes and goes. But love is a choice, and faith is always on the table.
This was really beautiful, and actually inadvertently addressed something I was writing in a different comment to you (started on my computer, left the apartment, will finish later).
Great stuff! Now to find something to have faith in...
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