Finding Meaning in Life's Flux

_source

Accepting the absence of fundamental beneficial or detrimental meanings can be therapeutic. Most people go to extraordinary efforts to find pleasure and avoid misery, seemingly unaware that neither is fundamentally and undilutedly beneficial or harmful. Nothing has a set and fixed value. We are the ones who give experiences meaning and can choose whether to see them as oppressive or uplifting.

An event is nothing more beyond what people create of it. This is similar to the existentialist idea that "existence precedes essence". We are propelled to this globe and given the duty of making our own fortunes. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, the prophet of existentialist, "life is nothing until it is experienced; but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing more than the sense that you choose."

We can find joy and conquer difficulties throughout our lives, but none of this is guaranteed, and many things are beyond our control. As a result, we must recognize that life is ludicrous and that our aspirations are largely insignificant. We struggle to maintain control while triumph and calamity alternate unrelentingly.

When we embrace this frame of thoughts we succeed to perceive achievement and failure as ephemeral. We are continuously trying and accomplishing minor successes, and we never stop failing ourselves in some manner.

We must accept that change is unavoidable, but the emotions it elicits and the triumphs we achieve should not lead us to believe we are in control, nor should defeat lead us to believe we have lost command.