A quick, interesting and anxiety inducing fact: assuming you live for 80 years, your life will exist for roughly 5.83941606e-9 the age of the universe. And for that tiny speck of the cosmic timeline, we live in a world that kind of sucks. With all of the suffering deceit, anxiety, difficult bosses, shameless people, obnoxious snobs and crazy ideologies, coupled with the fact that my life is quicker then a blink in time, what is the point in pursuing anything meaningful? We get born into circumstances we don’t choose, we end up working a job that we hate, there’s a chance we might have some form of retirement and then we die. This sounds like an unforgiving and painful existence…
…and it calls for me to skip the gym today.
Instant gratification — immediate pleasure — is an age old solution to nihilism — the belief that life is meaningless. Rather then delaying action, or moderating desire, the short term pleasures of fast food, skipping the gym to lounge around, and doom-scrolling on your phone has captured our attention and willpower in a dangerous way. It is a characteristic that is innate in almost everyone, and there’s a very good reason for it:
Waking up early is difficult, sleeping in easy.
Training light, or not at all is far easier then training hard and training often.
Starting a business, or pursuing your passion is a minefield of headaches.
Pursue pleasure. Follow your impulses. Live for the moment. Do what’s expedient. Lie, cheat, steal, deceive, manipulate. In an ultimately meaningless universe, what possible difference could it make? — Jordan Peterson
Aiming Up
Here is a proposition for you:
Something better might be attained in the future, by giving up something of value in the present — Jordan Peterson
The causal relationship between our efforts today and the quality of tomorrow is the foundational principle to any outcome that has ever meant anything to anyone. In order to gain something we must exchange our blind wandering for discipline and direction. There is endless opportunity to delay gratification, and demonstrate our privilege of the future over the present:
Stop your endless scrolling
Stop snoozing your alarm
Stop skipping the gym
It is not that we have a brief length of time to live, but that we squander a great deal of that time — Seneca
The details don’t really matter. The benefit lies in the balance between the chaos of possibility and the order of discipline. Do the hard thing. Do it today. Suppress the impending and innate feeling of meaningless in existence and apply yourself in such a way that produces the outcome of highest meaning to you.
Meaning is the…place you live when you are guided by love and speaking truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that — Jordan Peterson
What guides your action and commands your attention?
Just Something To Consider
🔗 Sources
Peterson, J. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos - Rule 7
Apicardami. Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. https://apicardami.com/2022/11/12/book-12-rules-for-life-7-do-what-is-meaningful-not-what-is-expedient/#:~:text=Rule%207%3A%20Do%20what%20is%20meaningful%2C%20not%20what%20is%20expedient.&text=The%20main%20idea%20is%20that,adding%20value)%20in%20your%20life.
Weaver, T. What is Stoic Temperance. https://orionphilosophy.com/the-stoic-virtue-of-temperance/