Another approach is to heighten your uniqueness by exaggerating eccentricities and character quirks and attributing Special Meaningfulness to them. Both these approaches are harmful, although they can motivate genuine & valuable accomplishments too.
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun
You can't create a Cosmic Plan, because you are human, material, and about two meters in your largest dimension, and the Cosmos is divine, metaphysical, and about 10^16 meters in its physical emanation. Unfortunately, it won't accept your Plan. Partly because it doesn't exist.
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun
You can create a plan for yourself, or for yourself and other people. That's a merely ordinary thing to do, though. It doesn't make you special, no matter how ambitious it is. Also, reality mostly doesn't cooperate with plans.
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun
When you realize trying to convince yourself that you are special doesn’t work, there’s several directions you can go. One is to try to be ordinary, which is also a bad idea.
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun
Better is to try to be “noble,” which means dropping the whole question of personal value and life-role, losing interest in the meaning of Me, and doing what you can to be useful for other people, for their sake, rather than for what it proves about Me.
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Replying to @Meaningness
Why is doing things for others not also a kind of personal? What makes Others different in kind from Me?
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Replying to @reasonisfun
Sorry, my tweet about nobility was badly worded and/or too condensed. It could easily be misunderstood as "service to others is truly meaningful, whereas selfish motivations are not." That's a version of the confused stance of "mission."
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun
The central insight is that we're always trying to make things mean either more or less than they do, which doesn't work out well. The "confused stances" are a catalog of strategies for adding or subtracting meaning.
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun
"I am special because they aren't" is one. "Everybody's special, so collectively we are truly meaningful" is another. "My life is made meaningful by serving others"; "my life is meaningful because I'm getting all the goodies I can"; etc.
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun
The "complete stance" says that we don't have to go around adding and subtracting meaning, we can just let things have whatever meanings they do or don't. Then we don't have anything metaphysical we have to keep trying to prove.
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And in that case, we can get on with enjoying life and being useful, without the exhausting foofaraw of Cosmic Meaningfulness (eternalism) or the empty depression of Cosmic Meaninglessness (nihilism).
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun
i feel like a lot of heavy lifting is being done by this word 'useful.'
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