Stances are unstable | Meaningness
Stances—responses to meaning—are unstable thought-patterns. Often we adopt several contradictory ones in rapid succession.| Meaningness
Stances—responses to meaning—are unstable thought-patterns. Often we adopt several contradictory ones in rapid succession.| Meaningness
Nobility is the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others.| Meaningness
Meaning and meaninglessness, pattern and nebulosity all obviously exist—yet we resist recognizing and admitting this. Why?| Meaningness
Representationalism tried to exorcise the ghost in the machine, but succeeded only in splitting it into innumerable tiny ghosts.| Meaningness
This chart is an overview of Meaningness and Time: the past, present, and future of culture, society, and our selves.| Meaningness
Several views of selflessness, in different religions and philosophies.| Meaningness
An ethical system that reliably delivers correct moral judgements is a wishful fantasy. No such system is possible.| Meaningness
What is the meaning of an extra-marital affair—or any relationship? A philosophical short story illustrates the puzzle of the nebulosity of meaningness.| Meaningness
Eternalism fixates meaning; nihilism denies it. Recognizing that meaning is both nebulous and patterned resolves this false dichotomy.| Meaningness
Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.| Meaningness
Eternalist kitsch is the denial of the possibility of meaninglessness. This leads to willfully idiotic sentimentality.| Meaningness
Hope is harmful in devaluing the present and shifting attention to imaginary futures that may never exist.| Meaningness
Privileging faith over experience is an eternalist ploy for blinding yourself to signs of nebulosity.| Meaningness
Five confused attitudes to life purpose, as an introduction to meaningness.| Meaningness
How—and why!—countercultures sought to reform psychologies and polities: to counteract alienation, anxiety, and anomie.| Meaningness
Failure to find new foundations for meaning, to recognize diversity, to provide community, and to transcend opposition: all doomed counterculturalism.| Meaningness
“Archipelago” is a political model in which everyone can choose what social system to live in. It’s impractical, but points to better solutions.| Meaningness
Wrong ideas about meaning come in mirror-image pairs, which fixate and deny opposite aspects of reality.| Meaningness
Most SAD light therapy lamps are not bright enough. How to get brighter light than any you can buy!| Meaningness
Seriously bright indoor lights for seasonal affective disorder, or just the winter blahs| Meaningness
Clarifying common misinterpretations of adult developmental theory| Meaningness
Misunderstanding “a life” as an object leads to the complaint that, although meanings exist, life is meaningless overall.| Meaningness
While the meaning of “objective” is nebulous, learning to relate to meaningness more objectively is possible and worthwhile.| Meaningness
A stubborn nihilist can always just refuse to admit that anything is meaningful.| Meaningness
When you discover you are owned by an ideology, you can escape. Better, you can become a larger space.| Meaningness
Everything was meaningless at the moment of the Big Bang. What could add meaning after that?| Meaningness
Lite nihilism includes a valuable, accurate analysis of the failure of eternalism.| Meaningness
Your future death does not make your present meaningless.| Meaningness
Nihilism has a taboo allure of forbidden power—because everyone knows eternalism is wrong.| Meaningness
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How and why modernity failed. All systems of meaning—religious, political, artistic, psychological—began to fall apart. Nihilism seemed the only alternative.| Meaningness
A reading list is a great idea—thanks! It would be a lot of work… but fun! For now, some books chosen without great care. The first three are the largest influences on Meaningness, but are quite difficult. There are some easier and more fun books later, plus one extremely fun movie at the end!| meaningness.com
Fluidity addresses the atomization of culture, society, and self with ships that sail the sea of meaning: collaborative, improvised, intimate, and playful.| Meaningness
The 1960s-80s countercultures abandoned rationality because they believed it negated all meaning. They were wrong.| Meaningness
The hippies and the Moral Majority both tried to rescue systematic eternalism—and failed. We live amongst their wreckage.| Meaningness
Romantic rebellion does not seriously try to overthrow the system; it is faux-heroic posturing. It can be harmful, but also inspires great art.| Meaningness
Materialism says that only mundane purposes like money, sex, and power count. It wrongly rejects higher purposes—but those too are not ultimate.| Meaningness
Monism and dualism both offer concepts of the supposed true self as a coherent entity.| Meaningness
Dividing purposes into higher and mundane, mission pursues higher ends and rejects pragmatism; materialism seeks only selfish goals. Both are mistakes.| Meaningness
Available ethical theories are either eternalist or nihilist; both are useless. We must recognize that ethics are both nebulous and meaningful.| Meaningness
Ethical nihilism is the denial of all ethical rightness and wrongness.| Meaningness
Finding the specifics of life unacceptable motivates the escapist fantasy of monism: the stance that All is One, denying diversity.| Meaningness
Ploys—ways of thinking, feeling, talking, and acting—which stabilize eternalism; and antidotes to use against them.| Meaningness
Meaning cannot be either objective or subjective. But meaning does exist: as interaction.| Meaningness
Confusions about meaning can be resolved using a method for looking at ways nebulosity affects the subject matter.| Meaningness
Great confusions about meaningness stem from the mistaken assumption that there must be some sort of eternal ordering principle.| Meaningness
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The hippie counterculture was structurally and functionally similar to the Moral Majority Christian Right counterculture a decade later.| Meaningness
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Ultimate is a word that can be legitimately used in discussions of meaning. Often, though, it is advertising hype, or a weasel-word.| Meaningness
People think they approach meaning in terms of religions or philosophies, but in practice, "stances" matter more.| Meaningness
A positive and realistic vision for the future of society, culture, and self, drawing lessons from recent history.| Meaningness
Over the past century, systems of meaning gradually disintegrated, and a series of new modes of meaningness developed.| Meaningness
The culture war, political polarization, Baby Boomer bafflement: the unending zombie slugfest pairing the two countercultures of the 1960s-80s.| Meaningness
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If we could just manage to be ordinary, we would not have the responsibility of living up to our potential. Fortunately, ordinariness is impossible.| Meaningness
Specialness is a sense of having been picked out for destiny by the Cosmic Plan. That causes you and others much trouble.| Meaningness
Wonder at the vastness, beauty, and intricacy of the phenomenal world: a texture of the complete stance.| Meaningness
Open-ended curiosity gives you the freedom to interact with the world without metaphysical presuppositions.| Meaningness
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What we want most from meaning is guarantees. Religions, political ideologies, and other eternalist systems promise certainty; but they cannot deliver.| Meaningness
The problems of meaningness we face now are dramatically different from those of the past. We also sense new opportunities, and have new resources.| Meaningness
It is attractive to think that we each have a unique, transcendent, ultimate purpose in life. Unfortunately, this belief is both false and harmful.| Meaningness
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Wistful certainty is a ploy for reinforcing eternalism based on the thought that there must exist whatever it takes to make eternalism seem to work.| Meaningness
Systems of society, culture, and the self were the foundation of the modern world. Their glories have passed.| Meaningness
Explore the ideas of Meaningness in greater depth by reading the books that inspired it| Meaningness
Modernity was built on certainty in science and mathematics. That was revealed as delusional during the early 20th century.| Meaningness
The rationalist theory of justified action leads to nihilism. Understand your activity as a vivid, variegated landscape instead.| Meaningness
Nihilistic claims about subjectivity, inherent meaning, universal meaning, and scientific objectivity do not hold up.| Meaningness
Intuitions of “cosmic meaning” root in hunger for personal significance, and in encounters with vastness.| Meaningness
Meanings come and go; they are not eternally stable—and that is fine.| Meaningness
The many justifications for nihilism rely on a handful of mistaken patterns of reasoning.| Meaningness
Recognizing meaninglessness requires unusual intelligence, courage, and toughness. Nihilist elitism renders you stupid, cowardly, and helpless, though.| Meaningness
A world of total license: the catastrophe some fear if nihilistic views become widespread.| Meaningness
“Nihilism is inevitable, but not a problem.” This is mistaken: it makes you miserable and ineffective, and erodes social and cultural capacity.| Meaningness
Nihilism promises you don’t have to care, because nothing means anything. But you do care—and you can’t escape that.| Meaningness
If meaning lives only in Neverland, we can’t make much use of it. Fortunately, it’s here, now.| Meaningness
Are you adult enough to accept that the world offers no absolute guarantees?| Meaningness
The Guru Papers brilliantly illuminates fallacies of contemporary spirituality, and also the toxic power dynamics of authoritarian control.| Meaningness
Your post on the different stances mostly focused on ideation, regarding what goes on individually in relation to meaningness. I imagine that, for most of us, this cognitive process is habitual and out of awareness. That led me to think about the stances’ effect on behaviour, how that propels our flip-flopping from one to another - and how it might be a key to recognising our own underlying stances. This could be confusing: behaviours derived from a stance often appear to mean, and are r...| meaningness.com
Current pop spirituality is based on German Romantic Idealism from two centuries ago. I outline the key ideas these movements share.| Meaningness
