闲人

Values are created by the stories we tell ourselves. How else do we get people who decide it's a worthwhile pursuit to spend their lives training themselves to put lumps of rubber into a net, and other people who value watching people doing that and express their appreciation with little bits of government printed paper (or bits and bytes of data, for these times).

I would like to say it is important to understand that things don't possess intrinsic value and people evaluate things differently. Yet in saying so, the word "important" is meaningless. Importance is only meaningful in respect to a context. Oxygen isn't important, it is important to aerobic organisms who wish to live.

So the above phrase, to me, is important in the sense that it is necessary to understand each other and the world. Too often, we argue without realizing that all our basic assumptions are different. If one person solves an equation with the assumption that x=1 and the other begins with x=2 and they arrive at a different solution as a result, any argument about their differing methods of solving equations and which is better is ultimately useless, because their conflict isn't about methods but about assumptions.

What do we do?

Perhaps the best solutions lie between finding a way to make a good story, or stop the storytelling entirely and just see what is, just be.

Survival is a losing battle. The more time and energy you spend, the more is wasted in the end. IF you don't have something larger to strive towards. Survival not as the end, but the means to achieve an end. And that end is the result of storytelling. Something becomes of value because we tell ourselves, in various ways, that it is of value.

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Storytelling is something that we do well, whether we realize it or not. Not in the sense that we make good stories but in the sense that we do it almost automatically. Yet it is not always helpful. Often for example, in the case of emotions, our stories lead us to justify our feelings or to deny them. I have the right to be angry because of such and such. I shouldn't be angry because of such and such. The former feeds emotions, the latter creates more difficult emotions: guilt at being angry, unworthiness because of one's lack of control, depression at one's unworthiness.

What do you like?

Chances are, no you don't. Most probably, you like the feeling that arises when you engage in what you presume you like. We eat something, we feel pleasure, we identify the food as something we 'like'. Through years of experience, we learn all the shortcuts that stimulate our brains' pleasure and pain centres, and we build stories about ourselves and our 'likes' and 'dislikes'. If we indulge in something too much, it ceases to stimulate the pleasure centres as much, and we get 'bored', and find something else to access the shortcut to relive the pleasure.

Blessing or curse, it is also our nature to make sense of things, to make meaning. The relentless pursuit of what is essentially a brain reaction thus leads us to glorify 'success', presumably because it is a state that allows optimum stimulation of pleasure centres. Whatever route you choose it remains the same, whether you pursue creativity, service to society, economic success, spirituality or other things that people find meaningful, it is after all a seeking to stimulate different brain reactions that different people prefer.

So, what do we do?