Being able to remember what you did gives meaning to life
Author: Matt Lakeman
Full Title: Thoughts on Meaning and Writing
uid: 202210031413
tags: #living-well #literature #favorites
URL: https://mattlakeman.org/2020/10/06/thoughts-on-meaning-and-writing/
Highlights
- But I do want a noteworthy life on my own terms. I want my life to resemble one of these bullet point lists within the reasonable bounds of what I can experience and achieve given my abilities, resources, and will. Especially when I’m older, I want to be able to sit at a computer and type out the actions, events, and people that I remember and be proud of the list before me. This is my personal heuristic for meaning in life. Both in the short and long term I try to do things which one day could be put on a bullet point list about me. Or maybe I just try to do things I’ll remember.
- Tags: #favorites
- “I understand there’s a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and watch old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid and outwit that guy.”
- Resisting this reality is literally a constant challenge. One way I try to resist is to consider which specific actions which will result in discrete memorable experiences. That is, I try to do things I’ll remember even if I don’t remember the day itself. For instance, what am I more likely to remember doing tonight: playing another three out of literally thousands of hours of Crusader Kings 2, or watching a new movie? The movie, of course. Even if the movie is bad, or boring, or forgettable, I will still vaguely recall having seen it years from now, but there is almost no chance I’ll remember those random three hours of Crusader Kings 2 regardless of how much I enjoyed them.
- I noticed that I would read a book and then forget 99% of it a month later, and I wondered why I was even bothering to read books at all. I began to write summaries of books, and that helped. So then I started writing longer summaries of books, and that helped even more. And so I began to write novella-length summaries of books combined with info from Wikipedia, Googling, academic articles, and other sources, and I found that helped the most. I haven’t reread my Enron piece in almost six months, but I’m fairly certain I could verbally walk through the vast majority of the essay right now if I wanted to. Same for the Hundred Year War, the liberalism of Genghis Khan, and why Peep Show is so evil.