Comment by jr3592
4 days ago
Can you expand on what "living a fulfilling life" is for you?
Your post really resonates with me, but the rub is (at least for me) "living a fulfilling life" means other trade offs, and potential losses.
Maybe fulfilling to me is something that doesn't fit nicely in the box of traditional society... am I ready to give all that up?
I think the "what" is way less important than the "how". I think "how to live a fulfilling life" has general principles that apply to everyone, but the results of applying those principles are different for everyone.
I think the core of it is: following my intuitive sense of "rightness" across time scales (seconds to decades). When I'm doing it, I feel peace, joy, contentment, and my life seems meaningful. When I'm not doing it, I feel dissatisfied, restless, and nihilistic.
I'm frustrated by how vaguely and abstractly I'm conveying this. But this intuitive rightness thing precedes language. It's like a bodily sense or an emotion, but deeper. Have you ever put a t-shirt on backwards and only noticed because something didn't feel right? Then you take it off and put it on the right way around, and it just feels right. It's a bit like that but for life in general.
I can give some examples of "what" I've done if you like but I'll leave them out of this comment.
> "living a fulfilling life" means other trade offs, and potential losses.
Part of how I know I'm doing the thing is that the trade-offs and losses don't concern me. If Y matters to me, and X really is necessary to have a life with Y, then I do X. X is simply the price of having Y, which I'll gladly pay.
In contrast, when I feel resentful of a price I'm paying, it's evidence that I'm not following my sense of rightness.