free from fear = free from meaning??

[spiralarchitect]

I posed this question on my blog hoping that I'd gain insight by writing it out, but no such luck. Have any of you struggled with this, too?

I see how being free from your fears can empower you. One thing I can't resolve yet, however, is if you can be unafraid of everything, even death, why is life valuable? Why should I care about myself or other people if I become selfless enough that I'm unafraid of death? My motivation for becoming fearless is to be free to do whatever I want and to help other people with that power. But if it "doesn't matter" if I die or others die, then that motivation becomes meaningless.

I think I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective.

[Andy]

I encountered the whole "free from meaning" dilemma a few months ago and kept struggling to figure out how to deal with it. After I had gotten rid of a lot of negative feelings, like feeling I should be doing x or just having other fears in general, it started to seem like life was meaningless. Many of the "shoulds" and fears from my belief system were no longer there, and I found that I didn't have to really do anything in life, nothing was necessarily required of me, I could very well just wither away. I kept thinking to myself, what's the point? there is no point. It took me maybe a week of pondering over this before I came to another realization.

I was basically looking for some kind of meaning from an external source. And from switching to subjective reality along with all the other changes I'd done there was no longer an external source to derive meaning. I saw that there would be never be external meaning I could look to unless I switched to some other belief system or started to become fearful again. I realized that it was up to me to create meaning, and that's what I did. This approach seemed somewhat fake at the beginning since I guess I believed there had to be some ultimate meaning "out there" for it to really matter, but then I saw that this belief was incongruent with subjective reality...so it had to go. Took some time to come to grips with it, but creating your own meaning, creating your own value to life, can be extremely empowering.

[Adam]

Well, one thing that fear has going for it, is that fear provides motivation. The problem with it, though, is that the motivation you get from fear isn't logical. There are other sources of motivation, including love. I do things for my wife, but my motivation isn't because I'm afraid of losing her or of any other fear out there. I do things because I genuinely love her. If I were afraid of my wife leaving, then I might try to restrict her freedom in the hope that she wouldn't see something that she likes better.

The way that I see it, is that choices that are motivated by fear are disempowering. A great example is The Patriot Act, where we have lost a lot of our freedom and privacy. An alternative, one that would be made in defiance of fear, would be to publicly apologize for the things the terrorists see so abhorrent. Instead of playing into the terrorists' hands and committing more atrocities which gives the terrorists more members, we would be destroying the foundation for the terrorists' anger, removing support from them without lifting a weapon. If, after the dust settled, we were motivated by love instead of fear, we would set up a stronger infrastructure in the nations where the terrorists are from (infrastructure as in water, sanitation, power, roadways, and communications, not infrastructure as in police and military), which would cement the US as the good guys (which we actually would be in that case) rather than the biggest bully on the block (which we have become).

Love is just as powerful of a motivational tool as fear, but the results are far more empowering. Getting rid of fear is fine, but if you don't replace it with something, then you're left empty, and as you pointed out, you'll find that you don't have any motivation.

[hazerfazer]

I'm just putting my two cents in:
When you give the example of it not mattering if you or others die, I think that is where you're looking at it incorrectly. I believe that if you give up your fears of something it is because you are giving the thing that it is affecting, the positive thing, so much meaning. You give up your fear of death because life is so important to you...you do not want fear to impact the way you live. I am thinking over this as well, because for some reason the constraints of fear seem more appealing than the freedom of fearlessness....in a way at least.

[julien]

It all depends where your values lie, and if you cannot find any meaning without fear, that means your good nature revolves around the fear that something bad may happen to you if you do not obey the rules.

[spiralarchitect]

Thank you all for your comments.

I think I am looking for meaning from an external source. Most of your comments have correctly pointed out that I have not really found my motivation. I know I could choose a belief system or create my own motivations, but it doesn't seem that satisfying right now. I want to know, not believe. But of course all we can ever "know" is but one sliver of perception...

What I want to know is what difference to the universe my giving up my fear and becoming more loving makes. Yes, it is more satisfying to me personally, and I can make others more happy. I can "make a difference", even a huge one, in the lives of many people in my generation and maybe even for many generations to come. But again, all I gain is my personal satisfaction and perhaps through me others can reach their own personal satisfactions and happinesses, i.e. we can all satisfy our selfish desires. I don't believe there is any absolute "good" or "evil" to the universe (indeed, there are "good" side effects to "bad" ideas and "bad" side effects to "good" ideas). It just is. Millenia from now the universe will just be, regardless of the "good" or "bad" actions I did or not take in this time and place.

I think maybe the answer lies for me in realizing that yes, my life, maybe all life on my planet doesn't really affect the long long-term existense of the very large-scale, the universe, but those time and size scales do not really apply to me. If I focus on the scale of me in this time as an individual, my actions do become more meaningful.

[Michael Chui]

Fear is motivation by avoidance, whereas love is motivation by selfishness. (That's not quite what it sounds like; the selfishness bit is elaborated here.)

You ask,

Originally Posted by spiralarchitect

why is life valuable?

My answer to this comes in a definition of life and death. Life is the ability to cause change, the ability to be changed. Death is an inability. You should never fear death; but this does not mean you shouldn't want life. To be alive means to be able to make a difference. That's valuable, and it has nothing to do with avoiding death.

Like Andy says, you must make the meaning yourself. That is the cost of freedom: the burden is placed on you.

It might be useful for you to read my definition of love in full; I define love as an amalgam of knowledge and equality (explored long-windedly here). It's hard for me to provide any kind of summary of my philosophy or what I've written on it (the writing is all in my Livejournal somewhere, but it's not organized well), but I'd be happy to discuss it further, as long as you don't mind if I make public anything I say that's non-specific to you.