Homosapiens must make things, and create. Homosapiens live in communities often including other species such as dogs and cats and chickens and sheep and maybe goats or donkeys and the odd rabbit or hamster. For humans Dunbar's number is 150 individuals we can keep track of in detail, and 500 acquaintances and 1500 we can recognize. Therefore we are constructed to live in a community, and preferably a stable one. The population center I live in is a city of over 100,000 members. The main High School has 2,550 pupils. Those groups are way too big. And there are a lot of nuclear families, with one or two parents and 0, 1, 2, or 3 children. Those groups are too small. So churches exist with about the right number. We have to do more in those. We need to progress toward a goal. I've noticed that progress is the same as purpose. We should work to help our community, tribe I guess I should say, or church. We will feel good if we make things for a community of that size, serve a community of that size, get rich and help a community of that size. Too many successful people find it lonely at the top, and get rich but still don't feel successful. We need to be independent but also interdependent.
We help others in our own families and others in our community, but in a balance with our own self interest. When a distant community does well we of course celebrate because they won't be coming over to our community and stealing from us, and we might get some helpful ideas from them. For example Toyota's manufacturing methods have allowed other countries all over the world to make things more efficiently and of better quality. We should all help each other. And the more countries we aren't at war with, the more places we can visit and the more countries will visit our attractions. I have lost track of the number of countries Joe Biden wants to go to war with, but it is certainly a very unhealthy number.
For many people life consisted of employment and family. Production workers learned the various tricks and skills needed to do an assembly task, in my case there were 133 steps to making what I built and after 2 weeks I could see what I had to do next. And there were different models so there were a lot of different variants so learn. As work got moved out of the country I took voluntary redundancy so other people could stay in that factory because many had worked there since leaving school two decades previously, their entire working life to date. But eventually each got a termination notice and walked out for the last time from the only place they had ever worked.
Neoliberal globalization is all about saving money by terminating production work, sending it to other countries, and the top executives and shareholders pocketing the savings. Don't call me a Marxist but it sure does look like a class war. I'll call it what I think it should be called and that's 'Greed'.
For long term meaning we and everything else that endures only exists in God. However much people reason things through and decide to trim off everything unneccessary from their lives to streamline it, in the end living a godless life, particularly those raised outside a religious tradition, suffer depression and have no purpose. I struggle with the meaning of life, am making some progress and rather presumptuously sharing what I've found. A neighbor, who was a catholic until the age of 18 has no such problems. The bits of religion that matter are not the odd trimmings, but the underlying basics often ignored, that God exists and created the universe. The rest of the details can then be coped with. What we can not do is survive as nihilists. Not personally and not as a nation or as a planet. I take note of the Biden Administration; no sense of purpose, no aims, just destroy this country and that, and make a fortune for our weapons industry. Run up debts - eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. No concern for anyone else, no concern for our children either.
His religion, learned in childhood which he does not appear to practice, nonetheless brings him significant benefits, while the atheism I learned in childhood continues to bring me harm. I am fighting against it and have found a church that looks promising to go to.
Satisfaction in life is largely based on progress toward a long term goal. I would suggest that satisfaction in life is pretty much the same as the meaning of life, and therefore depends on stability and progress and that it is better to build something impressive than to just be given it.
