All of us need some kind of creed by which we live: stay sober, work a job, pay taxes, exercise mind and body, eat right, save, don’t buy things you can’t afford, stay single, avoid vexatious people and things, and seek out only that which is uplifting and beautiful might be mine. Anyone who wants to know why I would do those things is invited to explain why they want to be a hungover, indebted, unemployed, welfare-claiming, dumb, soft-bodied overweight married man with an unpleasant wife and surrounded by ugliness. Kinda answers itself really. Since a lot of people are some of those things, I can only suggest how much their lives would improve if they were all of them, and that the improvement they will feel is its own answer.
You may also want to ask is that all? There must be more to life than that. If this thought has occurred to you, I have two replies. First, I’ll thank you not to be so rude about my life choices. Apology accepted. Second, if you feel that way about your life, you don’t need God, or a pilgrimage, or for that matter, a couple of weeks' holiday somewhere exotic. And you don’t need to find-your-purpose or discover-your-passion. Stop reading those self-help books.
What the more-to-life-than-this and the find-your-passion brigades want is a purpose that smacks them upside the head and takes them over, without them needing to decide. Kinda like getting married and having children. His wife smacks him upside the head and his kids take him over. Have I sold you on making your own damn decision?
How does a man live? Any damn way he chooses: bear in mind the time before you do the crime. You decide. You might swipe an idea from someone else - you probably will - but you decide to adopt it. If you feel sour doing whatever it is, stop, dummy - though it may takes some time to change whatever it is. Only you can give your life meaning. No-one and nothing else can. That’s the curse of free will.
When I start feeling a little sour about my life, that tells me it’s time for a change. The trick is recognising what that change might be. I don’t know how to do that, but I do know that the first thoughts I will have are all the cliches. Kinda like the first draft of a blog post or a BBC TV drama. The difference is that the BBC broadcasts the first draft, and I take the time to take away as many of the cliches as I can. The first thought is almost never the best thought. The third or fourth thought is usually pretty good.
One thing for sure: religion is a first-draft cliche. You could listen to the massed ranks of priests, imams, mullahs, and other assorted pundits, or you can use the free will and rationality that God - the Christian one anyway - gave you to figure out how best to use the gifts you have, both for the benefit of others and yourself.
These thoughts were prompted by Krauser’s comment a while back that he was thinking about converting to Christianity and that if he did, he would withdraw his Daygame manuals and videos. It never occurred to him that he might have been doing God’s work in writing and producing his Daygame content. Oh ye of little faith in yourselves. And a very TradCon conception of what behaviour pleases the Almighty.
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