What Makes Life Meaningful?

What Make's our Lives Meaningful?
I've been dwelling on this all day.

Well, one of the most obvious suggestions is that it is a meaningful life if it is a happy one. But happiness, as Aristotle pointed out a long time ago, is understood by different people in different ways. We probably didn't need Aristotle to tell us this because it's pretty obvious.
Some people, he said, think that the happy life is a life of pleasure or, at least, a life filled with many more pleasures than pains (since the cost of pleasure, as we all humanly know , may be worth a little bit of pain). Maybe this is what Jay-Z meant when he said "Pain is Pleasure..." Anyway, other people think of a happy life more in terms of what Aristotle called "honor", by which he meant being held in esteem by one's peers and fellow citizens. For us, this might mean any of several very different things. It might mean a successful life, which in turn has several variations.
Some people would say that success is wealth - that you can tell how successful a person is by how much money and how many possssions he or she has. Others would say that success is fame - being recognized by lots of other people (whether for one's accomplishments or just being known for being known, as is all too common among our current bundle of celebrities). Still others would say that success is more subtle and less obviously visible - for example, making a contribution to society or doing something meaningful, say, teaching in schools or working for a cleaner environment, whether or not this is financially rewarding or gets you well known.
Aristotle himself insisted that the good life is doing something worthwhile that you love and are good at, whether it is philosophy (his choice) or one of the arts - music, dance, literature - or perhaps gardening or being a housewife. It would be misleading to say that there are as many different views of happiness as there are people in the world, but it is clear that there are many different types & conceptions of happiness, and one size does not fit all.
Yet, as always there are larger philosophical questions that need answering. Earlier, I made a quick equation between happiness and a meaningful life; but is a happy life always meaningful, and is a meaningful life necessarily a happy one? The answer to the first question seems to depend on which of the above versions of happiness one accepts. With some of them, its unsettled in my opinion. For example, if one thinks of a life of pleasure as a happy life, it is quite clear that since there are different outlooks on happiness then there are an equal amount of outlooks on pleasure as well. Some of them, to be sure, like enjoying excercising some skill (playing basketball, sewing, playing the piano), can make life both pleasurable & meaningful. But others (watching wrestlemania, drinking beer to excess, playing practical jokes) are degrading, and a lifetime of such activities, no matter how pleasurable, can not add up to a meaningful life. Would you rather be a Dissatisfied Sage, who has contributed many teachings to generations to come, or a clueless pig rollling around in the mud, utterly delighted and totally satisfied? A happy life is meaningful, we might say, if it is the right kind of happiness. But then we seem to be back where we started and facing yet another version of relativism: are all conceptions of happiness of equal value?
To the second question, it seems that answer is no. If a person dedicated his or her life to finding a cure for a dreaded disease, to taking care of the poor in some Third World Country, or to creating a perfect artwork, all despite continuing frustration and utter lack of recognition or appreciation, we might applaud suck a life as meaningful but recognize that the person was not happy. Many celebrated saints and artists lived such lives. The great composor Beethoven suffered for most of his adult life from terrible headaches & tragically lost his hearing, an especially terrible fate for a musician (in my opinion as a musician myself). He had a terrible temper, terrible social relations and all in all a terrible life. Nevertheless, at the height of his suffering and while deaf, he composed what is perhaps one of the best-loved pieces of music, the final movement of his ninth symphony. Had he not lived such a tragic life, would he have been able to create such beautiful music? Many millions of people continue to be moved and overjoyed by the delightful "Fur Elise" - This is is the song that made me realize my amity with music. Had it not have been for the composition of this song, would I have ever found myself through music? Would I have ever found myself at all? How many others has Beethoven inspired in this way? But Beethoven never had a chance to enjoy "Fur Elise" or to experience the joy that this piece inspired in so many people. His is an example of a most meaningful and most UNhappy life.
The question "What is happiness" has yet another philosophical twist. "Happiness" does not refer to just a temporary feeling, what we call "feeling happy." So whether or not someone is happy is just not a question of how they feel right now. It is rather a question of the larger dimensions of his or life, whether he or she is living well or badly, because just as there all sorts of degrading pleasures, so too there are meaningless ways of feeling happy - drinking alcohol or taking drugs, spending time with a couple of amusing but shiftless friends. At the same time, we would be very hesitent to say that someone was happy if he or she almost never experienced such moments of joy - like poor Beethoven.
So it looks like the question of whether or not a person is happy depends on several differnt kinds of factors, which I have decided to clumsily call "internal and "external". The internal factor has to do wit how a person feels. The external has more to do with the actual facts of one's life. Both, I suggest, are necessary for happiness.
But consider this: Suppose you are one of those people who thinks that a happy life is the life of pleasure, or at least a life in which the balance of pleasure far outweighs the pains. Just imagine that for a moment.
Now we approach the reason I been dwelling on this subject.
At school, we've been discussing "the pleasure centers" because it has a lot to with certain psychological viewpoints. But thats another blog altogether. Neuroscientists only discovered this part of the brain a few decades ago. They found that stimulation of these centers was so intense and satisfying that the rats being tested on, when hooked up with electrodes in such a way as to self-stimulate their own brains, literally starved to death. Can u believe that? A colleage of mine, Robert, was the one who spoke on this, today. It reminded me of the "birds & the bees" talk my father had with me some years ago. In his attempt to make me realize how sexual the male being can be, he told me that ANY man, being honest with himself, would choose to have sex over eating for the week, without hesitation. Of course at that time I thought he was being exaggerative in order to make a point and in order to stray me away from having sex. However, the older I got, the more experience I've gained, and of course the more I learned about these centers, the more I began to realize that he wasn't exaggerating as much as I had initially thought. Today, Roberts explanation of this experiment summed up all of those findings and put them into complete perspective.
Well, I found out through internet research that the teqnuique has been perfected so that it is now safe and suitable for humans. Moreover, there is a life support system so that, even if somone does not want to innterupt the pleasure, he/she will be kept alive indefinitely, at least for a normal life span. For those who want to live a life of pleasure, here it is, the most perfect, dependable, continuous, pleasure you can ever expect to have. Would you like to be hooked up? (A note of warning: no student who has ever tried this has chosen to stop, although that option is always left open.)
Over many years, very few students have been willing to try it. Their reasons are revealing. They say "I want to do something with my life. I'd miss my friends. I'd like to get married someday." This suggests to me, that the internal aspect of happiness is not enough. But there is a variation on this theme, credited to Rober Nozick. Instead of waves of continuous pleasures, his contraption is much more sophisticated. You can think of it as an experience machine. What it does is it (electronically) simulates the experience of, say, having a successful career in medicine and saving thousands of live's or of being a popular music star and having millions of fans around the world. It can also simulate the experience of spending lots of time with friends or of meeting someone, falling in love and getting married. It can even simulate the experience of getting pregnant and giving birth. In short, it can give you any experience you would like to have of a happy, meaningful life, without the risks and bother that are normally apart of life. If you wanted the challenges and risks those could be arranged as well.
Now, the question again: Would you like to be hooked up?...
But again, most students say no. They are still unsettled because they want to REALLY do something with their lives, They want to REALLY spend time with their friends. They want to REALLY get married, someday. That seems to show that most of us insist on REALLY living in the world, with uncertantity and dangers included. A happy and meaningful life, in other words cannot be just a life internally enjoyed. We want to be part of the world as well. We want that natural-born connection to the cosmos. We also realize that we have a limited time and that makes it all the more urgent that we do something worthwhile with what we've got. So we give our lives meaning by the choices we make, by the relationships we form, and by the difference we make. That, in a nutsell, is what happiness is all about. Not just life of pleasure but a life of doing something meaningful and worthwhile and, as a virtuous person, enjoying it all as well.