The ever ending quest for answers ... that is the meaning of life right there. There isn't supposed to be an end. There isn't one, I don't think. Everything you understand uncovers more questions to be answered. Which is a good thing, if we knew the answer to everything we might get bored or something. The more we understand, the more we realize what we don't understand, and then work on understanding that, ad infinitum ... increasing out understanding. If we never striped to understand anything we would have never made it past simple things like 2 + 2. Never heard of blaise pascal? He's literally everywhere around you. Fuckin genius mathematician. A lot of things you take as ordinary like elevators, and the brakes on cars wouldn't exist were it not for him .. you know Pascal's Law? I'm sure a whole lot of other things too.
No, you're better off doing the opposite. To live life to the fullest to create meaning in your life as oppose to, trying to understand the meaning of life just to live to the fullest. Yep, though it wouldn't surprise me if within a hundred years our knowledge will lead us back down that path. To me everyone was a different function in life. A person may not be knowledge or understanding but yet still contribute a lot to the world to make it a better place. Whether it's spreading joy, creating inspiration, making people laugh, helping people out, creating art, etc. The world is filled with such a diversity of people with different purposes. I find the world more enjoyable that way. That's your purpose.
When i look deep into the questions i ask, i begin to see the pointlessness of the questions. That's when understanding arises within me. When there is no need to ask but rather embrace and enjoy the mystery.
That sounds like a problem of not enough knowledge, not too much of it. If you have every cookbook ever written, and cannot make breakfast, you lack knowledge, you are not burdened by it!
Without knowledge and understanding, our lives are controlled by fears and superstitions. That's a living death.
I think we are pretty good with what we know now. Now let's stop fucking the planet up and just have fun.
What i'm saying is different. You can read every cookbook and still not know how to cook. You can have the knowledge and still not know how to put it into proper use. You can still be burdened by fear. I know how to cook and i've never read a cookbook in my life. Nobody taught me how to cook, i've learned through observing not by obtaining information. Sadly, i've known many knowledgeable people who are too afraid to go after their dreams. They live in their little books never experiencing.
I understand what you mean, TD. I pursue knowledge in subjects i am interested in, and let life teach me every day everything else.....My father was intelligencia and was always in a book reading...He knew just about everything about everything,.......I can be that way, but am usually too busy painting or writing or doing something else and just living my life as happily as i can....
that's a might big IF in the op. pursuit of working knowledge of things that are specific to your unique individual personal nature, its hard for me to imagine anything as being more rewarding then that, unless its maybe crafting something you've always wanted to, that this has enabled you to do. of course if its extrinsic rather then intrinsic, that's another matter entirely.
If you read every cookbook and don't know how to cook, what you lack is knowledge that was not provided in those cookbooks. You learned knowledge about cooking through observation; knowledge is not the sole domain of textbooks. Knowledgeable people who are afraid to go after their dreams lack . . . knowledge! About perspective, about how life works, about bravery, etc.
No, you can have the knowledge but not the confidence or will. You can have the knowledge and still be lazy. You can have the knowledge without the experience. I've known many people who have more knowledge than me about fitness yet are still out of shape because they don't apply that knowledge. I don't have the knowledge but the experience and my experience far exceeds their knowledge.
Younger job applicants are often loaded with academic knowledge but have no clue how to do anything useful with it in the real world. I see it all the time. This is an old and well-known problem rooted in the fact that some important skills are nearly impossible to teach in a classroom setting.
To a scientist understanding is an end in itself, rather than the means to an end. There is no such thing as a "failed experiment". Science does not particularly concern itself with whether something is practical or not; rather whether if it is theoretically possible; often involving math with limits tending to infinity.