Catching up on some episodes of Heroes last night, and was watching Chapter 18, “Parasite”. This is the one where Nathan confronts Lindeman and Lindeman says to Nathan that he has to choose between a life of happiness and a life of meaning. He explains that to live a happy life you have to live in the present, but to have a life of meaning you have to focus on both the past and the future.
Well, I don’t know about you, but that analysis doesn’t work for me. Happiness, as Jean Kazez explains in her review of three interesting books about the subject, has not only been studied by a wide range of thinkers over the years, but there are a huge number of different opinions about it. Certainly the view that happiness is experienced by being “present” is one of them, but surely happiness can be experienced in reminiscence and recall, and certainly in sweet dreams and fantasies.
Jonathon Haidt, for one is quite clear that happiness is part of the experience of the creation of a meaningful life, and I agree with that. Happiness, meaning, mutually exclusive options? I don’t think so.
Lindeman’s point about a life of meaning spreading out beyond the present was a good one though. I really do think the way we create a sense of self is through the narratives we create about our lives. And all narratives are dynamic, they come from somewhere, to inform what is, and set the trajectories of what might lie ahead. One of my favourite books on the power of narrative in life is “On Stories” by Irish philosopher, Richard Kearney. He says –
When someone asks you who you are, you tell your story. That is, you recount your present condition in the light of past memories and future anticipations
and
Telling stories as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living
In fact, he makes it clear that as meaning-seeking and meaning-creating animals we use story telling to not only make sense of our life experiences but to make life itself meaningful.
So, Lindeman was right about a life of meaning involving an ability to sew together the past, the present and the future, and I suspect it was this, most seductive of options that helped Nathan make his choice.
Like all heroes, we become who we are by the stories we fashion out of our unique and individual ways of experiencing life.
Heroes Not Zombies 
The person who wrote that script has forgotten, that our lives have meaning today, because (in part) of the legends and myths that tie us to the past. All of the tales, and recountings of historic events remind us of what has happened, and what will happen in the future if we do not remember the lessons learned by those in the past. The legends of the past remind us of our ever changing human culture, remind us of timeless values and advise us against countless ways to be a villian. We need these records, to help us find our path in life, not only the way to the future, but to advise us of landmarks in the present that were there in the past.
thank you for that comment KatK – I completely agree. In fact, it’s surely one of the greatest of human characteristics – the capacity to learn from the repeated telling of stories, the great stories, myths and legends
Not to mention the triumphs or mistakes of our forefathers. *smile*
I thought of this conversation while listening to Ziggy Marley’s Tomorrow People. The idea in his song touches on what I was saying, here and elsewhere.
[…] particular religious beliefs, or, at least, to having a sense of meaning, or purpose in life. The books I’ve read about happiness often stress this feature […]