tonight's what creates a sense of meaning in life? What creates feelings of a meaningful life? What creates significant experiences that deep fulfillment or a sense that our life is mattering and meaning something beyond mere survival. When people talk about what is a meaningful life, my first proposal is that we're not referring to meaning in the sense of a sign.

For instance, the green light means go, red light means stop or yellow light means

proceed with caution. The word yes means I agree. The word no means I disagree.

In those cases, all of those signs

I just mentioned are hollow and empty.

They're just word, the word yes is just a sound that comes out of my mouth but you interpret that sign as

meaning I agree but we don't want our life to be a simple and all of our experiences to simply be a

lifeless sign that points to something outside of itself at least I don't want want all my life to simply be a bunch of words

that amassed to some kind of meaning outside of that essentially point to something else.

So I don't believe that we're using the normal understanding of the word meaning,

when we talk about what creates a meaning in life or meaning full life.

It's not that we view our life as some kind of empty sign that points to some message outside of itself.

I'd also propose that when we talk about what creates a sense of meaning,

we're talking about something beyond the mere satisfaction of our biological urges, which are to keep going

for some people to procreate, to survive to and to reaccumulate resources.

I don't think that anybody looks back

on points in their life and find that it was particularly meaningful simply because they got out of bed,

went to work, came home, ate their meals, you know, and simply proceeded to keep themselves alive.

So for the sake of tonight's talk, I'm going to assume that while our biological impulses to survive are important, they don't

create meaning for a sense of significance simply because we survive.

If you disagree I'd like to hear about that.

I'd like to also propose that there's things in life that are purposeful, that give us a sense of purpose and even create feelings of happiness,

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