You mean, like we all get together for tea?
I am just going by my experience that some people are hedonists, who Think that nothing ultimately matters and simply aim for pleasure. Some of these people seem rather happy to me. Not all the time. But generally chipper. They do have trivial meaning: getting more Money means more (drugs, prostitutes, partying, etc.) But you can replace the Word ‘means’ her with ‘entails the option of’.
I can’t prove this to you online, but I hope that you’ve perhaps encountered such people. To me they come off a bit shallow.
Now there can be people in their circle of friends who follow the same Lifestyle but who are not happy, or much less so. So you can’t simply focus on behavior. But I have encountered people like this in snowboarding risktaking sport circles. In rave type circles, in beach bum type circles. I have also met a stock broker or two who seem to fit this really well. I mean sociopath, ta boot, hedonists with these latter. No guilt, generally up and positive, energized, moving towards the next Buzz.
I don’t think I suggested that everyone’s meaning had to be the same, and if I did I am sorry for that. But meaning entails movement towards, in the absence of meaning we cease to move. Ultimately, to me, meaning entails a “connection to”. Even a new born baby has meaning, even though she cannot verbalise it intellectually. I think we, as humans, tend to over-emphasize meaning as belonging to those who are intellectuals.
No, no. I didn’t take it that way. Just that we could talk about happiness vs. meaning universally. Perhaps some people can live without meaning and be happy, but others cannot.
Well, by that definition then everyone needs meaning. With that definition an amoeba, even water has meaning.
I can’t say I do that. I don’t Think only intellectuals can find meaning important, in fact these Days the trend in intellectuals is to say there is no meaning, at least non-religious ones. You know, packages of chemical Machines utterly determined working their way towards Death in a primarily dead, godless, mechanistic universe as a background model. Nihilism is fairly common amongst intellectuals. But my sense of their nihilism is not based on your very very broad idea of meaning.
I was choosing specific groups, not thinking of them as not intellectuals, but rather as specific subcultures. It is true they are not intellectuals, generally, though the stock brokers included people who went to Ivy League colleges and could spout out all sorts of stuff from the humanities.
There is a sub-culture in intellectuals where everything is ironic, direct meaning is considered a bit gauche, and this is influenced by their take on scientific models of the universe, though these are rarely directly mentioned. Wry, witty, erudite nihilists.