Do You Think True Happiness Can Exist Without Meaning?
How does having a sense of meaning in our existence affect our feeling of happiness? And how will global changes affect the way of life we have known?
In previous generations, it was relatively clear where society was heading, and the individual’s challenge was to find the right career within that familiar picture. Those who succeeded in doing so felt that their existence had meaning and perhaps even attained a certain sense of happiness.
Today, the story has changed completely. Reality is fragile, we live with increasing uncertainty, and no one knows what will happen to them in the next moment. Advanced technologies are entering every area of life, with computers and robots replacing people. Experts estimate that within a number of years, most of the world’s population will find itself jobless.
It is difficult to imagine such a reality because it overturns the world we know. Nevertheless, it seems that it will soon be here. Countries will have to provide their citizens with all their basic needs, there is no question about that, but the greater problem will be how to feel that your life has meaning, how to feel that you are realizing yourself.
Self-realization in the form we have known until now, finding a profession that speaks to you, developing a career, earning a good income, acquiring status symbols, gaining recognition, reaching the top, will become irrelevant. It will become something buried by history.
We will have to sit down together and think about how to reinvent ourselves, both as individuals and as a society.
After some difficult examinations, today’s competitive, egoistic society will develop into an integral, complementary society. There will still be competition, but its nature will be entirely different: Who can do more good for everyone else around them?
A person will feel like an organ in the body of society as a whole, receiving nourishment from the body and giving back everything they can. The feeling of belonging to an integral system will create balance and harmony. No one will restrict others, interfere with them, or seek to build their own success upon someone else’s downfall.
Every individual will feel that they are important to everyone, that the others cannot do without them, that they are truly unique. This will enable each person to realize themselves to the fullest for the benefit of everyone. There can be no greater happiness, nor a greater sense of meaning in a person’s life.
Moreover, through such integral connection, we will become similar to nature as a whole. Nature’s vast system is integral, interconnected, and unified. Everything within it develops through the complementary connection between opposites, creating the magnificent fabric of life. The more we decipher nature’s integral code and learn to adapt all the relationships in society to it, the more we will ascend to a new evolutionary level.
At the height of our development, we will relate to one another with love and giving, and in the depth of the connection between us, we will discover the wholeness and eternity inherent in creation. May we get there quickly, and may we succeed!
Based on "New Life 234 – Happiness and Meaning" with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.