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Jason Jordan wrote in his aim comment, "convince me that life is worth living." It made me think, less because I think I can convince him, and more because I wondered why I myself was convinced. I haven't always felt that way, but I do feel that way today.

I think religion used to provide a lot of answers for us. When you accept that you are part of a master plan, that every suffering is a test of your faith and every joy is a reward for your devotion, when you are led and taught that every moment is a revelation of God's design, your life has pre-programmed meaning. It's a little like traditional broadcast television, where they pick the content for you, and your interaction with it is to like it or not like it. The parallel in this admittedly weak analogy is the postmodern age, where religion has fallen out of many lives, and the easy answers it provided to questions of meaning, identity, and community are replaced by an ala carte menu of friends, philosophies, and personal goals. Here our television analogy offers on-demand content, hundreds of channels, and an inane volume of programming available on DVD and the web. We can pick and choose what suits us best, but with this freedom comes an individual responsibility to master the profligate options available, to navigate this huge sea of options on our own.

In a postmodern life, we are free to invest our lives with the meaning we have selected, but we are also burdened with finding meaning that we believe in. The fallback position is still religion, but that can be difficult to fall back to, if you've spent a lot of time talking yourself out of it.

I place a great deal of importance here on meaning. To me, meaning is really where we derive our satisfaction from, how we arrive at a sense of identity, how we measure our soul's progress. The nice thing about religion is that it sets a difficult goal, one that everyone can aspire to, and one that can be consistently and constantly honed and refined. When the meaning of your life is to be as perfect as possible, you spend a life striving to hit that impossible mark, and everyone can realize success at it without jeapordizing the social order. Furthermore, success is personal; external forces can tempt and distract, but not remove your capacity for moral decision-making. When the meaning of your life is the creative works you produce, when the meaning is your success in your career, when the meaning you put into your life is less personal, and less universal, it becomes harder to measure your success. Worse still is when you don't have a meaning, when you have no yardstick to measure yourself by, and no guiding principle to set your goals by.

So what's the meaning I've adopted? I think it's simple experience, to be aware and present in the experience of life, to understand what goes on around me. That seems to me, to be the reason for my life: so that the life-track I run through reality can be experienced. It sounds sort of stupid when I say it, but I think that's what I believe in, and it works for me: there are so many things I want to do and see.