My grandpa always says that he is happy to be alive because life is a gift and that we should rejoice – I agree with him, I believe he is onto something very important and that there is a huge shortage of people thinking like him.
At the highest level, there are two approaches to being alive:
- Life is suffering
- Life is a gift
Life is suffering is essentially a victim mindset and it’s intellectually easy – I have been put on this planet without purpose, blablabla… It is boring, it reduces vitality.
Life is a gift is the opposite – it is a heroic mindset, it is not a given, but working on it increases vitality; I also tend to think about it as somewhat Dionysian.
A short summary of how I think about the two mindsets:
| Life is suffering | Life is a gift |
|---|---|
| victimized | heroic |
| passive | 5th force of nature, agentic |
| no intrinstic meaning | deep intrinstic meaning |
| suffering by lifeless Universe | gift by God |
| defensive | offensive/exploratory |
| reduces vitality | overflows with vitality |
| self-fulfilling prophecy | demands action |
| ~Apollonian | ~Dionysian |
On a tangent, my down-to-earth friend A. has had a very interesting take:
Maybe the key is that your life is a gift, but not to you, to the people who know you