Page 71 - Liberating Liberals V2

Liberating Liberals
Looked at with compassionate detachment it becomes obvious that humans can pile gigantic amounts of meaning onto the mostly meaningless challenges
of sports. And even further, get huge amounts of meaning from watching other people play these sports on TV — not even in person.
You might say sports are pseudo, tongue-in-cheek meaning. But if many people answered honestly
they’d have to admit that sports are their most intense meaning. Sometimes I feel that way. It may be as
good a meaning as anything else. And for those who find meaning in fantasy sports which are even further removed from any type of reality than “real” sports — more power to them. C’est la freethinking vie.
There are perhaps two great exceptions to the contention that all life is possibly meaningless. That mere existence has primed us with these two meanings provided by evolution: 1. To avoid death, and 2. To reproduce. These drives are so strongly imprinted
on our primate brains that they are almost an innate meaning. Nevertheless, certainly many people have “transcended” the survival meaning and committed suicide. So the avoiding death meaning isn’t absolute.
Also, avoiding death doesn’t solve much of the meaning quandary. So you successfully avoid death. What next? What meanings are you going to find between now and when you can no longer avoid death?
The second innate meaning, reproducing, is such
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