joyful o joyful

i havent really been in the mood for anything serious lately, but today i was thinking about life and was wondering if i even know whether or not there is a meaning or purpose to life or not. it seems like we do things simply as a means for occupying our attention and time, to distract ourselves from boredom, lonliness, meaninglessness, and so forth. we set goals so that we can justify the way we spend our time, and once we reach those goals we make more goals and start a cycle. for example, as it now stands university is just a way for me to know what i'm doing for the next 4 years; to have something to achieve, to have somewhere to go, to create a habit of doing something which i can identify myself with for a period of time. once i'm done university, other things will take up my time and attention, such as a career, a mortgage payment, etc. And with these aspirations which are known to us, we can focus on our goals and not let the meaninglessness of it all infiltrate our minds. It seems like the only time we ever reflect on life is during the down times; the times we have nothing to do, nothing to focus on. That is why when we are bored, when no TV shows will be able to capture the attention of our restless minds, when no book will firmly clasp our mind away from its insistent wandering, we just think. And soon we are quickly dissapointed with the lack of answers to our questions and so we search for stuff to do in order to pass this empty time until we reach a "must" in our schedule, such as a shift at work or a class at school. And so our days are a series of a "must do" action followed by a small period of "empty-passtime" which is then followed by a "must do" and our cycle repeats until the ultimate end, sleep. And perhaps this is what life looks like in the whole spectrum of years. 13 years of pre-college schooling, 4 years of college, then the insurmountable years of work and house payments and family raising and relationship building, all mixed with "waiting" periods in which we wait for our next promotion, our next child, our next job, our next car/house payment, our next grandchild, until the ultimate end that we are waiting for arrives, death.

People try to avoid this outlook on life by saying that certain things give them meaning. its poetry, or its music, or its friendships, or etc. but we can't give meaning to our own lives. its useless; those "meanings" are just distractions from the meaninglessness. If we want meaning we have to search for an absolute, and stop copping out about it.