Paralysis

How do you fill up days, when life is more lived between the pages of a book, enveloped in the glow of a screen, the silence of mind- than in what is the best approximation of reality our senses can muster?

A full two months now, where I cannot even attempt to concoct a purpose to my being, any sort of meaning to my days. So much philosophical waxing on about how the life of the mind, the intellectual stimulation that comes from seeking to understand the cosmos- provides a true grounding, helps to create a true life. But doesn't meaning require an external validation, a feedback loop, another person? Perhaps not, but how often does it feel so.

I read a definition of meaning that implies it is two-fold: an experience one gains subjective joy from, but also is deemed of value by- someone. Social norms seemed to be the lingua franca of the philosopher, but there are also higher values or drives, which an isolated story can serve to further. This gives those narratives meaning, in the overarching fabric created by the atomistic pursuits of self-fulfillment. Self-improvement. Self-recreation. These endeavors are surely more lonely though, than meaning found from a network, a connection spiraling out like a spider web. Granted, sometimes more like the den of a brown recluse. But can these experiences truly be meaningful if they die along with the neurotransmitters, the neural network in a single mind? Can attempting to use philsophy and understanding to take in, the watch, to absorb, rather than create, to scupt that outer world, come to mean something? And if it can, why is it sometimes such a restless loneliness, and yet other times, particularly in memory, such a cleansing isolation?