11d ago (edited) in Words of Wisdom
Belonging And Meaning (5 mins)
When I was 20 years old, I quit my placement year to pursue this venture. One morning in May 2023 I recorded my first video about “What is Happiness?” I’ve never really aimed to be happy, but someone close to me at the time was making happiness their only goal. They focused solely on how they felt, and in doing so, this seemed to make them even sadder, and the depth of their despair even deeper. I wanted to learn about happiness so I could help them, so I researched it. I found that in researching, and in trying to help, I was achieving a sense of happiness. It was a meaningful pursuit.
Firstly, I think happiness is the wrong goal. If you aim for happiness, you’re immediately focusing on the gap between your current mood and ‘happiness’. In other words, you focus on a deficiency. The same way, if you focus on attractiveness, you focus on your defects and feel ugly. If you focus on intelligence you always feel stupid. Us humans seem to have a cruel way of instilling our own insufficiencies through focusing on some arbitrary aim. To echo a phrase I shared in that first video: "There are times in your life when you’re not going to be happy, then what are you going to do?"
I’ve been lucky in that happiness has never really been my goal, I’ve always been taught to work towards something. Naturally, I aim to make my friends happy. I aim to make my family happy. Despite not being in a relationship, I even aim to make the future Mrs King happy. In serving these people who matter to me, I seem to find happiness.
My first video was inspired by Emily Esfahani Smith’s Ted Talk, who named belonging, purpose, transcendence and story telling as the 4 pillars of meaning. However, belonging is the topic of choice today.
The person close to me at the time didn’t have a sense of belonging, the only belonging either of us had seemed to be the relationship we shared. As such, I drifted from good friends, even loosing some. My sense of belonging diminished, and only when said person left my life did I start to rekindle ties with friends and family, even forming belonging in new places like the gym. I was once again able to connect with and feel accepted by those important people around me.
Belonging is supposedly derived from being in relationships where you can be who you are intrinsically, I hadn’t noticed I’d been suppressing who I was for a very long time. Being able to be myself around the people I care about has been like a breath of fresh air and trying to put the feeling into a sentence just cannot do it justice.
Belonging is perhaps the most comforting feeling. It is the essence I look for in my friendships, my employment and my family.
I guess belonging boils down practically to this:
1. Be careful who we get our sense of belonging from, and who gets theirs from us since attachment and habituation can act as a sort of pseudo-belonging, but real belonging is only achieved when the people around you have fostered an environment where you can be yourself.
2. Be intentional with who you spend your time with. Our time is finite so anyone who is making us feel less than ourselves should be questioned. Ideally, we construct our lives so that we feel the sense of belonging in every facet: At work, at home, with friends, with family, in relationships, in our communities.
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Belonging And Meaning (5 mins)
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