Existential essentials

[Loren Booda]

Which essentials do you value most in life?

 

[selfAdjoint]

List is major incomplete. Learning, Understanding, Creative Activities, and Contemplation should be on it.

 

[Loren Booda]

Agreed. That's what I get for trying to impose my own values into a list of ten choices for others. Perhaps you all would like to attempt such a list here for yourselves. Feel free.

 

[Jameson]

Hmmm. Memories is a good one. Family, hell I love many of those things. But I guess I would say knowledge is one of the top ones if not the top. Hard to pick just one :)

Jameson

 

[Mirch]

I would choose hapiness, that is the only reason I would do anything, be it learn, have friends etc. etc.
When I say hapiness, I do not mean pleasure or comfort or any of those things. What I mean is that feeling of well-being that you get inside, that full satisfaction with life.

Sometimes I think that people originally do things to make themselves happy, such as attain wealth, for reasons like security etc. But, after a time, they forget why they are actually attaining wealth, and so they can commonly become unhappy because of this.

Just my little theory.

 

[cragwolf]

I think a major omission from this list is: free time. That is, time that you have available to you to pursue whatever it is you wish to pursue. For me, nothing is more important than that.

 

[Loren Booda]

Would free time fall under freedom (another obvious omission) in general?

 

[loseyourname]

Freedom cannot be the most important thing to me, because if I was unfree to do anything other than what I was doing, but I enjoyed what I was doing, I'd be happy. It's hard to trump happiness in principle, but when I look back at my life, I've done plenty of things that made me very unhappy. At times I've even done things knowing they would make me unhappy. I get the feeling that there is some general set of principles by which I live my life, but it's very difficult to figure out exactly what principles compose that set. Learning has always been very important to me. Power in one-on-one relationships is a big motivating factor, but I'm not very power hungry outside of that. Excellence, in the form of doing whatever it is that I do very well and better than my peers, has always been important. Anyway . . .

 

[cragwolf]

Would free time fall under freedom (another obvious omission) in general?

Yes, I would put it in that category, but I'm not sure about other people.

 

[arildno]

And shouldn't uncomplicated and fun sex be regarded as an existential essential?

 

[loseyourname]

And shouldn't uncomplicated and fun sex be regarded as an existential essential?

Given the scarcity of that particular product, I've always considered it a luxury. I'd also like to think that nothing is essential to me that I cannot, in principle, provide for myself.

 

[Mental Gridlock]

There's lots of things you need..

Anti-gravity powered interstellar flying disk.

Laser pistol.

Anal probe.

Cattle mutilation tool-kit.

Telepathy.

English Dictionary.

Spray Gray-in-a-Can.


And that's the list of extraterrestrial essentials.

 

[GeD]

All these essentials are indeed needed by almost all people. However, all such essentials require one thing in order for them to be "owned", "had" or "used". Nothing comes without paying the price in the form of the expenditure of energy/strength - power.