The measure of life

In the previous post, I talked about emotions and the meaning of life. To add another facet to this conundrum, today's post is dedicated to examining the profundity of one's life. How can we say if we or any human being has led a meaningful life? It's a spot-on obvious answer from a subjective perspective: You are the most suitable and, probably, the only, person to conclude whether you've led a meaningful life.

But as a common practice, when we put paths of life into comparison, is there any appropriate way to benchmark and compare the profundity of each life? I don't have an answer to this, but still, I'd like to offer my perspective. So let's break this down into two ends of a spectrum of emotions: positive and negative emotions.

It's quite easy to know when you're happy - spontaneous smiles, eagerness to share that joy with others, or simply the acknowledgement that you've accomplished a goal. But is happiness in one occasion more significant than in another? And is one person's happiness more significant than another's? Subjectively, I think yes. We can benchmark that based on the significance of the events that instill emotions in that person. Maybe it's an achievement after an arduous, painstaking journey. Maybe it's the reunion with long faraway beloveds. Those might be more significant than getting a high score on a 15-minute test that one didn't study much. But calibrating positive emotions requires a thorough understanding of what role the event plays in a person's life.

The same principle applies for comparing negative emotions. But, to me, the process requires deeper complexity for how we deal with negative emotions. While negative emotions have their own bright side, they might still evoke self-centeredness. Right at that moment, all we feel is the entirety of negative emotions, how it encompasses all facets of our lives, and how ironic it feels to have to interact with people who are not experiencing the same emotions.

I used to have this experience of grappling with my own emotions while desperately trying to prove that my emotions were more extreme and, thus, should be taken more care of. Nobody can be in anyone else's shoes to fully experience how each feels. What I've gradually learned is to treat each and everyone's emotions and experience with their uniqueness. There are previous experiences that shape how we feel; there are influencing factors that may add the depth of emotions as well.

To put all emotions imaginable throughout a person's life into a scale, one can do that. We can measure the significance of events and their impacts on emotions. Feelings, intensity, and authenticity would have faded away when we reminisce those events, possibly somewhat distorting the accuracy of evaluation. But emotions are not meant to be compared anyway and, thus, should be treated with lightheartedness.

But to measure lives of different individuals is a whole another level of comparison. To do so might actually require a thorough understanding of their entire upbringing to rationalize the impacts of events on even one single emotion. Yet, at times, I think it's a possible thing to do - through the cliche of how one has created impacts on others. But that's the story for another post.