Seek A Meaningful Life And Happiness Will Follow

Everyone faces this motivational question. You probably have guessed it by now, but these illustrations and examples introduce a new concept. Here is the next story: 

Two beautiful girls graduated from high school and searched for the good life. The responsibilites of parenthood soon fell upon Wilma. The other, named Sue, had a talent for art and design and found she could create, sew, and sell fashoinable clothes to "high- end" and very glamorous people.While Wilma struggled with a marriage, she dedicated her life to her children. After a second divorce with her second husband, she cared for her three children. Meanwhile, Sue had one child, but eventually chose to live unattached by marriage. She associated with a fast crowd, having boyfriends, alcohol, and drugs while living in exotic cities. 
    Now they are both old and still good friends. Eventually Wilma found that family and religion provided meaning for her life. She is the most cheerful person you could meet, filled with gratitude for the love and respect she recieves daily from her husband and many children, and even grandchildren. Sue, however was motivated more to seek life's pleasures not the meaning of life. Now she has no husband and only a distant son. Her life is hard now and as her beauty slips, she is trying to give up drinking and worries about the lack of sales and the difficulty of sewing with arthritic hands. If you saw them during their early twenties you likely would have concluded that seeking happienss through pleasure was the way to go. Unfortunately, it is hard to see at a young age that you can find pleasure from seeking a meaningful life, but not a meaning life through pleasure seeking. 

From Freud's Pleasure Principle to B.F.Skinner's Reinforcers The Driving Force in life is said to be hedonistic personal pleasure. It certainly doesn't require a Ph.D. to know that men like pleasure, and like all animals try to avoid pain. 
This fundamental truth was known from day one, and requires little time to recognize that each day you spend time trying to do more pleasurable things and want to spend less time doing things whoch are troublesome, painful, annoying and frustrating. This is a true and correct principle. It could be considered a basic law of human behavior. 
 But we also sometimes know we willingly accept a great dealof pain and difficulties to do something that we might consider meaningful. 
 One winter, you might have shoveled a neighbor's side walk because you thought it was s good thing to do. At the onset you knew and later it was confirmed that your face and fingers would become cold. You had discomfort of putting on and off your boots, and perhaps you even huffed and puffed, and felt muscle strain while exerting yourself. 
 An athlete in training experiences pain in physical workout. A father puts up with much unpleasantry working at a butcher shop in order to send his son or daughter to college. It is not hard to find examples of meaning trumping pain and pleasure. 
 Both living to maximize pleasure and living to find meaning in life and true descriptions of of the human condition. They are opposites, but they both operate in our lives. It is good to live a life of pleasure, even joy, as long as it is a solid and true principle. 
 The desire to first seek meaning and purpose in life is not meant to destroy or replace the pleasure principle, but it could be seen as a higher law. While both motivations are correct, you must choose for your life whether one or the other is more important. You will eventually choose to guide your life by one or the other. Nothing dooms a marriage faster than building it around each partner's personal pleasure. Each partner will soon find that all too often getting their pleasure takes away or interferes with their partner's way of increasing momentary pleasure. The simple word for this is selfihness. On the other hand, a marriage is unequalled in providing meaning and purpose for living, and especially living for another.