Action, Project, and Life
OUTLINE
A. What an action is
B. What a project is
C. Life as a project
A. What an action is
An action has different parts
- An intentional conscious desire
- A move done to achieve the conscious desire
- A resulting state
Among all these elements, it is the first element which critically makes an action an action. It has to be intentionally desired by a conscious individual. If a movement is done unconsciously, it falls in a different category and is not action.
B. What a project is
A project
There is one big project: life
Life is a project because
- It is made up of many actions
- All these actions are made for a purpose
- The purpose is always a desired mental state
- It is possible to live a life made up of actions with different desired mental states and resulting mental states
- However, one way of organizing life is using one overarching desired mental state to guide all your actions. Organizing life this way is a way of simplifying a complicated project like life.
C. Life as a project
There are two ways of looking at life
- Unintentional
- Intentional
When you live life without intention, you do things without really thinking about what you want. You still get resulting states because being alive means you act and actions bring about resulting mental and physical states.
However, when you live life intentionally, you define before hand what you want to experience at the end of the action/s you take.
Why is intentionality desirable?
- It makes your thinking simple
- It gives you hope
- It provides meaning to what you do and meaning helps you to survive
- It provides a feeling of control or reminds you that you have something you can control in a world where a lot of things are out of your control. This feeds on your need for freedom.
- It makes you accountable. Knowing what you want means you are responsible for the results of your actions.
When your life is lived intentionally, life is filled with conscious actions. Life is associated with the concept of project. Life can be seen as a collation of different projects or it can also be seen as a single big project, with small projects underneath it, and smaller atomic conscious actions beneath it. When life is seen like the latter, you need a single big purpose, or a single encompassing goal that ties all your actions.
The single big purpose is always a state. It is always experienced. When we say we want something, what we mean is that we want the experience associated with that thing.
Now, it is in the nature of states that they are fleeting. They come but go fast. What's good is that they can always be revisited. When you revisit a state, it is unique but it also has the "state-ness" that drew you to it.
So, purpose and goal is not a final destination. It is a destination, yes, but it becomes important because we want more of it. We want to revisit it.