We all need a meaningful life, right?
That sounds appealing and everyone among us wants to make our limited time on earth as special and legendary as we can.
We want to do something spectacular while we’re here, and what is more extraordinary than changing the world itself?
You Are Changing the World
Hi, this is a personal venture in the form of a blog series dealing with a seemingly-impossible-to-solve issue of the universe: changing the world. We all want to change the world and some people told me that it was impossible, that no individual could change the world, that I might as well stop trying to pretend to be a god, and instead try to just change myself for once.
That wasn’t gonna happen, of course. I was going to change myself, but I was also going to change the world. I was going to make a better world by living a meaningful life and trying whatever was in my capacity to help anyone else live a meaningful life too.
I think you can change the world, as an individual, if you try to make your life a little more meaningful every single day, if you try to make a better world from what you have.
Meaning adds value to everything, right? Every word is valuable in the dictionary because it has a meaning, because it can be used for anything and everything, and it all depends on the person using it.
The same goes for us. Our lives.
Our lives have meanings, all different meanings and whatever comes out of it all only depends on what we make it to be. We can make it change for the better right now if we want to.
So let’s talk about a meaningful life, and how to actually add more meaning to our life.
Why our lives need more meaning?
This isn’t just for fun, and it isn’t a kind of luxury that only the dreamers and the artists are given. This is our life. This is the only time we’re ever going to spend on this earth as a highly-intelligent, civilized, interactive species. As human beings. We’ll never be here again. This won’t be the same ever again.
Life is singular. It’s momentary.
I am in love with this line from The Illiad
Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
Homer, The Iliad
Since we’re here for just a short period of time, we’re actually supposed to do the best we can with whatever we have. We have to live and laugh and fall in love and help others and be kind, and enjoy every single moment, and follow our dreams and do something nice everyday, and make ourselves and those who love us proud.
Ths is how life is supposed to be lived.
Life actually became a little more meaningful during the pandemic that hit us out of nowhere in the year 2020. We suddenly realised how important everything was that we’d been taking for granted.
We need to live a meaningful life with the understanding of how precious it is, and how…how temporary it is.
How to Live a Meaningful Life?
This is a compiled list of 25 genuine yet practical and powerful ways in which you can make your life more meaningful and positive.
1. Try to be better than the people who hate you.
Trying to get back at the people who dislike you and make it obvious? Not a good option.
If you kick at dirt, it lands on your face.
What’s a nice way to say it more politely?
Everyone’s battling their own hard choices and decisions in life, and if someone’s being mean to us, we should let it go bevause they probably have it got it worse than us.
Whatever works for you, just don’t stoop as low as the people who hate you. You gotta be better than all the haters, you know.
2. Don’t give up, whatever your dream is.
We live a more meaningful life because we follow our dreams. We act and think according to what our desires and wishes are and that is what gives us a leverage over other species. We are thinkers of choice. Your dreams have made your life more meaningful, despite anything else you have thought.
Never give up on your dreams and sometimes the hope for a brighter future is exactly what we need to keep going.
3. Don’t hurt someone intentionally.
Don’t hurt someone intentionally. Even if they have. Hurting them back is ultimately going to make you feel more unsettled (only if you’re a good person. Haha. Kidding. Sorta.)
But I’ve realised that in the long run, none of these small things matter. Not even close to. I think many of us would just prefer to let it go or in the worst case, bottle it up within, instead of directly and intentionally hurting someone else or wishing harm upon them.
And revenge is definitely not going to help us make our live more meaningful and make this a better world.
4. Dance. Sing for someone.
Here comes the really simple part of life.
Dance, even if no one’s watching, even if someone is. Dance in the kitchen, in your bedroom, on the street, in the subway. Move your body. Release dopamine. Or sing for someone, if you don’t know how to dance (like me.) Sing a song for someone especially. These small things in life are the most meaningful ones.
5. Plant trees.
Best use of time. If you’re unsure about what you want to do with your time, plant trees. Or water trees. The effort is never going to go wasted.
6. Challenge the bad and the injustices
Challenge it whenever you see it, in the subway, in the restaurant, in the garden, in your neighborhood, in the school or in your workplace.
Challenge it, whatever it is, racism, sexism, homphobia, transphobia, ageism, or any other form of prejudice.
Speak up. Raise your voice. Yell. Just challenge. Many times we’d end up seeing that just calling someone out on seomthing obviously wrong they did is bound to humiliate them in the public and they’re going to step back.
If they don’t, we’ll, you’re up for a fight. Never back down. We are here to make our lives more meaningful, not snatch the value of someone else’s from them.
7. Get educated
Seriously, get educated. Don’t just get schooled.
Getting ourselves an education would be one of the best steps we’d ever take in the direction of the life we’re striving to build for ourselves. Learn new things every day. Question everything. Be curious.
Implement ideas and theories. Manage your time and space. Grades don’t matter; what you learnt during the school year does.
Even after you’ve educated yourself adequately, don’t stop learning.
Once you’ve educated yourself adequately, help someone else get educated to. That brings us to the next point.
8. Help one person at a time.
You can’t possibly help every single person who’s ever needed your help. You won’t be able to until you build wealth for yourself and utilize it to help others. Until then, you’ve got to deal with one starfish at a time.
There is this starfish story that has moved me in a very powerful way, and also given me food for thought regarding my role in changing the world.
Help one starfish at a time. One by one.
9. Lead for change.
The secret for living a meaningful life lies in the power to lead others towards a sense of purpose and positivity. This gives us confidence in ourselves, making us believe that we are not only helping ourselves but also helping others do something better for their lives.
This is what leading feels like. Self-accomplishment. Self-respect. If you want to learn how to live a more meaningful life, teach it to others. Teachers do change the world, you know.
Self-respect partly comes from social welfare, when you admire yourself because you helped someone else. This is you changing the world.
10. Don’t spend your life doing a job you hate.
The reason this point is here is that this is so common. So many people in the world—who didn’t possibly figure out their dream at the right time, or alternatively had someone else influencing their career decisions—go through this dilemma because they feel that now is too late to start all over again.
It isn’t. Whatever you might think, it’s never too late to start living the life you’ve always wanted.
Dont spend the rest of your life doing a job you hate, working for a boss you don’t want, helping them build their dreams when you don’t even get to experience yours. Act now.
11. Forgive and forget
Some people might ask you to forgive but never forget. That might work too, because this world is to untrustworthy and you never know when the same person might betray you twice. It’s better to never forget.
But if we look at it from the philosophers’ point of view, we see that forgiving might make our heart a little lighter but the burden of never forgetting will still be imprinted on it.
To restore our mental peace and calmness, to not feel the burden of the past on our shoulders anymore and instead let it go, the best option anytime would be to forgive everything and forget everyone, whatever they did to you. Forget the circumstances, remember the lessons. That’s more important, right?
12. Take risks
Risks are an essential part of life. We take risks every single day, whatever we are doing. And rightfully so, risks add more value to things we could’ve taken for granted.
And though some people might be averted to risks, might not want to take them so impulsively and frequently, I believe in taking risks. After all, we’re all here to risk our hearts, aren’t we?
Taking risks adds the sense of newness to life, the thrill we all search for directly or indirectly.
13. Start journaling.
Journaling has always fascinated me like nothing else. Journaling is a great way to start living a meaningful life. Just my luck that I never seem to have enough time to do it properly. I want to start an art journal, and a bullet journal, and one in which I’ll write all my feelings and thoughts (no, it won’t be a diary).
So if you want to live a meaningful life, just open up Pinterest, search for journal prompts, grab a fancy looking notbeook (not a diary, guys.) And start. Just start. You don’t need to be perfect, that isn’t what a journal is about.
But you do have to be honest, because that is exactly what a journal is about.
14. Stop wasting your life away.
This seems pretty obvious and generic, but in truth it’s true that so may people among us are wasting our lives away, and not just on terms of jobs or such. We’re actually handing our lives out to someone else, giving someone else the remote control of our emotions, our moods, how our day goes and everything like that.
We feel like we have so much time, like we’ll do everything one day, but in truth all the time that we spend worrying and overthinking and planning and planning and fearing and watching old TV shows, all of that time is going to waste.
We need to take our control back, to understand what matters after all and only put our attention to it.
15. Give compliments
Not just compliments, give genuine compliments. Help someone else live a meaningful life too. Teach them how to live a meaningful life. Give them the kind of compassion you might expect from someone else. Spread love and genuine kindness towards everyone because we all lack it nowadays.
Even if it’s a stranger, even if you don’t know them, if you want to say something to them, or just feel like they might use a few positive words, don’t hold back. That’s how you make the world change for the better, by doing unnecessary actsiof kindness.
Wanna know some positive words that might make someone’s day. I’ll help you!
16. Try to leave a person in a better mood than they were in when you met them
This is awfully specific. And important. Many times we see someone happy and cheerful and then we foolishly say something that ends up hurting hem and now they aren’t the same happy and cheerful anymore.
Yeah, very common in my case, at least.
I think we need to make sure that our words don’t have a lasting negative impact on anybody that might hamper their mood from good to very bad.
This includes ourselves. Speak kind words to yourself too.
If someone talked to you the way you talked to yourself, would you remain their friend? Think again.
17. Pick up trash even if it’s not yours.
This is a good sign to know that you are happy with what you’re doing. Picking up trash to keep the environment clean and healthy can make anyone feel that they’re doing something good for the society, however small the deed may actually be.
So pick up the trash you see, even if it’s not yours to begin with, even if it’s just to feel good about yourself. If someone throws some garbage in front of your eyes, make sure to pick it up on their behalf. Feels weirdly satisfying when you see the ashamed look on their faces.
18. Be selflessly kind.
I think this applies to every place, everything, everyone. Be selflessly kind.
Love unconditionally. The best kind of help you can give someone is by expecting nothing in return, by doing it quietly so that no one even knows you’re doing it, except the person you’re lending a hand to. Kindness makes a better world, you know.
19. Don’t hate
Hate is another word for straight-up poison. I know that’s a huge metaphor, but I truly feel that hatred for someone is only ever going to eat you up from within and rot the humanity inside you. It’s never ever going to bring anything good.
And yet we are seeing so much of hatred and war all around that it makes me again doubt if anyone among is actually living a meaningful life or not.
20. Listen more than you act.
Listen to the meaning of things or words, of actions, of choices. Listen more than you act or speak. Sometimes the image that is on the surface is not the true image at all and thus you end up acting the opposite of how you should have.
Before you form any opinions, or decide something, or say something in anger, listen keenly so that you don’t regret anything you then decide.
21. Recycle
We’re back at the environmental issues again.
Recycling seems to be a big solution to the problems we face in our climate and environment and yet only less than 20% of waste is recycled annually, with the remaining 80% becoming part of landfill sites. My school curriculum makes us waste so much paper in the preparation of a term project (for quite baseless reasons, I must tell you) and I can only imagine the negative impact of all of these wastes combined.
We need to encourage more recycling. We need to learn how to recycle paper, and use it again. Creativity comes from the bare minimum, I believe.
We should also only make use of recyclable products to ensure that nothing we do is indirectly and inevitably harming our environment or sustainability in the long run.
22. Eat less meat.
Or I’d suggest, go vegetarian. Or better yet, vegan. But since so many people in the world seem to be dependent on meat for their staple diet, it seems impractical and against the basic foundations of this blog post to ask for such a favour.
It’s better to just ask everyone to eat less meat. Think about it, somewhere, some animal had to die so that you could taste this amazing, soft, perfectly fried piece of lamb. At least think about that, because hundreds of millions of animals get slaughtered for meat everyday. That’s alarming.
Select a meatless day.
23. Be more aware of what people around you are feeling
As I said in point #1, everyone around us is fighting their own battles and probably have as much on their plates (with different factors, of course) as we have on ours. We should be less in our own worlds and more aware of what the people around us might be going through.
This would surely make us feel a little more better about how we are helping someone else deal with life problems and maybe aiding them in building a meaningful life and a better world.
24. Donate to charity
Of course, if you want to make yourself a little more meaningful life, donating to charity and other NGOs is one of the best options to do that. You must’ve known that JK Rowling lost her billionaire status for donating to charity. She also kind of made my childhood a little more meaningful by writing her novels.
If you ever find the right means, as in enough money to fund some organizations that work for this exact cause—helping everyone live a more meaningful life, then you should donate to them without a doubt. It’s one of the best things you can ever do.
Very few people get this opportunity in their lives.
25. Read
Read some of the most amazing books ever written, ficiton or non-fiction, whatever your genre, author or writing style is. Just read. Read books that have, or are changing the world.
It is one of the best habits you will ever develop and it will help you gain so much more knowledge and generate new ideas by staying creative and educated.
Conclusion
Did you notice that almost all the ways that told us how to live a meaningful life were actually not just about turning yours into a meaningful life, but about helping others live in a better world too? It was all about helping someone else. What does this mean?
We are social beings. We interact and make friends (and enemies) and love each other (as surprising as it sounds.) We think for everyone.
We not only make our lives more meaningful, we make lives meaningful for others around us too. We care by sharing. This is what changing the world is all about.
Learning to live a more meaningful life, being kind, and finding your starfish.
Kudos. If you liked this post and want to make a better world, I’m with you. Accompany me on this amazing, fulfilling journey to change the world by become a part of my blog series My Formula for Changing the World. Welcome aboard, soldier!
