What is the purpose of life... and how to live it on Life"s terms?

In my quest to find like-minded people, who want to better humanity, I am watching videos, and am exposed the feelings of the speaker, commentator, or whoever is in the video.

What prompted this article is a bout of weeping... for no reason.

I am sitting here examining the context inside which this happened, and I Have had no reason to be sad, to weep.

So I ask, somewhat late, this usual question: is this mine? The answer is NO. Does this belong to one of my students? no. one of my readers? no. to the speaker on the video? yes.

Now, this was today. But whenever I watch a sales video... or maybe even read a sales email...

I get the feeling of the person who wrote it.
Most often: hope+fear: A perfect prescription for misery. ((

Not all philosophers live on the 13th floor... in fact, almost none of them does... But I wanted to illustrate that I am not the first to see the dynamic aof hope and fear... but looking at it from the 13th floor perspective, the Floor of the Feelings, the interplay is a sign of being trapped... and having no freedom to get what you get... you want what you hope for, or alternately, you get what you are afraid to get... both are debilitating. The only healthy relationship with results is saying: the results are the results, let"s see what they are saying, where they are taking us...

Descartes on the Vital Relationship Between Hope and Fear
“When hope is so strong that it altogether drives out fear, its nature changes and it becomes complacency.”
By Maria Popova



 

Hope — a faculty decidedly different from and far more muscular than optimism — remains our most potent antidote to the passivity and resignation of cynicism. The great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm admonished against the common laziness of optimism and pessimism, but he extolled the counterpoint to both — active hope that empowers us “to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible.”

“Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away,” Rebecca Solnit wrote two generations later in her lucid and luminous manifesto for our grounds for hope and action in dark times. The philosopher Jonathan Lear termed those grounds “radical hope” — the kind of hope that “anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.” But such anticipation of the unimaginable is inherently in constant dialogue with the unknown — with the fearsome possibility of not obtaining the object of hope and with the concomitant potential for despair.

That necessary complementarity of hope and fear in the face of the unknown is what the great French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician René Descartes (March 31, 1596–February 11, 1650), patron saint of reason, explores in a section of The Passions of the Soul (public library) — his final published work, which gave us Descartes on the cure for
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