Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something

our good friend Victor Frankl said life isn't something it's an opportunity for something and I wanted to title the video that this week because I think it's very appropriate to what we wanted to talk about today especially in the way that this saying of his could be misinterpreted so horribly to almost mean the opposite of my he what he meant and my point today is that we do often interpret this almost in the opposite way of he how he meant it we're so concerned with squeezing every bit of utility and use and profit out of

each hour of our lives that we think this is how we're taking that opportunity this is how we're trying to make life something when in reality Victor Frankl did not mean that Victor frle is a holocaust Survivor and he went through the entire Holocaust losing everything he had ever owned and his pregnant wife and his career everything everything he had every he was up to that point he lost everything including almost the hope that he would ever come out of it alive and in there he really met the true meaning of life which was to

give the life meaning he famously said we cannot ask what the meaning of Life Is Life asks us what the meaning of life is and during those terrible years life did ask him what the meaning of life was and he had to come up with an answer and because he had to come up with his own answer his answer is the most meaningful one that anyone could have ever given him and of course never could have given him and that's what he means that life isn't something but an opportunity for something is that it's an

opportunity for meaning and no one else can give us that meaning other than ourselves and no one else can take it away from us other than ourselves and we talked about in the past videos we've been talking a lot about time living in the present that the present moment is the only place where where life takes place that we don't live in the past or the future yet we're so concerned with it and we're so oppressed by it we feel like and I realized just very recently and this is why I talk about these things

because they're happening in my life I don't just talk about them because I think you need to know about them that's one reason but I just talk about what's going on with me currently and um the insights I'm thinking I'm gaining for myself and I just want to share those and the most recent thing for me to realize that how I've been doing the wrong kind of opportunity seeking via life via time was what most of us do which is to use time as a tool to use the present hour and thinking about it in

terms of what can I do now that will maximize my profit in the future and this profit isn't just money it's happiness it's fulfillment it's meaning what can I do now to set myself up in the future to have all the answers that I'm looking for now that I don't know now to have all the meaning that I want now that I don't have now how can I Supply it to my future self how can I use the now for the then and of course to some extent we need to do this of course we

need to set ourselves up even if it's in the most profane little ways of a retirement or anything like that but to the degree that we do it we harm ourselves life passes Us by as we try to make the best one for ourselves and again it's because we use time the time that we have now the the only place in which life takes place the present moment we use it merely as a tool for the future and we use it as a means to an end the problem is that that end will never come

and you might say well the goals that I have now that I'm sacrificing the present time or that I'm using the present time for why would you say that I can never achieve those goals I don't mean that you can't achieve those goals I mean some goals really are just we most of us said goals that are way way too big that we will never achieve but of course it's possible that we could achieve them the thing is even if we do achieve them we will never stop doing this because we don't know how to

stop and because we don't know what to do instead it's almost a gift to us that we don't have anything that we want at least we think so it's a gift that we need to be striving for something it's a welcome excuse to delay our happiness into the future because we know how to deal with that we know how to forgo happiness now with the aim of achieving it in the future and we think all this sacrifice that we're making now of sacrificing literally the present moment the present hour for some for some fulfillment of

a future goal which will bring us all the happiness we could ever wish for this is all we know how to do we don't know what to do if we had all that we wished for now and if we think about it this is not even unnatural for our entire human existence for T tens of thousands of years we were very much and had to be concerned with subsistence every day we had to worry about to some degree what to eat where to stay how to live how to make tomorrow easier and of course most

of us still have to do that to some degree although much smaller but something is changing and it's very recent especially if you look at human history as a whole which in itself is a very small thing but even within that this development of capital that we've had in the last 200 years where we have reserves of things our our standards of living are infinitely higher every decade almost Our Lives compared to someone in the 1600s compared to someone in the 1800s compared to someone now are vastly different even though that entire time those 400

years are almost nothing in our human existence it's a very very small portion of time and it's literally in our genes in our Evolutions to think this way to use the now for the then to use the present for the future but what's happening now thanks to our technology and our economics our innovation science is that more and more people are having to work less and less they don't need to work as much to achieve the same standard of living and the question is the more freedom we get the more we need to know what

to do with that and you might say oh I'm far from having to worry about that I still have to work very much I still have to do very much I still have very little security that might all be true but the question is not about the current situation but the question is about our intentions that question does not go away depending on what our current circumstances are after all whether we have it or we don't yet have it we are all striving for Freedom right economic independence being wealthy is freedom having the time to

do whatever one wants is freedom having influence on others is freedom whatever it is that you're striving for it comes out to freedom and that's that's fact for all of us whether we have it or we don't yet have it we are striving we're Desiring Freedom so the big question is what do we intend to do with it with the freedom that we have or the freedom that we're striving for either way it applies this this question applies to everyone what do we intend to do with it and if you need any proof that money

or again freedom in any way is not in itself a gift is not in itself happiness is not in itself the answer to all your problems look around to anyone who already has what you dream of having look at all the people who don't have to work anymore who have more money than they could spend more time than they ever wished for and you see them still being unhappy you see them still being resentful frustrated angry and you even see them not valuing that freedom anymore it's become a curse to them they don't know what

to do with it they didn't know what to do with it when they were striving for it they don't know what to do with it now that they have it and they will and now actually it's much more difficult for them to find that answer because they have no limitations anymore all the behaviors all the ideas all the ways of thinking about life all the ways of dealing with people and dealing with situations that are interpreted as bad or good all the unexpected surprises of that life throws at anyone regardless of the amount of Freedom

that they enjoy they now have a harder time learning to deal with those things because they have no restrictions it's much easier to become Frugal when one has very little money to spend in the first place it's much easier to not get carried away with all the possibilities one can have to do with their time and to do with their resources when one doesn't have that time and those resources at least not yet and that's why in our current striving for more freedom we are in the best position to prepare ourselves to finally get what

we wish for we're going to have to figure this out as as Humanity as a society we are essentially animals that are that have evolved to think as time as a commodity as time as an opportunity as time as an investment which is exactly what keep us from living in the present moment again there's a degree to that being of course necessary and useful there's no one arguing about that but the amount of Freedom that we would like to have we are unable to have currently or we are unable to enjoy it currently because we

will always have the mindset of how do I use this for more profit how can I maximize this to get more out of this and whenever we treat the current moment the present hour as a way to maximize all that is good about it in the future for more gain we sacrifice that hour for the next and the next hour for the one after that and so on and so forth until we realized we've never really used any of it we've always kept investing it for some future much much greater happiness and much bigger freedom

and that time either never came or when it did come we didn't know how to do with it we didn't know what to do with it because we had the one mindset of always thinking for the future and we were unable to shift from striving to having so my wish for you this week is that you think about what to do with what you're striving for and what to do with the amount of it that you already have if you keep sacrificing the present hour for the next you will have none of it to yourself

and if you keep sacrificing the things that you enjoy doing now for no other purpose other than for its enjoyment if you keep giving that up to be able to do more of it in the future you're giving up the very thing for which you are working for if you like to read if you like to paint if you like to listen to music if you like to make music and you give up on that so you can truly do it in the future you're defeating the purpose you're giving up for which you are working

towards and that doesn't come back once we lose our habit once we lose our appreciation once we lose our enjoyment in these things we can't get that back we could make all the money in the world and have all the time in the world to finally go back to these things for which we had given up to do the work that grand granted us all this time and money to do those things now we have lost all appreciation we can't go back to that we have given it up now we don't enjoy it anymore now

we're sitting there thinking well there's always more I can do who says this is it there will always be that guilt and that shame that comes from not so-called maximizing the potential of the present hour for future goals once we give up art once we give up the present moment once we give up kindness and once we give up doing the right thing just for the sake of doing the right thing in order to maximize our ability to do these things in the future we have defeated the purpose we have given up that for which

all this striving and all this work and all this fighting is for so in this way life isn't something it's the opportunity for something