HOPE. The ultimate meaning of LIFE.

“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.”

─ Aristotle

What's the meaning of life? What's the reason for living? What's the essence which keeps us moving forward? Have you ever thought about these kinds of questions? If yes, then you might have come up with a bunch of different answers such as love, freedom, peace, success and so on. However, I would strongly believe that the ultimate meaning of life, the juice of life or whatever you want to name it, is our hope. Hope for a better day in the future. Hope to live, hope to love, hope to give, hope to achieve… Any of us is on this planet at this exact moment to serve a specific purpose. You have a destiny to fulfill, you have a mission to complete. Don't always think about yourself. Think about bigger pictures than yours. Be more spiritual. A hope to do something meaningful to fulfill your life destiny will rescue you from any internal emptiness.

In one of the previous articles, we talked about true happiness which comes up with the fulfillment of your core life values. What it meant was that you have your own blueprint for life which interprets how your life should be in order for you to be happy. If you have read the other articles of Psychologyforhappyliving, I am sure that you know that this interpretation comes from your belief system which you have created for yourself during past years. To put it another way, you have your own story in your mind that keeps reminding you how your life is supposed to be. If you're not there, that could be the starting point of your frustrations and unhappiness. If you are far away from it (from your ideal life), then you might even get higher levels of unhappiness. However, this might turn into a huge problem for anyone, once the person thinks that the situation is out of his control. In other words, he thinks that he can do nothing to make his dreams come true. This is the critical point which he starts to suffer and feels powerless to change his life. I would call this critical point as broken hope. When you lose your hope to achieve your dreams, the life will be meaningless to you. You might see no reason for living anymore. The significance of hope on the life of human beings should never be overlooked. There’s actually an old Persian phrase which says “Man is alive by his hope”.

Then, what should we do to keep our hope for living? And what to do, if we have already lost our hope for living? Losing hope is one of the worst things (if not the worst thing!) that could happen to anyone. However, to fix this issue, you need to either change your blueprint (your story of how your life is supposed to be) or change your life to make your own desired life story. In most of the cases, you need to change a bit of each.

An important point to notice is that happiness would never fall on you by accident. It's your job to catch it. Happiness is a state of mind filled with pleasure. There should be a specific reason for you to be happy. You cannot be artificially happy no matter how hard you try. For example, if I want you to laugh, I need to tell you a joke or do something funny to make you laugh. It doesn’t work, if I either encourage or force you to laugh because it wouldn’t be a real laugh. The harder you force yourself to do something, the harder it becomes. As discussed before in the article about life values, even your life goals would not 100% satisfy your needs in order for you to be happy. For instance, let’s say that having a great car or a big house is one of your life goals in the next year. What do you think happens when you get there? It is guaranteed that in a few days you'll get used to the new situation (your accomplished goal!) and look for another future-oriented goal to fulfill. Think about your current life, how many things are in your life that once they seemed just like a dream to you? We should realize that it's in the nature of human beings to be always ambitious and seek for future-oriented tasks & goals to fulfill. So, once we get to the point of our goal accomplishment we should be prepared for the next steps. Otherwise, we would have been completely saturated at the point of our achievement and we would have lost our motivation for a better day in the future, since there would be no more to get in the coming days! You could consider it as a useful instinct in mankind as it keeps us moving forward to grow. You should also remember that our life goals are mostly manipulated and created in our minds based on the superficial influences that we get from our environments. Hence, even if you achieve those goals, you won’t feel satisfied because it is not fulfilling your true desires.

In order for you to be happy, I believe that you have to meet your core life values & blueprints. You should live on your own terms. It is not what you get that makes you happy, it the way you live, the way you see and interpret your life. That's what makes you happy. So, living your life the way you desire based on your beliefs, values and blueprints will give you a sincere feeling of pleasure and happiness.

How do you define the meaning of your life? How do you define happiness? How do you define hope? Think about your answers to the above questions for a while. 

This is my answer: whatever I do, I must never ever lose my hope & faith in making my future better. I would like to see a meaning behind anything happening in life, even when we’re suffering. Because if there's any meaning in life, there should be a meaning in our sufferings as well. I believe that sufferings are the basis of life which makes us stronger for living. Think about your whole life for a second. Is our life anything but our own interpretations of it? It depends on us to be wise enough to interpret the life in a beautiful & meaningful way that serves us. It is up to us come up with a positive mindset toward life. Life is nothing but our own interpretations of it.

Life is not about me, but about we. Hope to love, to feed your children, to end hunger & war around the world, to protect animals, to protect environment, to save the planet earth, to be useful for your family, friends and society, to achieve what you really want in life. These are just a couple of examples which make us keep moving forward. These are the reasons for living. These are our hopes to live for.

Never stop dreaming. Trust God. Have faith. You’re not in the wrong hands. You’re not in the wrong place. Be faithful and do not lose your hope because that’s the ultimate meaning of life which keeps us moving forward to grow and prosper.

This article has been inspired by the words of Tony Robbins, Joel Osteen and Viktor Frankl.