HW 30

Where does the emptiness that so many people feel inside come from? This emptiness inside of people that makes us feel incomplete or insignificant. We all have the desire to fill or cover up our hole of emptiness but why?

Maybe this sense of meaninglessness and emptiness comes from knowing that we are all inevitably going to DIE. "There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow." Ecclesiastes 1:11 . Knowing that you are going to die in my opinion is very strong motivation to want to make one’s life meaningful. Knowing that we are “temporary” beings pushes us to want to make something out of our lives. We then turn to playing certain main character roles in our lives/stories to substitute for the emptiness and the fact that we are going to die. William Shakespeare said “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Meaning that we go through life playing a character that either pretends to be cool to fill the hole of emptiness inside of us or worries about how to live life but in none of that will matter because we’ll just end up dying. It will all be over but for the time being we are focused on satisfying the emptiness and meaninglessness by creating self importance and getting others to make and think that we are important so that we feel significant.

Some philosophers believe that the stem of our loneliness comes from God. Religion adds meaning to some people's lives and they believe that having a relationship with God can and will cure the loneliness and emptiness they feel inside. German philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich argues that "Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life." To have meaning and a purpose in life is about being connected to God. Without this connection some feel like they are meaningless and don't have a purpose in life. I think that people just want to feel like their living for a reason and feel significant in any way possible.

Philosopher Fraud believed that our emptiness comes from "the separation from the mother" . The separation we as children experience from our mothers when we realize that we have to compete for her love and attention when all of it is directed onto the father. We then begin to feel a disconnection from our mother. Which in return makes us feel all alone and like we don't matter to her. The mother is separate from us whose attention is not only fixed on us. I think that we long to be nurtured, we want to be loved , cared for and taken care of. When we feel like were missing those things in our lives we feel incomplete. Then we start looking for methods to cover up / hide it from ourselves and the world.