What did you come up with? It is common to have included things like money and human relationships in your list. However, if someone has a bank account balance of $0, are they less developed than a millionaire? What about someone who lacks social capital, like a hermit? The problem with things like money and human relationships is that they are measures of the external environment. You could have been born into wealth, or be a celebrated individual, but at the same time be deeply dissatisfied. If leveling up implies a sort of progress, each of us are unique, and our set of values may be too idiosyncratic to generalize across all humans. After all, we are trying to define what it means to level up as a human, not as Jamie in Western culture middle-class suburbia. Perhaps you included more values as well — things like meaning and purpose. But can we reduce what we value to be general enough so that it can apply to all areas of life? Did your list include knowledge, health, or happiness? If so you are on the right track. What if I told you that the basis of our self-development can be reduced to the pursuit of knowledge, health, happiness without including meaning or purpose.
What about meaning though? What is life’s relevance, significance, and value? In the grand scheme of things, it does not appear to have any meaning other than what is attributed to it by the individual. It is up to us to fill the void. However, as a reflection of our changing attitudes and circumstances, the meaning or purpose we apply to our lives does not always seem to stay consistent. If we find a new purpose, it appears arbitrary and subjective whether it is better or worse than the one we had before insofar as it is contingent on the overall satisfaction it can provide us. So while it can still be argued that the search for meaning is important, whatever we find is deeply personal and only relevant as a tool to alleviate suffering and increase happiness. For example, fostering family relationships can bring meaning to one’s life insofar as it brings joy. But if it brings misery, then we often feel trapped and have wishes that those relationships would end. My goal here is to provide an alternative to this dilemma, a meta-meaning. Namely, if there was a meaning to life, what would it look like? We can start by looking towards someone accomplished to see if we can gather some information about what this meta-meaning looks like.
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said “The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer”. To paraphrase, the whole point of life is to level up.
We can look to evolution as an example.
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