Mission in Life

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I wrote this in instagram but it became too long to post there. Yvonne Bezerra de Mello is a Brazillian educator who specializes in children who fail to learn with standard education because they live with traumas related to war, violence or crimes. Her live was 20 min long to explain why she disagrees with the idea of "I have a mission in life" and why she follows the book "Man's search for meaning" by Viktor Frankl. No translation or subtitles available. She disagrees with the concept of "I have a mission in life" because according to her beliefs every person has more than one talent and to have a mission severely narrows down a person to just one talent.

I’ve read the book about procrastination by Timothy Pychyl and noticed two things. Procrastination is always caused by the negative emotions. The other thing is that we are over preoccupied with time. Clóvis de Barros Filho, a Brazilian educator on philosophy talks about having a life with purpose. Ana Claudia Quinatana Arantes, a Brazilian doctor specialized in aging and palliative care. Mark Rosewater, an american game designer repeats multiple times that “Restrictions breed creativity”. What he does is to solve problems in game design and every problem imposes restrictions of time, space, money, etc. There are multiple restrictions. One example he gives is that it’s much easier to write when you have a deadline and a theme than when you don’t have a deadline or theme.

I try to apply Mark’s lesson on life itself, going beyond game design or sciences. Timothy Pychyl’s book made me think on the following: were life infinite, procrastination would last forever. Had you had a thousand years of life to write a book, you wouldn’t spend a thousand years writing. You’d probably delay until you were close to the end of your life. Neuroscience has explanations for this particular behavior, but I didn’t read about it. Daniel Martins de Barros, a Brazilian psychiatrist, wrote a book called “The good side of the bad side” and negative emotions are often learned the wrong way. The education system often treats the negative emotions as obstacles or hinderances. Can’t they be what moves us forward? Can’t they promote change? This is something I see that athletes and artists have in common. They have to deal with pain.

A life without an end would be meaningless because it would lack a conclusion. Ultimately, every life has a limit of time. One conclusion that I had was: “What would be a world without problems? Or a world without restrictions?”. Such world would dismiss engineers because there would be no problems to solve. Doctors would be dismissed because diseases wouldn’t exist. Nobody would care to study because everything would just work as intended. Nobody would even think about saving energy or water because their supply would be infinite. I think that the fact that life is finite is what allow us to think on doing something before the end. What would be a life without the negative emotions? I think it’d be a life without change and with just one tone. That would also make art impossible to be made. Without variations there would be no seasons of the year, thus, life wouldn’t exist.

PS: I saw procrastination on college. I’d always delay and at least half of all students did it too.