Previous two articles tried to establish that order creation is the ultimate core definition and meaning of life. Purpose of this article is to bring home this hypothesis to daily life and implications of this concept to how we should live a meaningful life.

At the core of the process of life, order creation is autonomous and automatic. We know of this autonomous process as Evolution. Evolution is the algorithm that is applied at the genetic level to create increasingly sophisticated information management system for creation of kinematic (or non kinematic — plant life) self replicating machines. So over time life fulfills it’s purpose in two ways:
Increase order by having increasing numbers of living organisms ( population growth)
Increase sophistication of each member of the of the specie over time ( survival of the fittest) to ensure continuation and growth of the specie.
As you will notice the above two goals of life are performed automatically by all living things, animals, plants and all lifer forms of living including us.

So at a very basic level by just living and procreating we are fulfilling the most basic meaning of life. However if we stop at this level our life will be basically as meaningful as an animal — not destructive but if you are reading this article hopefully you aspire to live a more meaningful life than a moth. The question that this article intends to answer is how to go beyond this level in living a rich and meaningful life.

In the course of human history many individuals have created more order and organized the world around us better than their peers. We call these people leaders of different disciplines or creators of disciplines — philosophers, political leaders, scientists, businessmen, writers, musicians, artists, engineers. For example Aristotle masterful effort in organizing human knowledge and structured pursuit of truth guided scientific thought for almost two thousand years. His contribution to creation of structured progress was a higher level creative action compared to his peers who just lived their lives and died with their offspring as their only contribution to the universe. Since we identify creative action as the fundamental meaning of life, in our terms Aristotle lived a more meaningful life than many of his peers. Similarly Beethoven and Mozart lived a more meaningful life than their peers by creating a long lasting legacy of beautiful music and art of creating harmonized tonal structures out of vibrations of air. In other words people who create more organized information that aids the world in becoming more sophisticated and information rich live a more meaningful life by creating more order than their fellow men.

As a corollary destructive individuals who bring disorder or chaos live an opposite of a meaningful life or in essence are embodiment of evil — names like Hitler, Osama Bin Laden come to my mind as personification of this trait.

Considering the above hypotheses as the basis of applying theory of creative action to living a meaningful life, what does an average person needs to do to live a good life? Obviously not everyone is going to be Aristotle, Einstein or Mozart. My proposition in this article is that for an average person the most basic requirement to live a meaningful life comes down is to at least two key requirements

Raise kids who will be better creators than he/she is, thus leaving he world with a better forces of creative action – community leaders, scientists, business leaders, philosophers. Just executing on this principle will make world a better place if each one of our children are brought up to improvement of ourselves — I call this directed social evolution.
Secondly every should perform their craft in a way that it is left in a better state than when he/she started. This means doing your job not to just earn a paycheck, or to perform what you are asked to do, but improve your work/profession from its currrent state.
If everyone can perform these two tasks than they start to stand shoulder to shoulder with the great creators of humanity by giving the world two types of order creating forces, first his offspring, that is better than themselves in living a meaningful life and creating a better world and secondly improving and evolving their craft / profession to new levels.

Imagine if everyone in the world achieved the above two goals (have kids who achieve more than their parents and perform their work better than before)… The world will quickly become an amazing place within few generations.

These two simple goals may sound mundane but wisdom lies in finding profound within mundane. These two simple goals puts tremendous responsibility on everyone. We have to take our responsibility as a parent very seriously as we are not just bringing up our children but our children are our products that we are selling to the world as their citizens. This makes the job of every parent a serious job of creating a world of tomorrow.

Secondly signing all our work with excellence forms the basis of creating value in the world which is one of the key measurement of how meaningful is your life. Therefore it is important that you should pursue what you love and what you are good at…not necessarily where you can make the most money. Love your profession not because it is source of your livelihood but because it is one of the core reasons of why you were out on this earth.

I would submit that we should not hold our ambitions to live a meaningful life to what is laid out above. Instead we should pursue living as richly meaningful life as possible within our capabilities. What i mean by that is we should sign each day with excellence by doing best as parents, workers, executives, friends, community members etc. And going beyond that we should aspire to “create” and “advance” new forms of structure by contributing to world either intellectually (Establishing new theories, e.g. , Wealth of Nations, Origin of Species, Symposium, Theory of Ralativity, Principia Mathematica etc) politically (forming first democracies in Greece, abolishing slavery in America to bringing peace and subsequently economic development to middle east) building (from building great structures to todays power plants and sky scrapers) or inventing (e.g light bulb to computer to antibiotic). All of the above are examples of creating order where there was disorder before. Disorder of metal, brick, sand, water is shaped by the hands and minds of creators of the world into sky scrapers and power plants. Similarly disorder of confused thought, superstitions and jumbled beliefs get structured by thought creators of the world in scientific, political and economic theories based on which our world works.

It is the work of these Maters of Creative Action that has brought the man out of the cave and into the modern sky scraper. This desire to create order and structure out of every endeavor of our life is the fundamental driving force of life and the ultimate meaning of life. Most amazingly it can be achieved by trying to achieve at least two simple goals, raise your children to be better than yourself and perform your profession with excellence.

We all can contribute within our capacities to live a meaningful life and if we all do that world will be a wonderful place to be.