/** 
  * file: karbytes_16_may_2024.txt
  * type: plain-text 
  * date: 16_MAY_2024 
  * author: karbytes 
  * license: PUBLIC_DOMAIN 
  */

Back when I was approximately twenty years old, I found a document online (named "A Guide for the Godless: A Secular Path to Meaning" (by Andrew Kernohan and published in the year 2008) and referenced at the following Uniform Resource Locator: https://philarchive.org/rec/KERAGF) which was formatted as a free download-able book (as a PDF file or as a Kindle eBook file) and also as a purely HTML website (such that each chapter of that "book" was referenced via a hyperlink on some index page (much like how my personal website named Karlina Object dot WordPress dot Com is structured)). What I particularly appreciate about "A Guide for the Godless" was the part which talked about how emotions (particularly the contradictory emotions referred to as desire and aversion) are the signifiers which enable a human to determine what is worthwhile for them to pursue as goals and what is not worthwhile for them to invest precious finite resources in procuring. Those ideas profoundly influenced my own philosophical developments (especially as someone who has since operated as though it believed that there is no higher intelligence than what humans appear to have ever have (and will ever have) and, also, that no omniscient nor omnipotent nor omnipresent beings anywhere throughout existence).

A description of that book is displayed on the web page which is located at the aforementioned Uniform Resource Locator:

This book aims to apply recent thinking in philosophy to the age-old problem of the meaning of life, and to do so in a way that is useful to atheists, agnostics, and humanists. The book reorients the search for meaning away from a search for purpose and toward a search for what truly matters, and criticizes our society's prevailing theory of value, the preference satisfaction theory of the economists. It next argues that emotions are our best guides to what matters in life, and shows how emotional judgments about what matters can be true. Finally it discusses how a meaningful life can be lived, describes the role of justice, freedom, identity, and culture in its construction, and compares the meaningful with the happy life. Andrew Kernohan has a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Toronto and is an Adjunct Professor at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Liberalism, Equality, and Cultural Oppression (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and various articles in professional philosophy journals.