Osion kuvaus

  • [Note: For administrative reasons, the course is taught under the 21C03000 label, but the name and actual content of the course are described below]

    Designing life: Finding motivation, direction and meaning to life and work


     

    How to live? What values are worth striving for? What goals are worth pursuing? What to do with this unique life you are living? How to make good choices as regards your own future?

    Indeed, what is the meaning of life?

    These are a few of the fundamental questions everyone of us wonders about occasionally. Sometimes more theoretically, but more probably as connected to one’s own life. In various life junctures, crises, and times of change, we stop to wonder about the choices and commitments we are about to take.

    As a student, many of these critical choices are still ahead of you. So now is a great time to learn more about yourself, your own values, and life goals especially suitable for you. This will help you to design a life and life attitudes that better reflect the person you are and that will give you higher likelihood of enjoying a satisfying and meaningful existence.

    This course aims to help you in designing a better life for yourself. This is an ambitious goal, and the course will not offer readymade answers. Instead, it will:

    • Awaken you to the importance of being in charge of your own life choices
    • Give you conceptual and theoretical tools to think about goals, values, and life choices
    • Introduce you to the science and philosophy behind these questions and what do we empirically know about good life choices
    • Introduce you to various life paths, values, and goals that can offer you inspiration in making your own choices
    • Give you a number of exercises and tools that can help you both now and in the future to make more informed and deliberate life choices that better reflect your own basic human nature
    The course will be relatively hands-on in the sense that it will be much based on various individual-level exercises, group discussions, and writing assignments all of which aim to help you to think better about your own life.

    The course can’t design your life. But it will give you guidance, tools, theories, empirical knowledge, insights, and exercises that hopefully will assist you in your own personal quest to live a life that is motivating, directed, and meaningful. Indeed, a life worth living!