There are a number of classic works that treat the sorts of issues that you raise. (Interestingly, for what it's worth, relatively few contemporary 'analytic' philosophers have engaged these issues.) Chief among them, perhaps--at least in the Western tradition--are Plato's Republic and the New Testament, both of which, I think, are concerned with the kinds of issues that you mention. More relatively recent works that engage the topics that you mention include Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. (Sartre, of course, is the popularizer of the notion of 'radical choice'.) A very recent book by a living philosopher that treats the issues to which you refer is Susan Wolf's Meaning in Life and What Matters.

great question ... we might make some useful distinctions -- whether memories, beliefs, etc. are 'true' does NOT make an immediate difference to the individual, psychologically: we act on what we think, believe, remember etc., and in that sense the false thoughts/memories are just as 'valuable' or 'real' or important as the true ones .... however in many ways we like to orient ourselves towards the truth, to get our beliefs to be true, etc.; and thus when we discover some belief/memory is false we want to correct it .... (why we do or should care about truth in general is a separate issue; but most people simply do) -- so from that perspective, there's a large difference between the true ones and the false ones, as we seek to overcome the latter ....

the "idealist' tradition in philosophy -- esp figures such as George Berkeley -- would ultimately deny the difference between the true ones/false ones (or at least reconstrue it very differently from the way I've implicitly done here) -- so if you want to pursue your idea in more detail, I'd recommend exploring the work of Berkeley ...

hope that's useful --

Andrew

The reason we do things more than once is that we value doing them more than once, either because we find the things pleasurable or otherwise valuable in and of themselves or because doing them advances other values of ours. (Here, I am using "value" pretty loosely; I simply mean that we perceive ourselves to be gaining something from the relevant things.) So take your grape example. If I like grapes, and if I have an opportunity to eat them on numerous occasions, then, when I'm hungry and feel like eating grapes and grapes are available, I'll want to eat them. The memory of eating a grape is not going to satisfy my hunger, either for filling my stomach or for experiencing the eating of a grape. Of course, we sometimes have vivid memories of eating things -- Proust's madeleines are perhaps the quintessential example -- but a memory of something is very different (in numerous ways) from experiencing the thing itself.

When you think about it, it's not surprising that we do the same things over and over again, especially when it comes to what gives us pleasure. When it's something as simple as food, the pleasure is more or less constant from repetition to repetition, although certain factors -- such as not having had a food we love for a long time -- may increase or decrease the pleasure in various instances. In other cases -- I'm a fanatical knitter, so knitting comes to mind here -- when we repeat things we often get better at them, and there's value in this trajectory of improvement. There are also things that we have to do over and over again in order to survive: we organize our lives, both personally and socially, according to certain patterns (getting up at roughly the same time each day, transporting ourselves to work via the same route, checking our e-mail, holding election days on the second Tuesday of November, and so on). Finally, most of us value familiarity: we want to see people we like or work with or need things from on a regular basis.

In some cases, the value of doing something over and over again produces diminishing returns. After playing that Xbox game for the 1,000th time, you might get tired of it. And if you eat 50 grapes, you might feel sick. But this isn't because the 50th grape-eating-repetition is inherently worse, or no better, than the first one. It's because, when we're full, eating more grapes has no value for us.

In terms of income, the panelists on this site by and large belong to humanity's top ventile (5%) -- where the average income is 9 times the global average. This is roughly 300 times more than what is available to people in the bottom quarter, where average income is about 1/32 of the global average. (The difference is still about 100:1 if one adjusts for purchasing power parities.) Moreover, people in the bottom quarter typically work longer hours in more exhausting jobs, and have about 20 to 30 fewer years of life. So, yes, those among whom you live do not enjoy anything like our opportunities to live a full human life, anything like our freedom to learn, think, enjoy, and be creative.

These huge discrepancies are profoundly unjust, and it would be good if many people in the more affluent countries used their much greater powers to change the world toward overcoming such injustice. Unfortunately, this is not happening, though some are trying. Those who have most power to contribute to change also have the least vivid sense of how urgently such change is needed.

So I think your friend is wrong, and wrong on both counts. Being affluent does not mean changing the world -- most affluent people make no effort to promote justice or any other greatly needed or otherwise important changes. And being poor does not mean not changing the world. Think of the Manchester dock workers who helped end slavery. Think of the millions who marched with Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Think of those who denied the US victory in Vietnam. Think of the garment workers in Bangladesh who just won an 80% raise in the minimum wage (from $25 to $45 per month), thereby lifting the spirits and in due time the wages of millions of grievously exploited workers in other poor countries. Ideally, of course, rich and poor should change the world together, toward reducing poverty and injustice, and toward preserving the health and beauty of our planet and its many species. Realistically, I would expect at least as much of a contribution to needed changes form the world's poor as from the world's affluent who, despite their much greater freedoms and capacities, typically find the status quo morally quite tolerable. I won't pass judgment on those who feel they are too poor to help change the world. But I do think it wrong, both empirically and morally, to count out the poor as important agents in human history.

Whatever meaning life may have, it does not vary depending on where one lives. There is the saying, I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is better, and no doubt that is true, but wherever we live or however wealthy our environment, the basic issues of life and death do not vary. It is also worth remembering that many people in the West are very poor, and come from communities which have persisted in poverty for generations. Changing the world is no big deal, and really does nothing to increase one's enjoyment of living, nor of life itself.

I'd like to start with the last bit. You say that you understand living an authentic life as "directed by evolutionary forces that propel me to seek out maximum stimulation in order to realize my potential." I'd suggest some skepticism about that. If you mean by "evolution" what biologists mean, then there are no such forces; evolution isn't goal directed. And in any case, it's not obvious that "maximum stimulation" is the best way for for anyone to realize their potential. On the contrary, it's at least as likely that most of us suffer from too much stimulation as from too little.

Down in the foothills, let's start with an example. I don't get along with racist bigots who lard their conversation with vile remarks. I've had all the "stimulation" from such people that my potential calls for. Being authentic doesn't call for inviting them to my dinner parties. On the contrary, doing that would be downright inauthentic. I'd be pretending a friendship that doesn't exist. Tolerance doesn't call for it either. Being tolerant doesn't mean putting up with hateful things.

That said, I can imagine a point in trying to talk to people I deeply disagree with. Sometimes when we do that, we find that we've been overlooking something worth worrying about, even if we still end up disagreeing about details and means. And it's a little harder for each side to demonize the other when people make an honest stab at mutual understanding. But whatever value this sort of exercise might have, it doesn't extend to dictating the people I spend my intimate time with.

As for asking people their views before even considering them as friends, that does seem off, whether or not "narcissistic" is the right word. I've come to have real affection and respect for people I would have dismissed if I'd used that sort of test before having anything to do with them.

In "Brains in a Vat," the first essay of his book, Reason, Truth, and History, the philosopher Hilary Putnam considers a thought experiment, according to which an ant crawling along the sand produces what would appear to be an image of Winston Churchill. He asks whether this image would count as a depiction of Churchill, and claims that it would not: it would not count as a depiction or representation of Churchill, because the ant has never seen Churchill, and therefore could not have the intention to depict Churchill. The image, therefore, is not intrinsically meaningful: it would take an observer to notice that the ant's tracings resemble Churchill, and to conclude that s/he has seen a representation of Churchill traced in the sand, thereby endowing the ant's tracings with meaning. Nature as a whole, like the ant, does not seem capable of producing meaning: in order to produce meaningful representations (including pictures or words), there must be an agent who knows how to manipulate those signs. Whereas astrologists consider the order of nature to be meaningful, this seems to be an instance of what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake': the ascription of meaning to the wrong sort of thing to be a producer of meaning. If this is correct, then it should be concluded that nature itself doesn't have meaning. Now what distinguishes astronomy from astrology is that in astronomy, the study of the heavens is undertaken in order to explain the nature of the heavens, whereas astrology seeks to interpret the heavens. The astrologer's investigation thus seems to presuppose that the heavens themselves are meaningful, whereas the astronomer's investigation presupposes no such thing. While the astrologer need not--anymore than the astronomer--believe that there is any kind of ultimate purpose to be found in nature--in this case, in the heavens--the astrologer's attribution of meaning to the heavens does seem to presuppose that there is some kind of meaning-producing entity behind their configurations, and thus may--although I think it need not--lead naturally to the view that there is some source of purposiveness, of intention, of meaning, behind the stars that endows them with their significance. The astronomer makes no such assumptions, and so the astronomer's investigation, unlike that of the astronomer, does not attribute any meaning to the heavenly phenomena that s/he studies, and, therefore, does not presuppose that nature itself has any ultimate purpose. This need not imply, of course, that the working astronomer cannot share with the astrologer the belief that there is some ultimate purpose to nature, but only that such beliefs do not figure crucially in the astronomer's (or, for that matter, any contemporary scientist's) investigation of nature itself, quâ scientist.

How about this? Entertainment value is diversion (certainly a good thing), aesthetic value is engagement.

I'm not sure that this is so in the general public. But the reason would be that some great good can come from "academic genius" e.g. cure for a disease, whereas only entertainment can come from athletic brilliance.

Here we need to inquire - what is the standard that we are measuring value by and is that standard legitimate? If the standard is building character than I think it could be said that hard work usually works to build character-- though too hard a work and exploitation can also work to harden the soul.