All my previous topics were too long and sort of incoherent. No debate could be had in those topics since they were too long and incoherent. Therefore, I am going to state something brief here for us to debate: Everything good to us is a reward to us. If you lived a depressed life and thought that you having good meaning in your life is nothing but words and phrases and isn't actual good meaning, then that would not be a reward to you. But the moment you perceive good meaning in your life in such a way that it is actual good meaning to you and not just words and phrases, then that would be the reward to you. I will give another example. If you did not focus on yourself at all and just focused on living for others, making their lives good, and this has good meaning to you, then that would be rewarding to you as well. For you to make the lives of others good (rewarding) is rewarding to you. But as I said before, our reward system (good moods) are the only reward for us. They are the one and only things that can give us a rewarding experience in life since it all comes down to the functioning of our brains that gives us all our experiences in life. If you had nothing but disrewarding pain and misery from having your wounds attended to at the hospital, then just the fact that the idea of you being healed is of good value/worth to you means that it is rewarding to you despite your pain and misery. But like I said before, if you did not experience your good moods despite your pain and misery, then that would actually be of no good value/worth to you. Now to say that something can be of good value/worth to you even though it is not rewarding to you would be no different than saying that something can be rewarding to you even though it is not rewarding to you. Therefore, that would be a false (contradictory) statement. We have different functions of our brains. Our thinking function gives us the experience of thoughts. Our hearing function gives us the experience of hearing. Our sight function gives us the experience of sight, etc. But our reward system gives us the experience of reward (our good moods). Our hearing function cannot give us sight, our sight function cannot give us hearing or reward, etc. The mental experiences are tied (restricted) to their functions. Therefore, the only way helping someone in life can have good meaning to you is if you were in a good mood in doing so. As long as you are in a depressed mood or any other bad mood, then nothing can be of any good value/worth to you in those given moments. Not even if you changed the world and made it a better place. Only when you are in a good mood again would that have good meaning to you. It doesn't matter what you tell yourself otherwise when you are in a bad mood. If you told yourself that you still have good meaning in your life despite your bad mood, then you would be telling yourself nothing more than labels (words and phrases). That would not bring you any actual good meaning. So with all of that being said, it is only the feeling/emotional non-moral (mood) version of good and bad that can give good and bad meaning to our lives. The moral version of good and bad and all other versions of good and bad are fake and do not give our lives any real good or bad meaning.
I don't agree or disagree with you per se, but a question I did have while reading your post was that you miss the notion of doing something for a greater good that might only become apparent after a passage of time. E.g. exercise is painful, laborious and certainly not something I enjoy doing - puts me in a bad mood - but there is a greater good as a result of doing it, even if that is some way down the road. In your thinking, it is my enjoyment of that greater good in the future that makes the immediate activity have meaning - even if the immediate activity is a short-scale (non-moral) bad thing. True, the meaning in that act is not immediate: it requires the ability to link the act to the future benefit, and to have trust in that future benefit actually coming to fruition.
If I might interject a humble suggestion: you serve no one by continuing such posts. It is nice they do seem a little more coherent now. Try putting some of the ideas you have into practice, if you are able.
In the heat of battle a soldier may protect and tend to his wounded buddy. Is he in a good mood? No. He is doing good for his friend in spite of the terror and despair of that moment. He is even endangering his own life for his comrade's. Wouldn't that be an instance of doing good without the attending good feeling or mood?
