My purpose of this post is to understand more about life lessons more abstractly. I do not want to engage in mental masturbation in this topic. But I feel like this hasn't been talked about in this forum, and I have never spoken about anybody else about this topic explicitly. Only implicitly. The theme of this topic is that life is going to present to you the same problems over and over and over again, until you finally learn the lesson. My belief is that you could either accomplish this in multiple lifetimes or do it in this lifetime. I want to go over a personal background of how I reached this to clarify what exactly I mean. -------- To give a background of how I reached this rabbithole, I have been learning how to program. The life lesson that presented itself to me over and over again, was not to cheat or plagiarize from code that already exists in the internet. I refused to see the lesson for what it was, and tried to shortcut my way around actually mentally thinking about the problem. You know how the lesson goes. In the short run, I saved so much time, and finished assignments and tasks quickly. But in the long run, I didn't fundamentally understand what it was I was coding. I learned absolutely nothing. I get confused on coding interviews. Surfing the internet reaches it's limits when your intention is to cheat. Eventually I learn. I open my mind to see the lesson for what it is. I actually have to sit down and understand the coding concepts, and how to code, NOT how to copy code. Now all of a sudden, the structure of coding problems is more easy for me to discern. Referencing one of Leo's videos, I can now easily discern the content of coding problems from the structure of coding problems. I finally learned my lesson so now I can see beyond the lesson and the problem for what it is. -------- So now my background aside, these are my questions. What are some of the most fundamental lessons that one, or a conscious being, learns in life? How does one take into account the uniqueness of their own lessons in life? For example, I know my lesson involving cheating was definitely meant for me, but it does not necessarily apply to all coders. Are lessons just semantic? Is it even possible to have a conversation about lessons when every person has a subjective lesson they need to learn to understand concepts? (I already highly doubt this.) How does learning life lessons relate to self-actualization?