what’s the meaning of life?
What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of it all? What is the point of doing this?
Once in awhile, maybe when we catch a breather from the insanity around us, maybe when we’re struck with the great tragedies, sufferings and injustices of the world, maybe when we suddenly realize we are all alone with our thoughts, or maybe when the seemingly rat race nature of it all suddenly dawns upon us, we ask ourselves these questions. What’s the point? Why are we doing what we’re doing? Do we know? Maybe we don’t, and we become anxious and fearful, wondering if we’re wasting our lives and time. But we push away the fears quickly, dismiss them as ridiculous, tell ourselves ‘of course there’s a point and purpose! I am happy aren’t I? I have to do this don’t I? What would I do anyway if not this?’ And we go on again, having successfully dispelled the nagging questions until the next opportune moment for when they come rushing back at us again.
But maybe we should be taking these questions more seriously. I’m still young I suppose, but I certainly believe these questions will come up all the more readily and frequently as we age, as we get closer to the inevitable end that awaits all of humanity and which forces us to question what have we done with our lives and if it was worth it. And what a shame it’d be to realize at the end that we had gotten it all wrong.
However, before we can even ask what the meaning of life is, we first have to ask ourselves if there is meaning to life. Is there? We must challenge ourselves to think back to the building blocks of our beliefs and values. Do we believe there is meaning to life? Why or why not? I find it much easier to pass over these questions and to give glib answers than to face myself, my beliefs, dissect them, and really question the logic and rationale of the building blocks behind all I take for granted. I’ve been reading many fascinating worldviews – philosophical, religious, scientific, and ethical. They are all intertwined; you really can’t separate them as hard as some people try to. What’s fascinating to me is the fact that all these worldviews presented by the great thinkers are, at the heart of it all, logical, coherent, and rational given some basic assumptions presented by them. Whether they are true and supported by verifiable facts and observable experiences is an altogether different matter. (That is also an interesting point of discussion – that sublime, logical, and rational sounding philosophy does not equate to truth, and yet we often confuse the two.)
Drawn out logically, the worldviews lead to widely different results in how life is to be viewed, the purpose of life, and basic ethics. Some lead to the conclusion that life is pointless and meaningless – all random or all just simply ‘for the fun of it’. Our sense of justice, right and wrong, pain, etc. then naturally follow to be as meaningful as color differences. Some lead to the idea that all suffering is deserved – then compassion and social work naturally follow to be quite useless or misguided and the promotion of such work simply boil down to selfish motives. The great thinkers were logical and rational. What they believed and held to be true in their thought framework, they boldly faced the consequences of by living out precisely what their beliefs entailed. I admire them for the coherence between their thoughts and lives.
On the contrary, I don’t think we are as logical and rational, though we like to think we are. The way we live our lives does not match with what we say are our beliefs. We declare assumptions and ideas that scream ‘meaninglessness of life!’, and yet regardless, we go searching for this meaning that we’ve denied. On one hand, we espouse ideas that certain humans are more valuable than others, while at the same time become outraged when we read of other humans being degraded or abused. On the other hand, some of us declare that life is beautiful and meaningful, but we don’t quite care what that meaning is. We’re a society of contradictions.
I suppose life is like a game. There’s either meaning or there isn’t one. If there is meaning, then the question is what? We could find what makes us happy and content ourselves with that. But if this game of life has a purpose, then some purposes are possibly more valid than others, and just because a purpose sounds nice, it doesn’t make it the right purpose. We think that perhaps, even if we got it all wrong, if we lived happily and did our part, who could blame us? Are we to be held responsible for what we did not know? Maybe, maybe not. I’m inclined to believe, though, we will be held responsible. Sometimes my students misread instructions, and they code a function that works and that returns a value, but it is not the value the question is asking for. They clearly understand how functions work and how to code, but they simply misread or didn’t read. What happens? Well, it’s still wrong. It’s not the function asked for. I’m inclined to believe that’s how life is going to be. Do nice things, do great things even, but if it isn’t what is being asked for, it’s still useless. Maybe it sounds a little harsh. But we must consider that we’ve been given a whole lot of time (a whole life, to be precise) to figure it out. It’s not that we don’t have time to figure it out, it’s simply that we don’t take the time to. And for that, we can only blame ourselves.
Science combines to deliver an ever-growing abundance of things to have and to do, beyond all the dreams of earlier ages. It offers no guidance, however, on the questions of worth: What things are worth doing? What things are worth having? (Proper Confidence, Lesslie Newbigin)
It’s necessary for us to pursue after the questions of worth as vigorously as we have pursued after technological improvements, scientific innovations, and education. Is life meaningful? What is life’s purpose? What is worth doing and living for? It’s imperative to know the answers to these questions. If we know where we’re going and why, if we know what is truly meaningful and worthy, then combined with human ingenuity, intelligence, and creativity, there is no limit to what we may achieve and accomplish in the pursuit of that.
