The big Why?
What's the point?
Where was I? Ah, yes—bleating on about unemployment, gripping fear over my choices, high hopes of reflecting on what's next, unsubtle begging for work and the promise to return to chat about the meaning of life, to help reassure me I am choosing my path ahead wisely.
Taking time off to look for work was not supposed to so rapidly lead to a wave of existential angst. But, if one is to take a step back to choose the path ahead with clarity, it's proven hard to ask oneself questions that do not rapidly unfurl into some version of "what the actual fuck?".
Far greater minds than I have, over at least the past couple of millennia, failed to find a satisfactory answer, or at least one we can agree on. There is no shortage, though, of attempts to. Should we turn to religion, philosophy, physics, economics, psychology or biology? Should we just look until we find the answer we want to hear? Or, should we respect a question that is this big by just ignoring it knowing we could never do it justice?
I did think the latter option was probably wisest, but I need a break from writing cover letters. Instead, therefore, I've dabbled into a bit of all of these which inevitably means I am but scratching the surface of the surface. And given it's a big question, allow me to take this in a few bites. I'll start with the angst and in future chew on values, motivation, passion and my favourite, regret.
Put things in perspective
Before wading into the heady stuff, it's worth reminding ourselves how spectacularly irrelevant we are in the grand scheme of things, no matter how pressing your next meeting feels.
You may have a favoured creation myth, of which I do not begrudge you, but you will struggle to deny some stone cold facts. Your 80 years, if you're lucky, is essentially incomparable to the universe's 13.8 billion. If the length of time that anything has existed were a year, you not live a fifth of one second. The little blue marble we share is a relative newcomer clocking in at 4.54 billion years.
The universe's scale is impossible to imagine. It's 93 billion light-years in diameter. A distance so massive as to be meaningless. If you find kilometres easier it's 880 sextillion without motorway services. There are might be a couple of trillion galaxies with each having one or two billion stars. You and I exist on one tiny rock circling one of those stars in an unremarkable part of an unremarkable galaxy.
To perfect the life form that gives you ice cream headaches, back pain, wisdom teeth and the need to wear glasses, took a few million years and 117 billion forefathers. Credible reports on the past started around 3,500 years ago and it's fair to say reviews are mixed. It wasn't until the last century or two that you had much chance of marking your 50th birthday.
The truth, my friends, is despite the ever present feeling you matter and the world revolves around you, in the grand scheme of things you and I both are irrelevant, fleeting and forgettable. Kind of amazing.
The anguish of freedom
The universe just is. There is no point; no purpose, no quest, no destiny. As far as we can tell. It's hot gasses, explosions and the promise of a dark cold death. It's almost absurd, the term Albert Camus used in fact, to explain the achingly stressful conflict between humanity’s biologically hard-wired search for meaning and the universe’s "indifferent silence" to our searching. Camus was a brainy French-Algerian philosopher and writer, whose cool mystic was enhanced by dying young and only ever being photographed smoking.
Our high probability of suffering and the certainty of death, reasonably feels unreasonable. The "wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart" is certainly unsettling. Camus got straight to it by stating there is only one question we need answer for ourselves—whether to commit suicide—his "fundamental question of philosophy".
He didn't advocate we actually reach for the hemlock. Instead, Camus felt that accepting the absurdity of life should liberate us to live for the moment and embrace the "implacable grandeur" of existence: "[the previous question] of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived […] now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning."
Camus urged us to revolt. Rise up against the sheer madness of what the universe delivered and affirm that even though life is meaningless, we can still find value and purpose in our experiences and choices. Living becomes the ultimate act of defiance against the absurd.
If that's too upbeat there are other existentialists who thought about the anguish and burden we feel when submitting to life's futility. Jean Paul Satre (French and cool, obviously), said our existential dread kicks in when we realise we have freedom to do, well, anything, because there is no universal guiding moral framework or higher beings looking after you. Everything you do is in effect defining you—you must find your own meaning. If that doesn't invoke dread in you then he also explained we further add to our mental anguish because when we make a decision, we are also projecting an image of what we believe a human being ought to be. This realisation—that in choosing for ourselves, we are indirectly choosing for others—creates a deep sense of responsibility.
One step further off the cliff live the Nihilists. The most extreme version of which would tell me to stop writing immediately because any effort to find any inherent meaning to existence is futile. These people are probably best avoided at parties.
The Buddhist tradition, which Stephen Batchelor reminds us in an excellent little book, Buddhism Without Beliefs, exists in the same vicinity although the anguish of Buddhism, dukkha, comes from the understanding of the impermanence and unsatisfactory nature of existence. Before it became a full blown religion is was originally a teaching about how to notice, understand and let go of anguish. Rather than gripping fear, you're invited to be more aware of your mind and to find peace knowing somethings will never be known. Batchelor also slams your mind asking the reader a series of deceptively simple looking questions like "since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?".
Man's Search for Meaning
Perhaps those who most know what is important to being alive are those who very nearly stopped being. There can be few worse places in history for believing any moment might be your last than a Nazi concentration camp. Viktor E Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning not only swiftly snaps one back into reality but reminds you that no matter how lost you may feel, your life could be much, much, much worse. To read this book is to be humbled, he earned the right to be heard.
Frankl dedicated his life to thinking about life, the question he said "burns under our fingernails". His dedication left us "logotherapy"—a form of existential psychotherapy that helps individuals find meaning in life, or perhaps more properly, to help people to find their meaning to their life—whether "create" or "discover" is the correct verb is something I leave you to ponder.
Logotherapy starts with yet more angst. Frankl's “existential vacuum" is highly relatable (it can't just be me?), the haunting emptiness we feel, the inner emptiness that arises when we lack a clear sense of purpose or direction, leading to feelings of apathy, boredom, alienation or worse. Our inner void grows when personal or professional achievements are all we have to define ourselves, ever worsened by the steady decline of traditional sources of meaning especially religion, family and community.
He even gave our weekend jitters a name—Sunday Neurosis—less the fear of going back to work and more the emptiness felt when we are without work to fill our days; instead we must confront our lack of purpose directly. Try not working every day. The root cause of our existential vacuums are, accordingly to Frankl, similar to Satre's: too much freedom. With so few people telling us what to do, it's left to ourselves to find purpose, a process he said and I can attest will feel overwhelming. So what was his advice?
First, what not to do. Frankl warns of the risk of your "frustrated will to meaning" being "vicariously compensated for by a will to power", the most basic form of which is the will to money. Furthermore, in the absence of knowing your own path to meaning, it is often easier to do what others do (conformism) or to do what others wish you to (totalitarianism).
According to Frankl, meaning is found in three ways. You can do or create something meaningful beyond yourself in your work and deeds. You can find meaning through experiences or relationships: engaging deeply with others, nature, culture and beauty. The romantics among you may wonder how we got this far without mentioning the L word. When he was pushed to the very edge of existence Frankl found the greatest solace thinking about his wife, of whom he had no idea whether alive or dead. Love to him was "the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire" and through love he saw our salvation.
Finally, and most importantly for Frankl, meaning is found through our suffering. Perhaps his most famous contribution was to tell his story that, no matter how degrading and inhumane his and other prisoners' lives were made by the guards of Auschwitz, they could not remove “the last of human freedoms”—the ability to “choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.” This is almost an enlightened state similar to the tradition of Buddhism, the ability to recognise your anguish and find peace by letting go of its cravings in order to be awakened. Frankl, like the Buddha, saw suffering as an ineradicable part of life. Things are not always going to go your way and how you comport yourself through your hardships is, in many ways, to show who you really are. If "to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering". Frankl quoted Nietzsche often: “he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how”. If anyone understood what that meant, it was surely Victor Frankl.
42
This is all a bit heady. If you're not careful you could waste your life reading and thinking about what other, mainly white men, thought about life. Talking of which, who better to remind us about the pitfalls and potential pointlessness of doing so than Douglas Adams. Hopefully you know he found the answer to life above, but Earth, the supercomputer built to explain the question, was blown up just before doing so. Something to think about.
Where does this get us? A bit more confused, perhaps; maybe a little daunted but also a little reassured I'm not the only person who's been troubled they might be doing life wrong.
We've reminded ourselves we are spinning in the vastness of space, fairly remarkable when you accept life just sort of appeared from nothing. We've accepted that, unless one is willing to let others think for themselves, you will never receive a crisp and simple answer to this biggest of questions.
We've been reminded we have a choice—let the sheer gravity of that realisation hollow out your soul, a noble and truthful choice no doubt, but an extremely unpleasant way to live out your remaining days; or use this profound acceptance as the catalyst to put in the hard work to locate and shape your own worthwhile journey.
If you take up that challenge then you can create meaning or relinquish the desire for meaning. Beware of false idols, especially blindly following or doing what others tell you. Money, power and status are unlikely to quench the thirst deep within you for long, although, don't let that stop you offering. Instead, learn from those who have thought deeply on the matter and look for your own meaning through your actions, connect with people, nature and books, and more consciously choose how you face the inevitable challenges coming your way.
But how? I don't know but enough thinking, I need to get more practical, especially as I am running out of money. Ahead are the Stoics, a sprinkle?of Voltaire and thoughts on whether a life led through our values, not through setting goals, can make us more content. I'll touch on what motivates us to work, whether capitalism can ever enable everyone to flourish or if pondering on your purpose is merely an intellectual pastime of the privileged. I'll wrap up with some deathbed regrets. CV available on request.