We sometimes ask what the meaning of life is, because we experience our daily routines as pointless and repetitive. If we feel listless and apathetic, life often seems to us devoid of purpose. We may even think, in such moments, that everyone who doesn't experience life as utterly purposeless is laboring under an illusion. When, by contrast, we feel motivated and engaged, when we have projects we care about, the question of the meaning of life does not seem pressing. We may entertain it, of course, but somehow, it doesn't have a sting. It's as though it simply doesn't apply to us.
This may seem to suggest that life is meaningful when it is a good one, when the person living it flourishes.
There is no doubt something to this line of argument. An individual life may seem more or less meaningful depending on how it is lived.
But even the most meaningful lives come to an end, and the people living those lives die and get forgotten. Suppose there was a person in the 800s who, by all accounts, lived as meaningful a life as possible. Perhaps she was a great storyteller, intuitive psychologist, and highly respected in her community. She was the person everyone turned to when they were going through a rough patch. When she died, her death was experienced as a loss for everyone around her. Dozens mourned her passing. But however that may be, no one now has any idea who she was. It no longer matters—not one bit—how she lived or died. No one will ever utter her name again. Her life seemed meaningful at the time, but was it really?
Bow and arrow among the stars.
Source: 愚木混株CDD20/Pixabay
We can take this line of thought a step further and consider the fact that whole civilizations have disappeared, and no one knows much or anything about them now. One day, our civilization will disappear as well, and so will our planet along with every living creature, and in all likelihood, no one in the whole universe—if, indeed, there is anyone else—will know we were ever here. We like to tell ourselves that we create immortal works of art or that some human achievement or other will "live on forever," but the truth is, nothing will—not on a secular worldview, anyway.
It is this type of concern existentialist philosophers pressed. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, says that the moment we realize we are not immortal, we see the meaning of life as an illusion.
This problem, what we may call the Big problem of the meaning of life, the one that arises for all of us no matter how we live our individual lives, is recalcitrant. If we experience life as meaningless because we lack motivation to undertake anything new or we otherwise don't take joy in living or our human connections, there are remedies. We can usually find something that interests us and climb out of the valley of apathy. But what is the remedy for human mortality?
Another way to put the point would be to say that there is a discrepancy between two perspectives on life: our current one and the view, as it were, from eternity. Many things seem to matter now—who will win an election, whether your business venture will succeed, whom your child will marry. But none of these things will matter in a thousand years, which makes us wonder if they ever truly mattered or it just seemed so at the time. Albert Camus went on further and argued that the clash between our need for meaning, which doesn't go away on account of being unsatisfied, and the complete silence of the universe makes the human condition absurd.
A cynic may say in response that this is all for the better, considering how terrible we are. It is not only everything good but everything bad we do that will come to an end. In some sense, it doesn't now matter how many people Genghis Khan murdered. All of them would have died anyway, many years ago.
One may even find a cure for our neuroses, individual and collective, in the perspective of eternity. If nothing truly matters in the long run, perhaps, we can accept what happens at any one point in time with more equanimity. It is not only our accomplishments that will die with us but the worst of our failures.
I think there is something to the last two points, but I want to suggest something else. There is a different way to look at the matter of the meaning of life. In order to see it, we ought to consider the default state of affairs in the universe. And the default, I think, is a universe without life and without consciousness. Such a universe is one devoid not simply of meaning but of the possibility for meaning. And yet, that is the probable state of affairs. That there should have been any such thing as conscious life in a universe governed by physical laws is remarkable. It may be so extraordinarily improbable, in fact, that despite there being trillions of other planets, ours may be the only one that ever did or ever will house conscious life.
When one looks at the matter this way, I think, the Big Question loses its bite. We are going to die, indeed, and all of our hopes, dreams, and achievements will be forgotten. But even then, it will be true that improbably, remarkably, we lived, and we were conscious in a universe of matter, governed by physical laws.
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This is not to say that the question of the meaning of life gets some one particular answer if we look at the issue as I urge. It is still up to us to try to make our lives individually meaningful or not. My point is simply that the fact of mortality, of the ephemeral nature of human pursuits, is rather less troubling if we take a different starting point: if we consider the fact that the likely state of affairs in the universe is one in which no meaning and valuing are possible, because there is no life and no conscious life. That appears to be how things stand in all of the universe except here.
It is not that human life as a whole has meaning, then. The existentialists were right that it does not. Rather, conscious life is, if you seriously think about it, a miracle, not in the sense that it violates the laws of nature, but in the sense that it somehow arose from inorganic matter, against all odds. And each one of us, however long or short our lives, whenever and wherever we may have lived, embodies that miracle.
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