Is life meaningless?
I have no idea why, but I just feel like asking this question. When I do ask this question out loud, many people look at me like I am about to jump from the tallest building in town (which is like a five-story building by German standards so not too high but that is beside the point).
The reason why I am asking this is that I seriously have no idea, and nobody wants to help me answer this question. As mentioned, whenever I ask this question, people look like I am hinting at committing suicide or something therefore I am somewhat scared to ask this question.
However, I could not live with myself if I did not even attempt to answer this question since living with this question lingering unanswered in my mind is just bothering me a lot. And getting rid of an annoyance is somehow part of my life.
First, I want to discuss why people are so scared to ask this question. In my experience, asking that question just seems nonsensical. There is no shame in asking about anything one is curious about since not asking questions does not bring anyone or anything forward.
The reason why I believe most don’t ask this question is simply that they are either scared of being considered suicidal or they are afraid they will be judged for not having life figured out yet. Past a certain age, it is just expected to know the meaning of your life.
Therefore, most don’t ask because they don’t want to admit that they don’t know what they are doing with their life and that they haven’t figured out the meaning of their life yet. However, nowadays there seems to be a mindset shift so who knows how long this article can stay relevant.
So let´s get to the question of the day. Is life truly meaningless? At first, I (sometimes still do) believe that life is meaningless. My life has no meaning. Nobody´s life does. No one was born to fulfil anything. Everyone was born without any meaning.
Sure, some people are born with the sole purpose of serving their country like the royals. However, that is not the point I am trying to make in this case. The point I am trying to make is that life has no meaning even if you are born with meaning.
We all are born, we live, and we die. Everyone past the age of five must understand that we, mere mortals, are not immortal beings. We live a life whether short or long, whether fulfilled or empty, whether interesting or not. Then we just cease to exist.
My question is now why do we live? If we are all born to die, what is the point of living? It is not only somewhat of a waste but it is also actively harming the environment with all the carbon footprints humans leave throughout their lifetime.
Sometimes, when I am especially depressed, my mind just reminds me of this annoying little fact and it darkens my day furthermore. It is a terrible piece of information I know but I don’t quite know how to get rid of it or at the very least overcome it.
This train of thought is sadly not a recent train of thought either. I have somehow been carrying this piece of information with me ever since I was little. Frankly, I don’t know how but little me just knew that fact and deduced life was meaningless at best and wasteful at worst.
Many people would just tell me that life is worth living and that I just need to cheer up to see the amazing life ahead of me. However, when you are down in the dumps, just some overly optimistic ray of sunshine telling you to stop being overly dramatic and cheer up doesn’t necessarily help.
Since I couldn’t quite understand the meaning of life, I had to turn to the internet for help. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why humanity would endure such terrific suffering and anxiety attacks for the sake of it. I had to get to the bottom of this question.
Luckily for me, I came across a video which states three pillars of meaning. The three pillars of meaning are communication, understanding and service. From those three, I could understand why I needed to live. I could understand my meaning of life (even though I have the tendency to sway sometimes).
For anyone interested, I left a link to the video. I find the video short but explains it in detail. If you don’t want to watch the video, they also have a written article on their website. The article is somewhat more detailed but that could just be me. I know that some of the following parts come from the video so… yeah.
Photo by Leah Kelley (Pexels)
First communication. It is a well-known fact now that we are not born into a group. We are individuals who create groups by interacting with others and the environment around us. This experience is meaningful and makes a life worth living.
Think about it. For example, you travel to another country for your vacation. On that vacation, you gain new experiences, tried unfamiliar things and met complete strangers who are friends now. Isn´t that just a meaningful way to live life?
Meeting new people and trying new things is what life basically is but if you should seek out this communication then it just seems like the whole world opens up to you since you gain more insight and more experiences fulfilling life to a certain extent.
Second understanding. We are born into a world full of mysteries, mysteries we may never uncover. However, a lot of people still try their level best to uncover the mysteries of the world and explain it best to their ability. This puzzle-solving is the life mission of many.
For instance, our technology wouldn’t have evolved to the way it is today if it hadn´t been for the previous generations understanding electronics and developing such. If it hasn’t been for the many scientists who came before, how much of the world could we understand and truly appreciate?
Frankly, you don’t necessarily have to be a scientist to understand. You don’t need to understand humanity and evolve your knowledge. You can just understand to make your life more meaningful. Personally, I find it easier to appreciate beauty if I understand it.
Last but not least service. A world with no service is a very isolated world. A world with no service would drive itself to extinction because we as a society are built upon the fact that we help each other to grow. Since helping others helps you too.
To be honest, I don’t believe that I need to give examples here since the world is such a better place if we should help others. Who doesn’t want a better place? However, since I somewhat lost faith in humanity some time ago, let me enlighten you.
A very popular example of service is small acts of kindness. However, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If you are an artist, for instance, you create artworks for the world to see. You may not feel too affected by the finished masterpiece but it might brighten someone else´s day.
That is what service is all about. You don’t necessarily have to be a healthcare professional or in the military to be of service. As long as you are giving something back to the world through creativity, understanding, acts, etc… then you are doing the world a service.
Photo by Daria Obymaha (Pexels)
Funnily enough, I believe that I am least inclined to do the last of the three but seeing my behaviour and the behaviour of people around me, I believe that I was taught to do service since I was young and subconsciously do so while I consciously think I am an unkind person.
If I had to pick one of the three meanings to be my life´s meaning then I would have gone with understanding since I have always been curious and I wanted to pursue a doctorate just to understand more of the world I am living in from a chemical standpoint.
However, it probably goes without saying that everyone does have all three pillars of meaning in their life but just at different importance. I, as mentioned, lay heavily on understanding while you might value service or communication more. Everyone is different but everyone does all three.
To be fair, I say this way too often but just like everything in life, these three pillars are a balance. You can´t truly only dedicate yourself to service since if you should put everyone first, you will get burnt out and that is not helpful for the people you wanted to help.
My point is that to live a fulfilling life, you just have to practice communication, understanding and service. It may sound oversimplified because it is but sometimes when I am depressed, I just read over the bucket list of things I still want to do and experience.
This does not necessarily make me feel too much better, but it just reminds me that I still have so much I want to do in life and so many other things I want to achieve therefore my journey couldn’t just stop then and there. Besides my family and friends would be sad, like myself, if my journey should end there.
To be fair, I believe my parents would tell another story because I often would complain about the fact that I am alive but the reason I can do so is simply that I have been bloody lucky all things considered. I have a roof over my head and food on my plate.
It did take many years for me to realize that I am lucky and my life has meaning I haven’t found yet. For many figuring it out could take mere weeks but for others finding the meaning of life could take their whole lifetime. For everyone it is different.
There is no shame if I would ask you what the meaning of your life is and you wouldn’t be able to answer my rather simple question. If you could that would be amazing and you have achieved something many would take a long time to figure out.
Sidenote: when figuring out this question for myself, I was watching a good place and they tackled this topic quite nicely in season 2 of the show. The funniest thing is that they had philosophers working on that show and they couldn’t quite solve this question either.
This just proved to me that no one quite knows how to tackle life itself which is also why I consider it completely normal if I and others don’t have life figured out for ourselves yet. In a sense of the way, you have your whole life to figure things out.
After I finished watching the whole four seasons of the good place (which is more than a good show and I would totally recommend watching it yourself since they make the very boring concepts of philosophy very interesting in different scenarios. By the end of it you will feel smarter too).
I drifted off there a bit. Where was I? Ah right. After I finished watching the good place, I found out on YouTube, they have real-life philosophers go more in-depth about the concepts tackled on the show. Among which is existentialism (the topic I have been trying to tackle).
I will leave a link so you can go watch it for yourself since there are some philosophical aspects I didn’t quite know how to tackle in this article. If you are done with that video, I would suggest watching the rest of the concepts too since it is quite interesting. Don’t worry it is just four four-minute videos.