The meaning of your life, the purpose of your existence, your place in the universe, making some sense of the chaos, my forever question
Whatever you wish to call it, anyone curious enough to peruse these pages would know the feeling and have had their own fair share of struggles with it. Here I document my trials and the evolution of my own thought process around it. I do not claim to have an answer. I know that too well, that perhaps all I have is something to cling to, to cope with. And yet that alone is enough, for the beauty of my current solution blinds me to its failures, the failures in fact make it all the more beautiful.
I hope these words at least bring you a moment’s peace, some solace, for I know that they did for me, to feel and listen to another kindred spirit, a companionship forged across all differences, even species, all from the mere act of questioning.
uncurbed optimism, a naivety
Struggles from my earliest recollections
This is where it started. From whenever I could reason, I had this unease, the constant struggle, of trying to make sense of my life. Of course you can drown out those thoughts by playing games and watching movies, in short, being too distracted with life. But the thought creeps back ever so often, leading to one of those sleepless nights.
I always had a terrible thanatophobia, though some introspection later I realized that it wasn’t dying that I feared, but instead having all my life be for naught. After all, how could I accept that my struggles, labors and accomplishments would ultimately be for nothing. If even the most cherished of reasons could not survive against the absoluteness of death then nothing hard is worth toiling for anyways. What you gave your days and nights for is not here right now, and won’t be after you’re dead, so why toil for a meaningless ripple lasting an insignificant time. Why must we suffer when the outcome on a long enough timeline is certain? Isn’t it enough to just have good enough life like most people? Why is that idea so nauseating to me? Perhaps it’s simply because I had somehow caught the curse of a dreamer, which would be another page in itself to write about and I won’t digress into that here.
None of my day to day struggles made sense any more. I was disillusioned with life, the mundanity of it all, the pointlessness. I was looking for a way out, some kind of respite, and soon got lost in the soma of self-help. I covered volumes, not end to end for the multitude of words seldom held unique ideas in the same proportion, but reached no catharsis. The ideas I encountered were more often than not, shallow and superficial. Productivity, discipline, greatness? What was all that for? My thirst for the why was still unquenched. Soon enough I realised that self help is fast food for the intellectual mind and that I would find nothing in those pages.
Philosophy then became my new foray but I regretably confess that I was too impatient to read through entire treatises as all I sought out were the ideas they could present, and hence could very much suffer from a flawed understanding of those topics. Nihilism, existentialism, absurdism, hedonism, solipsism, and countless others isms later, all adding their own shade to the forever question, ultimately, the idea of the world being inherently meaningless but you inventing your own meaning struck to me as most profound. Such a simple conclusion, so easy to be mistaken with “life is what you make of it”. Yes, fundamentally it is the same, but the journey to reaching that makes it mean something much more than those mere words to you, at least to me it does. It’s like you see a gestalt that you can’t explain.
But the absolute freedom to choose shackled me more than my previous condition for I was too paralysed by the infinite possibilities. To choose one is to reject all others, to live with your choices wondering what could’ve been. What can I choose that I won’t regret? Many sleepless nights went in the act of choosing. I was young then, all so full of hope, feeling the world within my grasp. There was so much that I wanted to do that hours in a day were not enough, and I was so afraid of giving up anything (very interestingly giving up is all I do these days). My fear of choosing led me to the brilliant ( I actually believed it to be at that time, but in my defense I was young ) proclamation that my purpose of life was to “find the purpose of life”. Having delayed the real act of making the choice and writing this boldly in another one of these pages a long time back, I realised that the biggest hindrance was the ever marching time, whose burden someday my body will be too old to bear.
The idea, as I am typing it now, seems ridiculous, a culmination of boundless optimism, but here we go. What I decided then on a long night ( just like this ) was that since my genius idea can’t work within the constraints of time, my most noble pursuit should be to dedicate my life to extending my life. I had full conviction that immortality within my lifetime was possible and if not, I should be the one to spearhead it and make sure that it is. Countless nights spent reading about aging and existing work being done in this direction followed. Perhaps it was my own laziness, but somewhere down the line I decided that my goal, however ridiculous it was, had better chances of success if I hired other people to do it for me ( for I could only do so much on my own and would very much be limited by own intelligence and abilities ) and that would cost money. So the new carrot now became getting as much money as possible.
What fierce ambition you could say! But that optimism is long gone now and I won’t ramble much more on this. In my defence, I was someone who had never seen failure ( I was the “bright” student after all ) and it was partly due to my inexperience about life itself as well as not knowing my own “limits”. Soon enough, I started looking for something else since I knew deep down that I won’t be able to pull this magnificent feat of “cheating death” off.
living through others, a misdirected cope
Having accepted my mortality, I tried to find another meaning that would work within those contraints. I realised soon that deep down what I wished for is simply to not be forgotten, no one does. “Living through others” and there’s various ways to go about it as I will discuss shortly, is one of the more common ways people consciously or unconsciously try to leave their mark on the world. And even without much introspection into the whys, this idea from its conception itself repelled me subconsciously. I did figure out the whys though and that’s what I shall go over next.
The more noble of these type of meanings is to do something great… or really tragic. Great could be curing cancer, running some country, some scientist who advanced science by decades. In my young and optimistic phase, I think I believed this too and what brought about the change was the inevitability of failures in life. Sure you can believe and keep on trying, but what if your whole concept of meaning in life relies on whether you were successful or not? If I failed at these grandiose tasks of mine that I set out for, which was going to happen in all statistical likelihood, would my life be meaningless? Were all my struggles and dreams inconsequential against an almost inevitable downfall? Clearly one cannot live with that, I cannot, for meaning needs to be ascertained priori and not post any achievement (how else would I justify my pain). And since not everyone can be great, (the exact definition for it is another challenge that I forego here) what virtue lies in a solution whose foundations rest upon a constraint ill-suited for all.
Since greatness was elusive, I found a disquieting comfort in tragedy’s embrace. If I cannot be on the right end of the spectrum, then I might as well be on the left one. Mediocrity terrified me, being average, that sea of sameness where a single individual is akin to some dim star in the night sky where no change would ensue were it to cease to exist that very instant. Don’t get the wrong idea by my usage of the word “tragedy”. By tragedy, I refer to any action that is not borne of some sound rationale but instead is driven by fervent attempts at standing apart, some of which can indeed be destructive which I obviously do not condone.
A parallel I wish to remark on before moving further, lest the reader may overlook it (and isn’t the point of all writing to convey the mental state of the writer to the reader), is about the universality of this crave for uniqueness. You can see it particularly, though in a very reductive way, as a teenager’s angst. Even though many might not fully grasp where this innate desire springs from, I believe it’s because an independent identity is so deeply rooted within the subconscious of any intelligent being, intertwined deeply with the meaning of life itself, that it makes the phenomenon universal. Though this again is too reductive and superficial, simply because we still are at a plane where the meaning exists through other people.
I wonder if suicide and self harm and even downright psychopathic behavior could partly have their origins from this, with a focus on the term “partly” as such a thought is an amalgamation of all that you are. A famous one being Dazai’s double suicide, which while I appreciate the cynical beauty of, couldn’t help me from seeing parallels. To find solace in another soul and affect it with the permanence of death, so absurd yet undeniably distinctive.
Another and the most ubiquitous as well as the most nauseating example of living through others is having children. It is no hidden secret that having children does give people a sense of purpose as their trials are now the source of nourishment to someone else’s existence, one that will still be here after they are gone, and perhaps whose descendants will still walk this earth, all because of what they do now. I get the allure of the idea and it is a noble pursuit without which all of life would come to a standstill, but does it qualify as a valid solution? For the most, definitely yes, but unfortunately I’m not most people.
Before moving forth, allow me to outline a certain characteristic that I wish for and expect a feasible solution to possess. A viable solution firstly must be similar to Kant’s universal law, emerging from within and universally applicable to everyone. The quest for greatness certainly is not universal and though there are many ways of living through others, it is especially important that I bring to light a larger issue with the fundamental idea of it, that renders all of them invalid.
Should your meaning depend on someone else remembering you? After all, this is all that living through others can gets you. Even if you could beat the impossible odds and be the greatest person ever or the most tragic martyr that people would talk about for ages, would that be enough? How long would they remember you? What do they even remember? Do your loved ones and your family, your kid ever truly knew you? Even people closest to you have and know different versions of you, none of which could be further from the truth. Would your great-grandchild even know anything more than your name, if even that? Perhaps all most people remember is what you did for them, not who you were. This is who I am on these nameless pages on the internet and yet no one in real life has a fleeting hint (and I intend to keep it that way) about all that goes on in my mind and troubles me. Finally, were you to be the last person alone on this earth, would you life be meaningless simply because there’s no one to witness you? A true solution must also be applicable to such a scenario.
With all that said, I do agree that to live for others is often easier to bear with and is certainly enough for most people.