The Meaning of Life
What’s it all about?
It’s a puzzle.
One that has occupied a lot of people for a very long time. If you’re one of my regular readers, you’ve probably guessed that it’s a question of interest to me as well. While most of my writing is consumed with meaning-in-general and the general critique-of-knowledge that follows, most of this serves to distract for the real question: why are we here?
Now, I’ve got a working hypothesis. Which means that, if I’m taken canonically, I’ve wasted a lot of your time with the other stuff I’ve written, so I should probably just get on with it. In my defence, It could also be said that I’m just in keeping with the fashion. Few writers choose to get directly to the point. Executive overviews are for work, not prose. That said, I won’t wait till the very end to tell you what it is, but I’ll drag it out a little just because.
After all, if some dude tells you that he knows what it’s all about, you’re right to be incredulous.
And that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. I think I figured it out. You might even like it. I kind of do.
But let’s start with the technical bits. I’m not going to be of much help to the religious. I don’t think God put you here to do His (or Her or Whatever’s) will. My version of this skips over God entirely. As I’ve said before, I don’t think God is contingent, so I don’t feel that I need to account for It in my working hypothesis. A good meaning of life should try and do away with complexity, not double down on it.
But it does need to account for an enormous variety of expressions. There are those who say that the whole of creation is alive — every particle, every muskrat, and every river system. And that should be considered. The meaning of life has to understand humanity as an extension of a bigger system, not as central to anything in particular. A good meaning of life makes space for a universe in which we don’t exist (or one in which we’ve destroyed ourselves). But life doesn’t end with us. Life has a lot of expressions. Ours is just one.
A good Meaning also needs to be capable of contradiction. In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the meaning of life is revealed to be 42. Douglas Adams (the author) insisted this was a coincidental choice — little more than a funny sounding number. Which in some ways makes his choice perfect. The meaningless is meaningless because contradiction is inherent to the operation of our minds. The less foundation an idea has, the freer we get to be with it. 42 is a great meaning of life — you can do whatever you want with it. But it doesn’t tell us much about how to approach the issue. That Deep Thought suggests his creators go looking for the right question rather than the answer is one of those things that made Adams’s inquiry into the subject so immortal.
But, in deference, there isn’t a single question that addresses the mystery of life. There’s a bunch of them. So a good answer has to fit in a variety of ways. And, you know, lots of people have addressed this issue. Most of them are on to something, even if they’re only belaboring the point. Any good meaning of life needs to transcend some of this and embrace a variety of alternative inquiries.
See, the meaning of life has to be inescapable; something you can’t help but participate in. This is why most major religions have a concept of hell. They insist that if you behave counter to their precepts, punishment is inevitable. God, being largely contrived, can get away with this. If all you need to do is refer back to yourself, your job is easy. But this is unprovable, and therefore useless. Instead, we should consider the meaning of life as something to be extracted from the physics of the universe. Whatever your view of its origins, the universe is a gigantic self-replicating machine. Our own existence is a testament to the iron-clad laws of physics. Genesis, once begun, follows its own impossible logic: replication compounding complexity. This is literally all that DNA does — it’s a chemical replication machine.
Have I wasted enough of your time? Shall I get on with it?
Probably. So here it is:
The meaning of life is to pass the experience on.
That’s it.
What does this mean to you? It means you should make art. You should teach and give things away to strangers. Celebrate the creative forces that inspire you. Speak your truth and embrace your weird. Remake and reimagine everything. Even your mistakes are beautiful. Inscribe everything you do with poetry (always a mistake). Love — make it your business.
And test this out. I don’t know that I’ve got it — this is a hypothesis, after all. One I’m woefully ill-equipped to test out properly. But I figure that to die is to embrace silence; to escape the churn of creation.
To live is to pass the experience on. The question that presses upon is is what to pass on. The wise person chooses carefully. The unwise do it in spite of themselves.
To embrace a meaningful life really just means to give something back to the universe.
