What is the Meaning of Life?
What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose? What happens after death? Why is there something instead of nothing? These are some of our basic existential questions. Why do we even ask these questions? Throughout history, our constant yearning for answers to the existential questions drove – and still drives – our creation of mythologies, religions, arts, sciences, philosophies, literature, belief systems, and whole worldviews. Our great literature and art arouse in us feelings of awe and wonder, as well as dread and mystery surrounding these questions. We are all familiar with many of the stories and myths of heroes who go on great quests. On the surface, these narratives may be about finding a golden fleece, Odysseus finding his way home after the ten-year Trojan War, or Buddha returning from a forest after many years of meditation and getting enlightened. Lurking below the surface of the literal description of facts of who went where and did what lies a deeper meaning in which we find the protagonist so often in search of answers, justice, order, and ultimately and most importantly a way to make sense – to make meaning – out of the world in which they find themselves. Robert Kegan, a Harvard psychologist, writes in The Evolving Self (1982) that “it is not that a person makes meaning, as much as that activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making.” What Kegan is driving at is that meaning-making is a compulsion rather than something we choose. We often mold ourselves on these heroes and protagonists and aspire to be like them. We do this so that we might have a guide to help us make sense of the world and find meaning in our lives.From Existential Questions to Existential Crisis
In part, we collectively have created the many stories, tales, myths, philosophies, religions, and worldviews to abate the existential dread that is liable to envelop us like a long, ceaseless night when we confront these existential questions. Nietzsche described this feeling as the realization that when one “looks[s] into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” His imagery is even more fitting to ponder when just recently scientists produced the first image of a black hole, which is at one and the same time the destroyer of all that comes near it and yet the same object that gives galaxies their structures. Existential dread may turn into a full-blown existential crisis, but it need not necessarily do so. After all, Isaac Newton describes his own sense of facing this void in a rather joyful manner. He wrote that “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” The difference is in perspective, meaning-making, and self-knowledge. Today, we may have innumerable opportunities and cognitive tools leading to many more ways of creating meaning than at any time in the past. For example, a villager who lived in the 9th century in what is today France had minimal knowledge and a limited well from which to draw. He or she was likely illiterate and could only draw upon the local customs and tales as well as his or her own experiences, which were usually geographically limited. Today, we have instant access to the whole of written and known human texts, as well as the many interpretations of our histories. We carry around devices that allow us, in a few short keystrokes, to find instant answers to many of our daily questions. We may never be physically lost so long as we have our GPS-enabled devices in hand. When it is so easy to answer so many questions, perhaps it becomes more apparent how hard it may be to answer the existential questions. At some stage in our lives, often triggered by an event, the sense of dread begins to creep in like a late evening fog, obscuring our possibilities. Instead of helping us to create more meaning, what is sometimes called the tyranny or the paradox of choice comes into play, and we end up less able to pick amongst the many meaning-making options. Perhaps it is our experience of this new complexity in the world,, as well as the fragmentation of our daily lives, which separates and isolates us from the rest, that contributes to the existential malaise that so many of us appear to have and that appears to have been steadily increasing over the past decades.