The Meaning of Life

Had this email exchange with an old friend last week. We hadn't talked in years, so of course there were many catching-up details to be shared, which naturally led to a general discussion about life's ultimate meaning. I swear she started it. In the middle of her last email was this paragraph:

I've realized or decided that life has no meaning. We live and we die. I have no need to make a mark or leave a legacy. We're all ephemeral, transient bags of water animated by electricity. I'm good with that. We're all part of everything, together. Why people have to fuck it up so much during the short time we're here is a sad mystery, assigning meaning where there is none feeds the ego. I assume no physicists believe in god.

That kind of stuff is like a bag of candy to me, so I jumped on the invitation to go to Philosophy Town with it. Possibly it wasn't the kind of sympathetic response she was looking for. But I felt like the process of writing it clarified some of my own "mystical atheist" thoughts on the matter. If you're interested, here's what I said. I've left it unitalicized, because it's quite long and that would be just one level of annoying too many:

As for life having no meaning... I think I know what you mean, but I think I don't exactly agree. Or, rather, there are three distinct things I think you might mean, each of which I do agree with, but maybe not in quite the same way as you:

1. Life has no intrinsic meaning, only meanings we arbitrarily assign it.

Sure. Yes. That seems obviously true to me.

However, I wouldn't then go on to say it therefore has no meaning. Because nothing has "intrinsic meaning," whatever that might be. All meaning is relative to some community that has decided upon it arbitrarily, but that doesn't make it any less valid.

The word "cookie," e.g, has been agreed to refer to a certain kind of baked good. There's nothing about the sound of the word or the way it looks written on a piece of paper that makes it inherently suitable for that purpose, but we can still use it to express hunger or generosity without necessarily feeding anyone's egos.

2. OK, but that's just a different use of the word "meaning" from what I'm saying here, which is something more like "point" or "purpose." Because we are all randomly evolved combinations of physical stuff with no designer, no one can claim knowledge of some ultimate purpose to our existence.

Again, I agree with that statement as far as it goes, but would add that the lack of an inarguable, universally valid reason for human life doesn't imply anything wrong with creating our own reasons for living.

We may be bags of water animated by electricty, but we are not JUST bags of water animated by electricity. We also happen to be the only such bags of water that have developed communicatively rich language. We're the species that makes ideas stand for things and words stand for ideas and things stand for words with next to no effort. It's in our nature to go around creating meaning and stories that make our lives make sense to us. There's no point in saying we shouldn't do that, because it's behind every decision we make, every thought we think, and every opinion we opine.

To put it another way, in order to be "good with" or "not good with" the transient and comically physical nature of human existence, you have to first believe in meaning of some kind. Otherwise, the whole judgment is a non-starter.

3. Thoughts, opinions, judgments — yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting we get away from. Our obsessive need to see meaning everywhere is precisely what makes us so neurotic, so we need to learn to cut it out when it's not appropriate. Look at this planet, for Pete's sake! We're making a giant mess of it, killing ourselves and everything else along the way, all for the sake of some stupid ideas and preferences we've dreamed up just to make our lives more interesting or sensible. Life isn't supposed to be interesting or make sense! Other species don't do that, and they seem to get along fine. Oh sure, sometimes they eat each other, and I wouldn't exactly argue that they're better artists or moralists or truth-seekers or whatever than we are. But they also don't figure out ways to short-sightedly annihilate each other and their surroundings, just so they can feel a little more comfortable and smug during their individual lifetimes. Come on!

OK, yeah, I'm pretty much with you on this one. And the whole God-as-something-you-need-to-decide-whether-you-believe-in-or-not I also can't get behind. We do need to get over ourselves and stop clinging to the beliefs and stories we identify with so strongly that we're willing to commit violence to ourselves and the beautifully balanced chaos from which we've sprung in order to protect them.

However… I feel like the letting-go and acceptance-of-reality-as-it-is that are called for here are what religion, and even the mystical concept "God," are supposed to be about. Forget about belief or disbelief in certain narratives. Those are not useful concepts. But if one can manage, at least temporarily, to take on the attitude that there are mysterious forces beyond our understanding, behind everything we think we know, including our sense of ourselves, and that those forces furthermore express themselves through each of us and in turn are witnessed by each of us in a pre-causal, atemporal kind of flow that, when we are lucky enough to tune into it, feels like nothing so much as unconditional love, well, that's a very powerful stance to be able to take.

I guess I'm saying that your "We're all part of everything, together" is not incompatible with a physicist experiencing something that she might decide to call "God." We don't need God as a concept that explains how things work — we have science for that. But science doesn't tell us anything about how to enjoy the world as given. If anything, it just makes up more and more stories about that world, till we can't look at anything directly anymore because we're too busy trying to understand and control it. What we need now to balance that perpetual discomfort is a willingness to experience complete mystery behind the complete understanding. It's not a matter of belief, but of openness to possibility.

So, if you're saying life has no meaning and therefore is pointless and therefore it doesn't matter what people do just as long as they keep their stupid stories to themselves, I respectfully disagree. But if, by "Life has no meaning," you mean to celebrate the infinity of possibilities presented to us at every moment when we can manage to let go of our stories, fears, desires, beliefs, and preconceptions and just live, I'm with ya, sister!