The Meaning of Life

A friend of mine once said that instead of humans as a species being like Sisyphus and having to watch the boulder we have been pushing up the hill roll all the way back to the bottom (and having to start again forever), that each generation tries to push the boulder (quality of life?) further up the hill, and even if it occasionally backslides that on average progress is real.

I am curious about how often the focus is on teleology in assessing the ostensible lack of meaning in life, or there being some ultimate purpose, like there is one meaning to life and we do not have it anymore. As far as I am concerned there is no meaning to life, but there are plenty of meanings to life, and each of us creates our own and can contribute to others’.

I do not know you very well, and you don’t know me very well (let us be honest); I do my best not to put words in the mouths of other people. Let’s assume that I have been as disillusioned as anyone, but there really is not much point in arguing who has stared longer into the darkest, vastest void.

I am still highly ambivalent about my own existence, and irresponsible enough sometimes to add insult to injury because if there is no one else I would rather be, and usually I would rather have never been born, what does that say about my opinion of the human species?

We all know (or should know) that there is a tremendous amount of suffering in the world, and to use the overused but insightful metaphor, we are all passengers on spaceship earth. In a very meaningful way we are all tied together in a vast tapestry of causality of which we are an infinitely small thread. But we cannot let the scale of the cosmos distract us from the very real pain around us, a certain amount of which is in our power to alleviate or assuage. Even if we have not figured out how to live for ourselves, every consciousness is sacred and we owe it to the rest of humanity to try to ease suffering as much as we can (whatever that means). Everyone deserves the luxury of not having to struggle for survival (now that it is within our species power to end global poverty especially), and the luxury of having to figure out what life is for for themselves. I do not even have to be a fan of these weird mobile sacks of flesh, these shitting machines, these ignorant world destroying animals raping the Earth with seeming impunity, these human creatures to realize that it is hubris to assume that I know that there is nothing for our species, that out of the 6 billion plus individual, singular, consciousnesses out that there, to assume that someone might not have a clue (and either way it is moot).

In fact I think there is less room for meaning if there is some sort of predetermined destiny or inevitable future. What purpose does anyone have in that perspective? The future will be whatever it will be, with or without us. Only in creating our own meaning can there be any true meaning at all.