A few weeks ago in Hay at How The Light Gets In, I took part in a debate about the meaning of life. As I prepared my initial three-minute presentation, the thought that bugged me most was: “Not again!”
There was nothing substantively new to be said about the subject when I wrote my book What’s It All About? in 2004. All I felt I was doing was putting it all together in as clear and engaging a way as possible. Mine was far from the first book on the subject and although at the time there was still surprisingly little competition, many, many books have followed.
In case you haven’t yet heard the answer, here’s the summary of what most of them say.
Life has no ultimate purpose or goal. We are mortal creatures who live, die and that’s it. When we ask for the meaning of life we should really be asking about its value: what makes life worth living? There is no single answer to this. In the movie Manhattan, Ike includes Groucho Marx, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louie Armstrong’s recording of “Potato Head Blues”, Swedish movies, Sentimental Education by Flaubert, those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne, the crabs at Sam Wo’s…” He ends with what many of us would start with: the person he loves. Make your own list – preferably one in which your beloved is not a young girl less than half your age. Whatever is on it, the point is that, as the alien in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles put it, “Life is its own answer. Accept it and enjoy it day by day. Live as well as possible. Expect no more.”
So why do we still have more books, more discussion, more head-scratching about what the meaning of life is? I don’t think it’s because most of us don’t buy the standard answer. Sure, many – perhaps globally the majority – believe there must be “something more”: a life to come, a higher purpose. But even among the religious, fewer and fewer buy the idea that after death we’ll wake up in a paradise, order a Bellini and start celebrating for eternity.
At the same time, many still have the nagging feeling that the standard answer isn’t enough. In a sense they’re right. The point is that no answer is enough. Too often it is assumed that if we could just find the answer, that would be the end of it: life would be meaningful and we could live out our days in peace. But the meaning of life is not found by discovering the meaning of “the meaning of life”. It is more like a skill than an item of knowledge. Knowing that all you can do is “live as well as possible” is the beginning of the search for meaning in life, not the end.
In Hay, I used a perhaps odd analogy with that most eccentric of sports, cricket. If you knew nothing about it, you’d be baffled. But you would not be fully enlightened by having all the rules explained to you. To play it well you’d need hours of practice, to appreciate it properly as a spectator, months and years of watching. Life is pretty much the same. Knowing where meaning is to be found doesn’t automatically give you the skill or appreciation to find it.
Worse, meaning can go as well as come. There are times in life when enough lines up that we don’t have to worry about its meaning: it’s obviously good and worth the hassles, the aches and pains, all those taxes. But this is a fragile state and we can all be derailed by crises or just ennui. Meaning can’t be captured once and for all. It is like a wind that we have to harness like sailing ships to keep ourselves from being caught in the doldrums.
Philosophers are to meaning what art critics are to art. They know what meaning is but if you’re trying to create it, you’re better off looking elsewhere.
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