The Meaning of Life

In popular culture, this question is often encountered as a joke: some bearded guy on a mountain top gives a clever non-answer to a question that is assumed to be un-answerable. 

It’s easy to see how this issue became a joke. There are so many absurd answers offered with a straight face, that one suspects that the “real” answer is somehow being kept hidden from us, the unwashed masses too stupid to comprehend the reason for our very existence.

In the past, most of us lived in a cultural “bubble” that provided the answer (or non-answer) to the question in a way that encouraged us to just nod our heads and move on. For example, we may have been told that our purpose on Earth was to “praise God” or “Make the World Safe For Democracy”.

Modern thinkers at least try to step out of the bubbles. Modern philosophers will attack the issue with the tools of their trade: language Using those tools, they may decide that the question is meaningless or subject to 1,000 answers by named historical references. It is bad form for a philosopher to make reference to any actual fact in our shared Universe. Talking is the Universe of the Philosopher.

I suppose, by taking the question seriously, I am eschewing the title of “philosopher. For me, at least, the question does have meaning and that meaning becomes evident when I contemplate the real world of experience - not just the way we talk about it. From a philosopher’s point of view, what follows is total nonsense - a flagrant abuse of terminology and the rules of logic.

Sorry.

We can easily slip into asking for the meaning of the entire universe. This can happen if we are still stuck in the bubble where “God” means something, so we can ask “Why did God create the world?”

Outside of the bubble, where “God” is a meaningless word, the question becomes “why is there anything rather than nothing?” This is a good question. We can expect interesting ideas to come from cosmologists rather than theologians. For now, it makes sense to just accept that the Universe exists. We expect those who still live in the religious bubble to see the Hand of God behind it all. 

Or not.

But we are asking for the meaning of life, which is a vanishingly small phenomenon in the Universe as a whole. It is living things, not stars or rocks that look for (and find) meaning.

Whatever meaning may exist in our lives, we cannot expect it to suddenly pop into the Universe as man appears on the scene. All life, or at least most life, must have meaning - at least to the organism in question. The rat has a meaningful, purposeful life (from the rat’s point of view), even though the rat may be too stupid (or too smart) to ask exactly what it is all about.

The same can be said of a tree, a bee, or any of the organisms that surround us. We are perhaps set on the right road by recognizing that meaning is relative to the organism in question and may exist with or without the organism being “aware” of meaning or anything else. Meaning is very different for a deer than a bee, but we may always say that the meaning of life for any organism is to be a good specimen of whatever species you happen to be.

It is certainly plain that human beings can get away without knowing the meaning of life, or “knowing” some completely absurd pseudo-meaning. Meaning matters but knowing the meaning doesn’t seem to be crucial.

This leads us to a more manageable question. What does it mean to be human (Whether you know it or not)? We expect humans to behave in ways that promote human thriving in a human way, Taken together, these ways add up to what is the uniquely human meaning of life.

We share a lot with fellow mammals and even trees, but there are a few things that stand out when it comes to our “strategy” to thrive as human beings.

•  is, as we may expect, basic and something we share with every living thing. We carry on with this goal in specifically human ways that involve finding a mate and caring for children (often well into their adulthood). While our reproductive urgest may seem to be powerful and overwhelming, they are modest compared to, say, a poplar tree that covers the world with billions of sex messages in the vain hope that one or two may actually become another poplar We are far more efficient and focused. This leaves room for human life that is extremely rich and varied We are more than machines that make more humans.

• 
  

• We are extremely “social” and in a particularly human way. Being part of a society is part of what it is to be human. Doing so is part of what it means to be a “good” specimen of the human race. We care for others, not just “relatives” We teach, we explore, and we build. This is particularly important as we near the end of our “useful” lives. We are honored for our contributions. Our fellow humans are honored to care for us, long after we are “useful” to them. This is an important case since it is at this point in our lives that we doubt that there is any meaning to our lives, which seem to be a hollow shell of what they were like in our “prime”.

• , is exemplified by the astonishing richness of language. Each word carries a host of shared experiences. Think of the meaning of one three-letter word: “war”.

I could go on. Instead, I urge you to go about in your daily life observing typical human behavior. Think like a “man from Mars” or a biologist who just discovered this species. How can you explain all this hustle and bustle that we call the human race? How is that explanation different from how you would explain all the trees?

.