I often wonder about the purpose of my life, unsure if I have one. I am an educator. I teach courses in freshman composition, sophomore composition, creative nonfiction, arts and entertainment journalism, literary theory, and the history of literary criticism. I am a creative writer. I write fantasy stories. I am also a consumer. I buy things: books, video games, toys, nostalgia curios, food. I can’t seem to find a center to all of my activity. Is there a center? Why does it all matter?
Viktor Frankl, paragon of existential inquiry, famously reminds us in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) that "Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose," emphasizing that it is our duty to respond to creation and not creation’s responsibility to direct us. He notes that when we ask life, "What is the meaning of life?" life responds by whispering back the same question: "What is the meaning of your life?" We have to define the meaning of our own lives; meaning is not intrinsic to it.
Meaning sometimes emerges as a result of narrating, of telling a story. Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of "existence precedes essence" echoes this idea, suggesting that we define ourselves through the stories we live and tell. Sartre argued in Being and Nothingness (1943) that human beings are "condemned to be free," meaning that without a pre-existing essence, we must continuously create meaning for ourselves through action and choice. This existential freedom adds weight to the act of self narration; in telling our story, we are also constructing our essence.
I sometimes wonder if an unconscious understanding of the existential power of narrative to provide meaning is the source of my love for fantasy literature. It would be so much easier if a Gandalf or Epemitreus showed up at my house and told me I was somehow essential to the survival of the world. Here is a mission, Jason. You need to sacrifice yourself to save the world. I’m not sure if I would be able to fulfill the mission, honestly, but even if I were cowardly and said "no" to the call to adventure, at least I could live in a world where my cowardice had meaning. Milan Kundera’s concept of "the unbearable weight of meaning" helps clarify this point. The sheer gravity of being told you are essential to the world's survival grants a weightiness to every choice, even the decision to refuse the call, even the state of being hated by others for failure.
A lot of people come to the conclusion that there there is no meaning alone and find solace in social collectivities. There are institutions, maps of meaning, that deign to give us meaning. They are the large institutions like Nation, Religion, Capitalism, Family, Education, and Media. These institutions offer frameworks of meaning by providing roles, narratives, and systems of value that individuals can inhabit. For instance, the family offers meaning through kinship roles and generational legacy, while education frames life as a process of growth and self-improvement. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of "habitus" elucidates this dynamic. As Bourdieu explains in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), habitus is a system of dispositions that shapes how people perceive and act in the world, largely influenced by the social institutions they inhabit. In this sense, institutions provide not only structure but also a subtle, often unconscious, sense of purpose and place. You can be a patriot and devote yourself to the cause of your people. You can be a faithful person and immerse yourself in your faith tradition. You can seek celebrity and status and amass a following. You can be a capitalist and win by accumulating more than other people. In other words, find a prestablished map of meaning and follow it.
There are other ways of thinking about this. Here's one: screw the maps because there is no meaning--there are just intense experiences or a lack of intense experiences, ecstasy and boredom, vitality and unlife. In this void of meaning, you can seek intense experiences in drugs and sex, art and deranged physical conditions. If you’re just a form of intelligent slime, a sensorium that secretes thoughts, then meaning is irrelevant. Just experience life while you can.
This nihilistic, absurdist view of life seems consistent with much of our culture today. Our culture assumes that the only thing that is real is the reality defined by science, measured by science, commodified by the market, and administered by the technocratic elite. It’s a dark world where we are really no different from any other commodity. A human being has a price in this dark world. Even more unsettling, human material has a price by the pound. I’m sure a brutal economist could work out how much a pound of grade-A human flesh meats are worth. As Heidegger notes in Being and Time (1927), "The present age is one of the dominance of the world-picture," highlighting how everything, even human existence, becomes framed within calculable, objectified terms.
The cosmos seems empty or cruelly patient. It is waiting to hear my answer to the meaning of life.
After 41 years, it sometimes feels like I've worked out an answer, and it’s a boring one. I am reminded of the story of the beggar and the cabin built on a treasure trove. The story, often attributed to an old Sufi parable, tells of a beggar who spends his life in poverty, begging for scraps while unknowingly living atop a vast buried treasure. One day, he digs beneath his cabin floor and discovers a cache of gold that had been there all along. The parable illustrates how people often search for meaning outside themselves, oblivious to the profound wealth already within their reach. It seems really pointless, so unimaginative, to say, simply, that the meaning of life is to love: other people, things, animals, art, etc., because everything is, at base, God. There is no dividing God. God is an ancient tree, a plastic bag, your wife, your child, a car, a sunset, a good meal, and a dried hunk of mechanically processed jerky in a plastic shrink wrap preserved with carcinogens. It’s all God, the virus and the patient, and while you’re not required to love it, you can if you want to.
That's the only decision available to us. Love. Or not. But this is cold solace, because even if you love, you're not inoculated against misery. Loving something often causes misery. It's a frustrating aspect of the world that everything is ephemeral, so loving one thing is often setting yourself up for loss (ask anyone who has lost a cherished pet).
I guess the issue isn't misery or meaning, joy or sadness, but probably righteousness, an old timey word for be being in harmony with creation (or out of harmony). In other words, singing along with God or being a form of dissonance.
This is verging on the side of mysticism. Mysticism is essentially where you reach a boundary in discourse beyond which verbalization fails. You have a choice: either you stop speaking and say “Om,” or you tenaciously keep going and risk sounding like a crazy person. I'll guess I'll wrap up.
One thing I’m still wondering about is the relationship between understanding and calm. Intellectually understanding something doesn't seem to change the heart. Put another way, as questions: could Buddha be enlightened and still feel anxious? Could Christ feel resentment at being crucified? I don't know.