Meaning in Meaninglessness

Photo: Alex Guillaume on Unsplash

Fleeting existence can lower the spirit if you allow it. We live moment to moment, entranced by the present and captivated by our striving. In a flash those moments evaporate, and we are left wondering how our grasp on time loosened despite our desire to shatter the gears to our clock. Schopenhauer captured this idea in his essay, On the Vanity of Existence, when he ghostly penned, “Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.” Although this notion is the essence of how our consciousness operates with the reality before us, despair never arrives as the response to it all.

Suffering is abundant even in the most successful among us. And it appears that the ways in which mankind has chosen to alleviate emotional torment revolves around uncovering some type of meaning or purpose to explain everything. It is in our nature to desire and know the ends behind our actions. Otherwise, incentives are nonexistent in any causation-based schema, which just happens to be the foundation of life itself. A reason must exist for why we water flowers, for instance, otherwise it would be quite strange behavior. When applied to existence as a concept, especially upon the realization that none of us asked to be here in the first place, this can create a minefield of rabbit holes. Why are we here? What awaits after I attend an overpriced school, participate in the labor force, and other life milestones? Once again, these pits of uncertainty and agony concerning our place in the cosmos seem to be less harrowing when a meaning is assigned to describe our reality. Religion and other divine-based beliefs such as astrology do this quite well and have proven useful for some people. But there will always remain a certain ambiguity to it all. Teleological beliefs that care only for the end and not the means miss the point to the absurdity of life. We are result-seeking creatures, and yet we cannot know the culmination of our actions while on earth. Within this absurdity, however, lies a landscape of individual elements of inspiration each containing the idiosyncratic wherewithal to be enjoyed for its own sake.

Our striving contains numerous, fulfilling experiences while attempting to make sense of life. With the pointlessness of the world as a given, according to Camus, the nature of being is unknowable given our current cognitive constraints. Forced to abandon asking questions of ”why” upon observation of these societies mankind has constructed, it is imperative to ask how we can flourish in existence. We are then called upon to fill in the arcane gaps between how we live and why we do so. To live in the absurd exponentially increases the value of those pleasures that endlessly enthrall us – conversations about what we believe, great food with great company, enduring friendships. All the while we remain in combat with the dichotomy between meaning and meaninglessness. As our own architects to this map of understanding, we can engage with life in a way that is deeper than any outcome-based explanation. Conversations, for instance, are catalysts for laughter as well as vital to our personal decryption of honorable virtues. They are ubiquitous throughout our lives and yet each one has something new to offer, something new to learn.

In the spirit of irony, on stage in front of thousands of people, the comedian Bo Burnham quipped that we should try to live our life without an audience. The concept behind social media, to display your life in photos and thoughts and archive it accordingly, may not seem repulsive at first glance. But people have unhealthy fetishes with the end results — number of likes, retweets, or streaks rather than the idea of documenting your life with a sense of temperance. If the stupefying odds of existence and the activities contained within it were enough to keep us all in a state of wonder and joy, social media need not exist. Current social media platforms are fueled by psychological triggers of pleasure and suffering, and it translates into patterns of addiction and other unhealthy tendencies. The activity of creating an archive to your life should be enjoyed in and of itself. It’s been poisoned by these metrics of comparison between friends and foes in a virtual space. A world that prioritizes the intrinsic value contained within these experiences would be much better as it would hone in on performing actions for purely their sake rather than an external reward.

Many might see this intention as a losing struggle since these moments themselves are fleeting. Others are products of societal norms and might not even accomplish much in the present. Although it can be perceived as irrational, this existentialist point of view is the outlook on life that grants us the most autonomy. We simply have to marvel and engage in the experience of striving. It’s uncomfortable, but this way of living comes without regard to the finish line. The climber who attempts to summit a mountain that never ceases to grow in altitude. The diver wanting to touch the bottom of the ocean that continuously grows deeper. This expedition provides a process for always improving our navigation through life’s problems and the contemplation of our place in the universe that comes with it. Existence asks us to be content with the unknown. Unnerving by way of appearance, this very well could be the remedy that keeps us sane.

Editor(s): Krista J. Douglas