“IN this world there are only two tragedies,” said Oscar Wilde. “One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” This paradoxical proverb has often proved true.
Many people think that if they only had more money they would be happy. Howard Hughes was the world’s richest man when he was only 45 years old. Twenty years later, at sixty five, he still had all his money but was probably the world’s most miserable man. He had retreated from society, living in small dark rooms in different hotels and keeping all the sun out. He was dirty, his beard grew down to his waist, and his hair fell down his back. His fingernails were two inches long. His huge body had shrunk to nothing.
When thrashing through a sea of suffering, meaning is the metaphorical life preserver. That’s why worrying that your life is pointless feels a lot like drowning. If your life feels devoid of purpose, I would like to invite you not to panic. This is an excellent place from which to reassess your assumptions about existence.
At some point, you went off-course from your societally prescribed Meaningful Life. Yes, you may be lost–but you don’t have to stay that way. Let’s go find where your meaning went missing.
Meaning is simply a sense of significance. I don’t mean fame, because even the famous get swallowed by time. I don’t mean having a big impact on the world because any impact you can have is tiny in the scale of the infinite universe.
Here’s a pocket-sized definition of meaning: if you have been of service to even one other living creature at any point in your life, you have achieved a meaningful life. That time you were patient with the stressed-out grocery store clerk. When you avoided stepping on the ladybug. It doesn’t matter if it was small. We are all small.
And perhaps your meaning is to simply be here–to be a part of the natural world, just like the trees and the animals. Maybe it matters that you are here simply because you are here.
If you grew up in Western culture, you might have pictured financial security, thrilling travel, and a comfortable home containing a healthy family. This isn’t a bad target–it just isn’t the best target for everyone.
Capitalist culture teaches us that achievement, productivity, and consumption are the keys to a good life. But holding up this “good life” as your purpose can leave you owning plenty and feeling empty.
In lieu of productivity, many of us strive for longevity with admirable diligence. We eat organic vegetables, get cardiovascular exercise, and worship at the altar of health. Until illness and aging catch up to us and consume our fervent project.
By investing in a narrow view of success, we reduce life to a list of tasks. Get up, go to work, come home, eat your fiber, spend 50 minutes on the treadmill, sleep eight hours, repeat.
In this way of being, people who dutifully grind through the work of life without ever reaching success are left with only despair. And those who achieve success sense, uneasily, the inherent unfairness of the world – that they live in comfort while others struggle for no compelling reason.
So here you are, throwing your assumptions about life out with the garbage–scary! Confusing! It’s like building an IKEA couch with a time limit, except you’ve burned the instructions, and it turns out the couch is actually a table.
Many of us cling to our old ways of being, ways that we know lead only to suffering, to avoid the existential vacuum. But figuring out your purpose is the work of life. Humans have been doing this since ancient times. You’re in good company.
Maybe you’re reassessing your life because you’ve achieved your goals and still feel empty. Maybe your original goal was taken from you–a lost career, a health crisis, a financial calamity. You’ve faced the painful reality that your original life’s goal can lead only to meaninglessness.
We love stories of individuals striking out on their own to overcome great personal struggles. It’s inspiring when that happens, but that model doesn’t work for everyone, perhaps including you.
We need other people. Excluding others from your journey of meaning can lead further to isolation and emptiness. If you find yourself unsure that your life has any point, it might be time to expand your community–to be of service to others, and to let them be of service to you. You can develop a lived sense that your life is significant to others.
Even if you don’t particularly enjoy people or don’t have a community available, you can still play a meaningful role in the world around you. Familiarize yourself and cultivate connections with living things–even plants and animals. Maybe you will be the caretaker of a lovely garden. Perhaps you will become a rescuer of stray cats. Maybe your life’s purpose is to run a garden full of well-fed stray cats, oxygen-producing plants, and native bees. You get to pick.
Humans are surrounded by an ecosystem teeming with life. Not just plants and animals, but minuscule fungi and microorganisms too small to see with a naked eye. They’re living in your body, on your skin. You yourself are an ecosystem, layered with millions of lives of which you have no conscious awareness.
Perhaps this is all meaningless–simply an explosion of biochemistry. But is it not also beautiful?
Maybe it’s time to unlearn your negative assumptions of meaninglessness. Put down your expectations for what you should be. Lean into our tiny, lovely slice of the universe’s chaos.
In today’s times many people are also asking themselves about the meaning of life. I don’t need to go into that any further here. Everyone knows. Everyone may experience it themselves or find it in their families and surroundings. Yes, the pandemic is over, even if there are the first openings and loosenings here and there.
“What is the point of life?” people are asking. You work hard, and many times someone else gets the credit. You struggle to be good, and evil people take advantage of you. You are in a great situation and accumulate money, and it just goes to spoiled fellow men and women. You seek pleasure, but it turns sour on you. And everyone – rich or poor, good or evil, meets the same end. We all die.
I found Ecclesiastes in my bible. A book for our time. Ecclesiastes strikes a responsive chord. No century has seen so much progress, and yet such despair. What is the purpose of life anyway? Is there any ultimate meaning? I even asked myself all these questions, since some people around me passed away during the last weeks.
A key phrase in this book, “under the sun”, describes the world lived on one level, apart from God and without any belief in the afterlife. If you live on that level, you may well conclude that life is meaningless.
Ecclesiastes attracts extreme reactions. Novelist Thomas Wolfe said of it, “Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound.”
It’s really true. Please check it out and try to read it. And find out for yourself if life really seems so meaningless!
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