The Biggest Question Is the Wrong Question
The greatest question we can ask ourselves has the simplest answer.
What is the meaning of life?
Everyone — or, virtually everyone — has asked themselves this question at some point in their life. And it’s an interesting question, a profound question. But there’s a part of me that’s convinced it’s the wrong question.
Generally, what people really want to know when they ask this question is whether there’s a purpose or explanation for the events that happen in their lives. The question becomes even more pressing when we realize how little power we have to change what happens.
It’s sad and depressing.
I’ve asked myself this question countless times. I’ve tortured myself over it for many years, searching for some kind of justifiable answer.
I’ve waded through the high seas of Christianity, Deism, atheism, anti-theism, philosophical pessimism, Buddhism, Pantheism, Panentheism, and basically everything in between.
The question penetrates down to our very wiring and wheelwork.
I’ve considered suicide — and I even attempted it once. But, as the great Emil Cioran once said, “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
There’s profound enlightenment shimmering off the words of that suicidal curmudgeon.
So really: What is the meaning of life?
As I mentioned above, I believe that to be the wrong question. The question presupposes there’s something wholly independent of us that’s standing outside the window, passively watching everything play out.
While I used to believe this outlook, I now find that worldview particularly flat and uninspired.
Alan Watts provided a beautiful flourish to the question. He said: “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
The meaning of life, according to Watts, is simply to live. There’s no deity to please, no image to bow down to.
Many of us — including me — have spent so much time searching for the meaning of life that we miss the meaning of life.
Scarcely has irony been so cruel.
Watts’ view is a deceptively powerful explanation. After all, the meaning of any action, in a strict sense, is limited to the act itself.
If a light bulb goes out in my kitchen, I’ll eventually have to change it. I won’t beg for an existential explanation for why the light bulb burned out, and I won’t hope for a Deus ex machina to slip down and solve the issue. The simple fact is that the light bulb burned out, and I need to find a replacement.
The same can be said for life.
As far as we know, the meaning of life is to live. That’s all.
That’s not to say there isn’t something more out there — none of us know if there is or not. We simply don’t know — and when it’s impossible to know something, it’s only rational to move on to other questions.
But I have another theory. What I really think we’re after when we ask about the meaning of life is safety. All of us — no matter who we are or where we’re from — we all just want to be okay.
I know that’s what I want.
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But in safety we become bored and restless.