Why Are We Here? How To Create Profound Meaning in a Meaningless Existence
“There’s no right, there’s no wrong, there’s only popular opinion” — Jeffrey Goines, Twelve Monkeys
Several years ago, I used to think that if only I had the time to read all the philosophy books out there, I would finally find the meaning of life, as if it was something to be found.
“Why are we here?” — I used to ask myself.
This is the all too common cliché question we see everywhere, but I now realize that it’s the wrong question to ask. Why so?
Because it subtly assumes that there is a general objective meaning to Life common to all human beings and intrinsic to our existence, a principle we should all adhere to, and all we have to do is to find and abide by it.
In fact, our conformist culture had us think that there should be an absolute truth, a common purpose for all human beings we should all aim for: A God to worship, A strive for happiness through consumerism, A particular Study-Work-Marry-Retire-Die life path we should all pursue, and more generally, a set of values preached by our society we should adopt and consider as the highest truth.
After all, it’s easier for our societies to function based on a set of shared values and things we consider as true and important. Just imagine what would happen if everyone came up with their own rules and acted accordingly.
However, when it’s about something as important as giving our lives purpose and meaning, we owe it to ourselves to ask the question:
Is there such an absolute truth about our purpose on this planet? Is there an objective common shared meaning to our existence?
The Meaning Of Life Is To Survive
So, is there a factual common shared meaning to our existence? Let’s generalize this question even more:
Is there an objective common shared meaning to the existence of all living entities on this planet?
What’s the common innate built-in purpose between you, your dog, and covid-19?
Well, we all want to survive.
The driving force common to all species on this planet is the drive to perpetuate life: Eat, reproduce, and not get yourself killed.
It’s just that survival means different things for different animals.
For humans, we have a quiet sophisticated sense of survival: We spend our lives working and earning a living to ensure not only that our basic needs (food, shelter, etc) are fulfilled but also our psychological needs (Relationships, self esteem, need to belong, etc) are satisfied.
Because we cannot really survive on basic physiological needs alone: Without having our psychological needs met, we would probably dive into depression and end up killing ourselves, thus you know, not surviving.
For most other animals however, survival just means not dying of hunger or getting eaten. Your dog doesn’t care much about his self-esteem and self-worth, the relationships he has with other dogs, or his need to self-actualize: he just wants you to feed him.
Therefore, the meaning of life, if there is such an intrinsic purpose & meaning to our existence, is just to survive.
Not the thrilling grandiose answer to a life purpose you would expect, right?
The Absurdity Of Our Lives
If the common purpose of our existence is just to survive, what do we survive for? For what aim?
Well, from all we can discern, there is no other ultimate objective aim or purpose. We live just to survive, and we survive just to live.
Our existence is kind of absurd, and while it could be enough for other animals, living just for the sake of surviving feels empty and meaningless for the conscious creatures we are.
3 Steps To Defy The Absurdity & Create Your Own Meaning
So, the bad news is that life is meaningless. There is no greater scheme you are surviving for, no heroic mission you were born to accomplish, no gods you were made to worship, no predetermined meaning, no instructions manual for life, nothing. We are left alone in this universe.
But that’s also the good news: If life is intrinsically meaningless, you get the freedom to choose the meaning you want to give to your existence.
If there is no absolute truth, you get the space and liberty to create your own truth. If there is no predetermined purpose to your existence, you get the opportunity to create your own purpose. If there is a void, you get to fill it, and if there is a blank page, you get the privilege to write on it.
However, all of this is easier said than done, so let’s go through a detailed 3 steps process to create meaning into our lives and take back control.
1- Awaken To The Meaningless of Life
We are all coming from somewhere in life: We’ve all been programmed by our societies at some level in some way, we were spoon fed rules, values, about what’s meaningful and what’s not, whether through religion, cultural norms, or whatever popular ideology was out there.
This is normal, as we can’t function without a system, especially in our early age. So we take on whatever is there, whatever our immediate environment and culture preach to us, incorporate this framework, and use it to navigate this world.
We start to cling to the meaning we give to this world, it becomes part of our identity (which is why it’s so hard to change), forms part of our comfort zone, and we take our version of the reality for being the reality itself: The subjective meaning we give to our lives for being the objective meaning of life.
If we are lucky (or unlucky), at some point, our system fails us, what’s right is no longer that right anymore, what’s wrong could be easily seen as right.
The framework of meaning we used to make sense of our world dissolves into the void.
A loophole, a vulnerability takes us out of our self-made Matrix.
That’s when we realize, there is actually no system. We created the system, we created a meaning, a purpose, rules, values, right and wrong.
We imbued an otherwise meaningless neutral world with meaning and value.
But the world, on its own, without us the meaning seekers & creators, is meaningless, neutral, and doesn’t care.
It doesn’t have any purpose, there is no absolute right and wrong, no absolute truth about what’s important and what is not, and at the end of the day, nothing really matters more than anything else in an objective sense.
And once we awaken to this reality, there is no going back to sleep.
2- Answer The Call For Adventure
Nothing really matters, life in intrinsically meaningless, if we’d stop at this point, we’d probably end up depressed for the rest of our days.
But luckily for us, the silver lining in the absurdity of our existence is that we were gifted with the freedom and privilege to choose whatever meaning we want to give to our lives.
Life is meaningless, and that’s great news: You do not have to follow a set of transcendental universal rules that are supposed to give your life direction and meaning, to remain in the herd the same way you’ve always been and be guided by a shepherd.
You can create your own rules, construct your own meaning, and become your own master.
Nothing is imposed on you, and you always get to choose.
So would you choose to remain safely in the herd, or would you dare to venture into the wilderness?
3 — Create Your Own Meaning
If you choose the latter option, the next step would be to consciously attempt to assign self-chosen meaning to your existence.
So how do you create your own meaning, and how do you choose what is meaningful for you and what is not?
The best place to start with is Self-Knowledge: Getting to know yourself, what your values are, what is personally important to you and what is not so.
Once you have a clear sense of who you are and what you value, you can start to derive meaning from your environment and the different activities you participate in.
Example 1:
Say that your top value is Curiosity.
Having this in mind, you can create more meaning into your life by choosing to engage in activities likely to fulfill this value:
- Becoming a Life-Long Learner through reading books on the subjects that interest you, signing up for online classes, etc
- Socializing more and getting to know more people and their stories to fulfill your curiosity
- Exploring new places (Nature, discover a nearby street, city, etc), new cultures, and go on adventures
Generally speaking, you create your own meaning by aligning your life (your daily actions, your job, your relationships) with your core authentic values (The things you care about most deeply, your aspirations, etc).
Example 2:
Your top value is Love & Connection
Let’s suppose that you cannot pursue new activities to fulfill this value.
In this case, you could take the activities you are already undertaking (your current job, your existing relationships, etc), focus on and leverage the specific aspects & outputs of those activities that could satisfy your desire for connection, hence creating more meaning in your life.
For example, you have an office job which you find boring and which you cannot currently quit.
You could in this case make your job more meaningful by introducing the opportunity to fulfill your value of connection in your working days through:
- Engaging & interacting more with your colleagues and creating new friendships in your workplace.
- Building a trust relationship with your customers/clients that serves you professionally but also allows to connect with people on a more personal level.
You do not have to flip your life upside down to make it more meaningful, you can simply learn to leverage some existing aspects of your life and make them more aligned with your core values instead.
We are born to survive. But survival for the sake of survival is absurd. It is not enough. So we look for meaning, in the stars, in the gods, in other people.
We look for meaning, we cry for meaning, we long for something greater than we are, than our own existence.
But no one can hear us scream.
There is no echo back, no answer to our questions, no apparent intrinsic objective meaning to life.
So we turn to ourselves, we tune in to our souls, and that’s when we realize that, ultimately, the meaning of life is to create our own self-made meaning in life.
In the last analysis, the greater purpose of life is found in our most personal subjective lives: in the dreams that the small child in us longed for with sparkling eyes, in experiencing what it means to love someone, in healing and growing, in the hard work, in the sweat and hardships we encounter while pursuing what we care about and believe in, in the craziest ideas we had but were too afraid to try, in living authentically & deeply, in appreciating the beauty of our world, in actualizing our strengths, in becoming everything we are capable of being, in using the power of our dreams and imagination, in waking up to our life calling and boldly embarking in one of the greatest and wildest adventures there is: A journey towards self-realization.
Or as Nietzsche puts it:
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.
There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead?” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Originally published at https://curiobrain.com on January 25, 2021.
