Nothing matters. Now there’s a fun-loving rhetorical turd you should try dropping at a dinner party sometime.
People go positively apoplectic when you suggest their lives – life itself – is meaningless.
But it’s true. And you don’t need me to prove it. You already know it – you just might be in denial about it.
We humans spend an inordinate amount of our lives in denial. Denial of death. Denial of life. Denial of the impermanence of, well, everything. And yeah, denial of life’s meaninglessness.
But if you can keep your emotions in check long enough to actually consider that expression, to let it sink in and marinate a bit, you might discover it’s flip side: relief. Joy, even?
It’s ironic that our desperate need to force meaning into our lives is one of those things that actually keeps us locked in misery.
We insist on finding meaning in a beautiful sunset, the arrival of a newborn (the miracle of life), the death of a loved one, and most important of all, of course, our own lives. My life must have meaning!
Meaning is what lurks behind our creation of heaven and hell, gods and goddesses, political parties and philosophies, spiritual movements and nations, and on and on and on. People are actually murdered because they root for the wrong team.
You insist that life has meaning?
Ok, where does that meaning exist? Your mind, yes?
But is your meaning shared by me? Maybe the sunset doesn’t mean the same thing to me. Maybe my neural paths took a left turn where yours went right, and I find the sunset a royal pain in the ass because it heralds the arrival of the mosquitoes.
And don’t our definitions of something’s meaning change over time? A young, childless, anarchist woman may find new meaning in her marriage, her children, her suburban home. Conversely, a suburban mom who loses her husband and children to a drunk drive may become an anarchist. Whose meaning is real? Whose matters more?
We switch sides, switch gears, switch teams, time and organic brain matter being the fickle agents of all that meaning and its changing temperament.
An individual slipping into dementia loses all sense of meaning, laying bare the silly, stupid truth that all our ‘meanings’ are nothing but mental labels. To an Alzheimer’s patient, a tree is no longer a tree, never mind the historical importance of the Byzantine empire. To the mortally ill patient, his body breaking down at the cellular level, the great unknown awaits and does he really want to spend his last minutes cogitating on all of the meanings with which his life was freighted? Or does he simply want to gaze into the eyes of his loved ones a final time and marvel at the simple miracle of it all?
Our lives are meaningless. Tell yourself a good story, if you must, about what your life means, about the glorious heaven that awaits (and the hell that awaits your enemies). But recognize that the more meaning you invest into that story, the heavier it becomes, the more weighted your journey.
And that, perhaps, is the greatest irony of all. When you suggest that life is meaningless, the knee-jerk response of your listeners is that you must be ‘depressed’ because only a depressed person could think such a thing. Yet maybe the opposite is true: to embrace life’s meaningless is to glide through it unencumbered by expectation, the simple joy of being enough.