Thoughts On The Meaning Of Life

This is the quintessential philosophical question: what’s the meaning of life. It’s so cliche it’s hard to take seriously, but I think it’s worth trying to for just a brief moment. After all, it’s pretty easy to come to the conclusion that there isn’t any meaning. We’re born, we struggle, we die, maybe experience an afterlife but nobody can confirm that a posteriori—so all of that for what? I’m being very nihilistic, but I think that’s a fair question to ask. The majority of the population gets sucked into the rat race that is school, work, marriage, kids, retirement. Other priorities take over your ability to focus on improving yourself, learning about yourself, and exploring the things that seem interesting to you.

When you have a wife/husband and kids the priority becomes: provide for them in some way, shape, or form. This often means taking a job that you don’t love because you need to keep the lights on and be sure your family has food to eat. A noble cause nonetheless, but at what cost? You become stressed because you don’t enjoy your work or your co-workers, your boss is an asshole. This environment leads to resentment and frustration. This spills over into your personal life and begins affecting your spouse and kids. If your relationship begins to deteriorate with those that were the reason behind your work, what exactly is the goal? What’s the meaning behind what you’re doing? Given this is a common occurrence, I feel this is a fair question to ask. It’s at least relevant.

We get stuck in a seemingly unbreakable cycle. It's like telling an artist they can only paint the same painting over and over for the rest of their career. The appeal of art would quickly lose it's allurement. It takes the meaning out of the pursuit. The journey is about learning, adapting, applying, and growing. Blaise Pascal writes in his ‘Ponsees’ about meaning. A question of meaning is a question of why. We can use his gambler anecdote:

Offer a gambler the money they could potentially win, and in exchange, they can't play the game anymore—they wouldn't take that deal. Allow them to play the game but take away the potential money prize, and they'd also lose interest.

So, from this we can extrapolate something along the lines of: to have meaning, you need to have the thing desired along with the allusion that once you achieve the thing that's desired it's going to make you happy, but because having the thing on its own isn't going to make you happy you also need to not have it...

This is where religion comes into the picture. But I'm not going to dive into that just yet cause that will occupy at least a few hours.

Karl Marx, though somebody I would’ve assumed I had no similar views to, made a great point about careers and meaning/purpose. In Marx's eyes, all of us are generalists inside. We were not born to do one thing only. We push ourselves to one discipline alone which renders us 'one-sided and dependent' and 'depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine.' Here of course he’s referring to the economic incentive to “silo” yourself by specializing i.e. getting a bachelors, masters, or higher. You now know more about that one thing than the majority of people and you can plug into a business to continue fueling the economic machine. However, as college enrollments continue to climb and more people are graduating with bachelors, the more there’s an over supply in the market. This is why it’s now expected that you get a masters + work experience before getting any industry standard job with above market pay. But again that’s a completely different rabbit hole.

Specialization might be an economic imperative, but it can be a human betrayal.

I believe that a great first step to finding meaning is finding enjoyment in life. We worry too much for enjoyment, consciously or subconsciously, and we focus on the negative instead of the positive. We enjoy the thought of things that we’ve been lead to believe are enjoyable like the weekend, happy hour, parties, nice food, name brands, social media etc. But take a second during the experience of these things and ask yourself whether you feel deep down the things that you think are enjoyable are actually that enjoyable. Maybe they are, and that’s great. But often times the things we do for enjoyment are distractions and tend to result in more stress. 

We embody stress, anxiety, and depression as a result of the uncertainty that is life. Then we get anxious that we’re anxious and stressed that we’re stressed. People feel they should be able to find composure, that they should be able to not feel these feelings or control them. Make peace with how difficult composure is to achieve. Strive to be the composedly anxious. I personally find meaning in making peace with all that is, in being grateful for everything that I have, and for being able to educate in some capacity.

I’ll cut this off here but something I think about frequently.

~ Bonde