Day 2! It appears that the blog is not dead quite yet.

I saw a meme on instagram yesterday where someone said "you're weirdly obsessed with finding meaning" that stuck with me. Given my philisophical nature, this is a state that I find myself in quite often. Finding meaning feels like a critical part of what it means to be a human being. After all, if we don't have meaning, we don't have purpose, and if we don't have purpose, for what reason do we keep moving forward in this life? Obviously there are a great many existential philosophers who have much more well=thought out ideas on how to deal with this but this is my blog so I will write whatever thoughts I have here.

Personally, the struggle for meaning has been a part of my thinking since middle school. Growing up in a Christian household, the purpose of one's life was always found in the bible. But one time at a Model United Nations conference, I heard an aphorism that would stay on my mind for years to come. One of the canidates for some position got put on "the hot seat", meaning that the crowd had 60 seconds to shoot rapid fire questions at them and one person asked them, very facetiously, what is the meaning of life? While I would have been stunned into silence thinking of an answer, not half a second later, the canidate replied "To give life meaning". The room obviously went wild and I was again stunned not just by the wittiness of the reply but the truth of the statement. While this happened in the sophomore year of high school, as I sit writing this blog as a college graduate, this statement still rings true to this day.

Giving Life Meaning

One of the most interesting bits of philosophy I have been blessed with recently is the works of Ernest Becker. While I'm sure he has a lot more nuance and complexity in his work, what I took from it was that humans are always working to confront their two biggest fears: impermanence and insignificance. We fear death, that much is obvious, but we also fear that our death, as the end of our lives, are insignificant. In fighting against these two fears, humans take up immortality projects. These immortality projects can be things such as ammassing great wealth, creating a family and providing for them, winning great awards like a Nobel Peace Prize. The key to these immortality projects is that they give us something that we can point to as our life's legacy and that legacy itself gives our life significance. While our physical bodies may die, the effects of our immortality projects live on, giving us a sense of immortality. It is true that we came from nothing, lived, and returned to nothing, but that short stint of life was not insignificant because we created something meaningful, our immortality project. In this way, the purpose of our life is indeed to build towards giving our life a purpose.

Is this entirely correct?

This sounds good to me and in many ways I think that Becker's work is really in line with what I think. However, there is something to be said about simply being. If we paint our existence as a constant struggle of building and creating purpose, it does seem quite a tiring and bleak existence. Taking inspiration from Kierkegaard's lily of the field and bird of the air, I want to say that if we step outside of the zoomed in focus that philosophy can offer, sometimes it truly isn't that deep. It can be fine to not know what the meaning of life is. It can be fine that there is no meaning to life. Sometimes I just like to lay in bed and look at the blue sky and that brings me enough satisfaction that I don't need to struggle for my existence. Life gets really complicated and sometimes we don't need to complicate it any further. In other words, I have no clue. I am no closer to a final answer than I was at the start of this journey 10 years ago but that is ok. Perhaps I will look back on this in another 10 years and realize I have come no closer to the finish line. But perhaps life is just a sort of meandering around in a great open space until we die.