about existential questions // part2 // UNFINISHED //

I chose to terminate this article here because there’s no point in writing further about this matter. Everyone has a personal view on this. I have solved mine. If you’re interested in talking about this, give me a call, we’ll talk about it.

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So, we’ve seen in part1 that meaning is forced on to people by society. Success is a good example. Money another one. But it always kind of leave us empty. We’re never sure if it’s real, we’re never sure if it makes some sense. I think a lot of people around me are having this crisis because they believed that after having a degree from a famous school, the issue of meaning would be solved – “I’m an architect from the best school in the world” – yeah, but no. Nothing is solved. It’s worse. They day you go get your little certificate, it’s all cool, you’re all happy. Then next day, same old you. It’s worse because now, not only it is meaningless but it was supposed to give you meaning. What now? People want to know… what they are supposed to do.

The following is an attempt to solve the question. “What is the meaning of all this?” – we’ve seen some ready made answers in part 1. Quite okay, we can all have the little house with white fences and a dog. There’s nothing wrong with it. We can actually function okay on those. But the issue is that it doesn’t have any flexibility nor personality. So, if you want meaning, you have to be Christian? … or a consumer? What a pile of shit, I think that especially smart people need meaning because they don’t get caught into all this shit talk and peer pressure. The question remains… within the chaos, where’s the meaning? Where do we find it? And if we find meaning, does it mean we have to do it repeatedly like a robot until the day we die? Like “This is my mission on earth! I’m going to do this!!”. It sounds kind of stiff.

this is it. 42.

Before we proceed, I’d like to admit that this is not an easy subject. And it is probably the hardest article I’ve written to date. I have countless of talks over this issue and I’ve used it to refine. It is more of an attempt to clarify what is important rather than being philosophically/intellectually correct. We can also see it as my personal advice, if you will.

So, let’s… I’d like to take a little flexibility in the thinking and diverge the question in a less intellectual path. It’s a more an emotional pathway.

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So here goes… meaning of life.

If we try and remember our childhood memory. Some best of it… like a birthday party or the first time we kissed our first girlfriend/boyfriend. Where was the meaning? Kind of nowhere. I remember when I was playing football in the backyard of my primary school, yelling (already) obscene stuffs, life didn’t require a meaning. It was awesome. Period. In fact, it was so awesome that we seemed crazy — “in the zone” — like wild animals, you know. When you’re in that state, you need no meaning, you make meaning. You don’t search for it… The search for meaning only appears in times when we are miserable. “What am I doing?” is the typical question that you’d ask if you didn’t enjoy your experience. So we can assume that meaning is not entirely correlated to “what are you doing?” but rather “how are you feeling about what you’re doing?”. I believe that as long as the answer to the second question is “great” … we don’t need the answer to the first one.

Then let’s combine that emotional path with a drier philosophy: existentialism… in which, we postulate that: “the meaning of a life is defined by the sum of the actions we take. In which, we’re entirely responsible for every choices and actions we make. Man is ultimately free and responsible for his/her own freedom – the ones that deny it are called cowards or fuckers” (reinterpreted from existentialism is a humanism by Sartre). It goes further saying that there is no moral and we’re always in the anxiety of making meaning. This is helpful because it breaks every single one of the predefined pathways that we talked about in part1 and replaces it with freedom and responsibility. It saves us from becoming little sheeps.

So, if we combine those two things … the emotions and the philosophy, I’d like to pose one very simple hypothesis.

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We’re ultimately free to shape meaning. The meaning that we have is the sum of our actions. (philosophy)

When we’re miserable, everything is meaningless, so we search for a meaning. Life doesn’t require meaning when we’re fulfilled. In fact, everything is meaningful then. (emotion)

So meaning is relative to freedom and fulfilment.

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It sounds too simple… but, the answer I came to is: to find meaning, you need to get rid of it. After all, having a meaning is a little bit stiff…  So the goal is to be in this eternally “absurd” state while maintaining “happiness”… or rather durable fulfilment. When we’re not fulfilled, the world shifts into chaos. When we are fulfilled, the world is meaningful again. So it looks like this:

This little “equation” is the child of the combination of rationalisation and emotion, which I think it is a quite wonderful combination. Since I always like to think of humans as “hyper emotional but slightly rational” beings. So there are two components of this equation, freedom and fulfilment. Sounds great… but a bit vague. Let’s look at them individually. To be logical, let’s start with the second.

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The durable fulfilment

I’m taking a toddler’s point of view on this in order to be precise. There’s several emotional and physical state and we’d like to argue, for the sake of individuality that, emotions are subjective. But it’s rather true that emotions have a universal degree of good and bad. With empathy, we can relate to something bad or good happening to our fellow humans. So we cry together and cheer together. Good and bad are subjective but their degrees are universal. The subject of my bad thing might be a good thing to you, but the degree of my bad thing is the same as the bad thing to you. So, if you will, we react with the same emotional degrees to different subjects.

So if fulfilment have degrees ranging from good to bad, it means that there are extremes. Extreme bad and extreme good. Those we can totally agree on and thus define a rule. The definition of the worst ever would be physical or psychological inexistence. As in physical and mental death. The definition of the best ever is physical and psychological bliss. A kind of nirvana, trance or godlike presence of some sort. So we have a relative scale. Almost simplistic.

The graph doesn’t say anything striking. But if we ask the question “what do you chose?”, then it start to be quite useful.

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