Charges of Geresy

What is the meaning of life? It’s a philosophical question, isn’t it? The essence of the question is encapsulated by Sisyphus, a mythological Greek figure. Sisyphus was tasked with rolling a boulder up a mountain, letting the boulder roll back down to the bottom once it had almost reached the top, and being doomed to do this over and over again for eternity. And yet “one can imagine Sisyphus happy” said the philosopher, Albert Camus. But how can he be happy in the midst of such a pointless existence? Isn’t what he is doing meaningless?

The story of Sisyphus prompts us to ask whether everything we do is meaningless. But it is absurd to say that everything is meaningless, because the very existence of meaningless things necessitates the existence of things that do have meaning, to which they are being implicitly compared. Otherwise, the word would be redundant. So, we accept that some things must have meaning. But what is meaning exactly and where can it be found?

Many people intuitively know what “meaning” is, without necessarily being able to explicitly articulate this. Imagine a child building a sandcastle on a beach, knowing that eventually the sea might come to break up her creation. During the building of the sandcastle the child finds meaning and purpose in the building. Something in the child tells them, while they are sweatily scooping up handfuls of the gritty golden sand and piling them up, then patting them into shape, that they need to build that castle and what they are doing has a purpose. Some human part of everyone one of us responds positively to certain actions and makes us feel as though what we are doing is worthwhile, even if we may later look back in hindsight and wonder why we did them.

I have come to believe that meaning is more akin to an emotion than anything else. Our treatment of meaning in the philosophical sense has led us away from the reality of its nature as a human emotion and state of being.  We feel things are meaningful in the same way that we feel that we feel happiness, anger, or sadness. Sisyphus may indeed have felt a sense of purpose in rolling the boulder up the mountain, just as the child felt meaning while building the sandcastle. We do not need to stand back and question if either of these actions was meaningful or not. Whether we can empathise with either of them, as we imagine ourselves doing the same task, does not change the emotions felt by those individuals. Meaning is felt not thought and is subjective. So where does a sense of meaning come from?

We can answer that question from an evolutionary perspective. Our ancient ancestors had had to do a great deal more to survive than we did. They had to build shelters, organise the production of food, and protect themselves and their families and friends from danger. All the things that our forebears had to do on a daily basis needed time and energy. They didn’t have unlimited energy or time and therefore couldn’t do everything. A sense of meaning may have evolved to encourage them to carry out certain actions, preferentially over others, actions that helped to achieve one or more of these goals. So, the positive emotions that together constitute a sense of a meaningful existence evolved to reward and encourage this behaviour – the act of working towards goals that were seen to be of benefit to the continued existence of the human race.

This analysis also explains why working towards longer term goals tend to feel more satisfying than striving to achieve shorter term goals. Shorter term goals are there as stepping stones towards the attainment of the human purpose – the survival and prosperity of the species. Our mind rewards us for these intermediate goals, such as eating, reproducing, socialising, collaborating, building and understanding, as a proxy for rewarding us for the larger goal which they tend to bring about.

As is the case for any other emotion, there are predictable ways in which we can cultivate a sense of meaning in our lives. The brain is like any other organ – it needs to be in a certain working state, feeling certain emotions, to be considered “healthy”. Being endowed with a healthy dose of meaning on a daily basis is an important part of that health. If we want to feel happy in life, then we should try to understand the way that our brain responds to the actions we take and to take steps to ensuring that we do things that help it to respond in a positive way. It is important to keep in mind that meaning is a sensation; we do not necessarily need to know why reading, building, creating, and understanding new things makes us feel a sense of purpose in order to feel it, just as we don’t need to explain why we feel happy – we just feel it. However, better understanding the exact triggers for this emotion can help us to spark it more frequently and reliably.

A sense of meaning comes about when we set our sights on a goal that feels important to us and can see the relevance of our own actions in the attainment of that goal. Conversely, a lack of direction and sense of meaninglessness comes about mostly when we have some ideas of which goals are meaningful in our lives, but for some reason are unable of doing things that we think might help us achieve those goals. This may be because we are working towards fulfilling goals that other people have decided for us, without fully understanding them, out of lack of clear purpose. With this sense of a lack of personal agency comes a lack of meaning. It might also be because we don’t see exactly what it is we can do to achieve those goals. Finally, we might struggle to find meaningful goals that we can work towards – goals that contribute to our prosperity or that of our wider community. This last hurdle is one that is characteristic of the modern world.

In this day and age, it is quite easy for us to survive, without having to do very much. This ease of survival has made it more difficult for us to see the direct relevance of the actions we perform on a daily basis to our survival and prosperity as individuals, communities, and a species as a whole. We can however treat our malaise by finding objectives that feel meaningful to work towards.

What is then meaningful in this modern world, where we have already effectively conquered our own planet? Despite our growing existential complacency as a species, there are still many problems that threaten our existence, as well as many potentially lucrative avenues of exploration to ensure our continued success. Both environmental and societal problems and challenges still abound – growing in number and magnitude – all awaiting solutions and fresh approaches. Natural disasters and climate change; our ability to harness the power of the world around us and to discover ways of understanding and engineering the natural world and the matter around us to our advantage; human medicine and a better understanding of ourselves, including the most enigmatic organ in our bodies – the brain; puzzles to solve concerning humans and their interactions – wars, inequality, prejudice and choosing conflict over collaboration; opportunities for the creation of joyful experiences and civilisation through art, music, culture, and stories. All these things either threaten the stability of our existence or are doors of opportunity for the achievement of greater and greater things.

It does not actually matter whether, upon having done certain things, we re-evaluate our actions in hindsight and judge them to have been “pointless” in achieving a particular goal. Seemingly paradoxically, these “pointless” activities were in fact meaningful, since the very act of searching through the rubble is a necessary part of finding the gems hidden within. Each step we take towards a goal consists of many hidden steps that tell us how not to proceed, and these are just as essential. Above and beyond attainment of the goal itself, the real “point” of our effort in working towards these goals was to help us create within us a sense of meaning and therefore a form of happiness, as a goal in and of itself. So, meaning does exist in the modern world. Sometimes what we are already doing is contributing to our growth, and all we must do is learn to recognise its value in this context and see what we are doing as part of a larger objective in order to allow our brain to feel that what we are doing is worthwhile. If one really can’t see the relevance of their actions to any kind of higher purpose and thus feels demotivated, they can first consider what needs to be done to help ensure the survival and stability of the species and subsequently find new things to do that aid in that quest. Even if that ends up being rolling a boulder up a mountain or building a sandcastle on a beach. So long as it feels meaningful, it is.