It’s been a while since I’ve written something. For a while, I’ve been contemplating on what even to write. Then I concluded to write about the thoughts that are clogged up in my brain for the past months.
Let’s see; I’ve been intrigued by a question people have been pondering for a long time. “What the freak is the meaning of life?” this is a personal question, yet venturing on to find answers has been ultimately satisfying. This article may not provide a complete picture, but I’ll try to put out my findings in the best way possible.
Life has no meaning! Well, that sounds nihilistic. But if you think about it, nobody has a clear-cut answer to how or why humans exist. There are only speculations on how DNA itself came into being, but what are the odds that with the virtue of mere entropy (a measure of randomness), atoms somehow combined to form nucleotides (simplest structures present in DNAs and RNAs.) The universe still has plenty of mysteries around it, but entropy is one recurring law that the universe has been following. In that grand scheme of entropy, somewhere along, humans came about, and we acquired this ability to be “conscious” and start to wonder the questions like, what is the meaning of life? In What is Life, renowned quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger explains that entropy is the reason why living beings exist. Let me simplify a bit more than that; plants make food by a process called photosynthesis in which the plant absorbs sun rays (which is a major source of energy) and uses it to make complex sugars (food) and emits less energetic infra-red light. Thus the net entropy of the system has been increased by this process. In this way, we could also say that humans are merely a product of the universe trying to increase entropy, and we are the agents that the universe appointed for that particular task. That’s one way to look at it. Out of the many explanations I read, this nihilistic view rang more bells for me than the others.
Although, we could form millions of subjective answers like “I exist to support my wife and kids” or “I exist because I want to revolutionize Silicon Valley with this amazing business pitch.” But in reality, from whatever I’ve read on this, I feel life has no meaning as such, but we derive meaning. As I’ve mentioned earlier, there are millions of things humans still have no clue about and are yet to be understood. If we recursively question everything and anything, “What’s life?” “But why?” “Even then, why is it like that?” this sort of reasoning can go on forever. And let’s say, for the sake of argument, you somehow found an end to those endless questions; the end would be most certainly nothing.
In Sapiens, written by Yuval Noah Harari (which by the way is a brilliant book), he explains the whole of humankind, and one striking quote that I came across while reading it was:-
“Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.”
Even if I say that money is a man-made construct with no real value or that life is meaningless, it doesn’t change anything. All the man-made constructs have become inter-subjective, meaning that even if one dismisses all such beliefs, that does not alter the subjective belief of others. Or, if I say “earning money is stupid,” I might eventually die of starvation. All these man-made constructs are what made us, us. These complex social hierarchies and fictitious beliefs made us the most successful and dominant species on the face of Earth. So my point is, almost any meaning that we come up with detailing our purpose in this world, most certainly it includes or will be related to something imaginary that man has made. But let me make one thing clear, all these things, such as money, nations, etc., all these fabricated realities are there for a particular reason, and it’s not an elaborate lie to deceive people either. These fictitious beliefs brought humans together and helped work together as a team. These beliefs made me have something in common with a stranger. These work as a cohesive factor. If it weren’t for these fictitious beliefs, I will guarantee that we wouldn’t have survived this long ever.
Ancient hunter-gatherers led much, much happier lives than modern-day human lead. The reason is simple. Ancient hunter-gatherers didn’t worry about the consequences of getting fired from his job or fret about what specialization to take for their graduate courses. But suppose humans have stopped evolving at hunter-gatherers and never grew to use their brains to fabricate fictitious concepts like money; it wouldn’t have ended well for us. Because they might have either wiped off all the living organisms in the world (mass extinction due to uncontrolled hunting) or killed each other (genocides) because they couldn’t work together as one with peace.
If I have confused you with my facts and theories. Here’s how I would condense the whole thing into something more chewable. There’s no meaning for our existence, but we could come up with subjective meaning, and finding contentment in the pursuit of fulfilling those goals would be one meaningful way to look at life. Because of its complex nature, I couldn’t come up with a way to conclude everything that I know into a few sentences; hence I will stop at this quote from Joseph Campbell.