the supreme lack of meaning in life

Many ask “Why am I here?” in an attempt to find some sort of meaning for their creation on this planet. People assign roles to their life, especially in hindsight, to describe what they were “put on this Earth to do” and why. It bugs me that so many people are so reductionist with their lives’ meaning, and I think the original sin is assuming life has any meaning at all.

I don’t find meaning in life

I think I’ve brought this up casually when speaking with friends and they have, understandably, asked if I was ok. <What a strange thing for such a bubbly man to say.>

It’s truly not strange at all, in fact I find it liberating. Meaning, cause, effect, etc are properties we assign to events, ideas, and other things in this world that can contain them. A word has meaning, precisely the meaning that we humans assign to it. And the reason that word exists is that we invented it, it exists because we exist.

There are logical reasons why we exist, but I don’t think when people ask “Why am I here?” they are looking for the biological/evolutionary explanation. They want to be told a cushy reason like, “I was put on this Earth to help people” or “I was put on this Earth to make the world a better place”.

It’s time to get over it. You are here for no reason, and the life you live holds no meaning, at least not the same meaning that a word holds or that a book holds. Your life can’t be reduced to a few sentences of “it means this or that”, and if that’s the life you lead than I feel sorry for you.

Life is not a thing that holds the property meaning, rather its a general description of the history of events and possible future of events that we experience. It’s linked only by the collinearity of time.

You can ascribe whatever you want for “phases” or “contexts” of your life, but they are only labels that make sense to you. They communicate nothing more than temporal or spatial or headspace categorization, documenting the zeitgeists you’ve changed through.

Ultimately, however you contextualize your own history, it exists in the timeline you’ve written for yourself in its own way, scribed onto the sands of time without categories or labels. It’s endless, meaningless, and that’s fine.

It’s ok for things to not have meaning. It’s good to ask why. It follows that it’s good to ask why and confidently conclude that there is no why. How much I yearn with every ounce of my being to be able to ask why without others assuming I expect for there always to be a reason. There often isn’t and if there isn’t, I want to know.

We have all been caught up in a game of making sense out of the insanity of being. We find comfort in spinning tales of creation, reasoning, and meaning in places where they don’t apply. It gives us reason to stop questioning and live on.

I feel alone in my converse. All I want is to question endlessly and arrive to the same conclusion time and time again that there is no answer.

The great comfort of the unknown and the unknowable draws me in. It’s beautiful in its beckoning calls of endless doubt.

How could I ever be comfortable with sweet lies when I am enthralled by unknowable truths?

I feel like this is one of the thoughts I have that I share more rarely with people. The times I’ve shared it, I’ve felt scared, and unheard in my own shoes. People seem to feel threatened when I pull the curtains on the sweet lies that they have been telling themselves. I try to understand, assume it’s a difference in our understanding in the word “meaning,” and move on.

But I can’t. Like a prophet, I feel this mandate to spread this comfort with the unknown to the people around me. I perversely almost cannot feel truly comfortable with people who don’t share this embrace of meaninglessness.

The prevalence of religion and determinism of existence pushes me further than I would normally be into the realm of absurdity.

Like a devout priest, I cling to my ideals because they are all I have to call my own in this mundane world. I’m lost in the sea of lies told again and again by ourselves about how this thing in their life meant this and etc. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I selfishly want to hear people describe their existence as a continuous stream of events without judgement and feel a sigh of relief that I’m not the only one who thinks deeply about how little I should think about something.

At this point, I’ve accepted the zeitgeist of our generation and have mentally assigned phases to my life too so that when the topic arrives, I’m not caught unarmed.

But secretly I feel a dread that I can never truly connect with anyone who feels the way I do about life because they are prolly all mega depressed lol. This bothers me too: how when people can’t find meaning, they lose the light in their eyes, lose hope, and lose motivation to continue.

I feel like it’s the opposite for me, the lack of meaning of life is incredibly liberating.

It’s how I’m able to do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want, because living my life is not like writing a story that I will have to explain later.

I’m not beholden to any social pressures of doing things in a certain way that is easier to explain in terms of phases or contexts. I switch between feeling different ways and doing different things almost daily. My life spins on a dime whenever I feel like it. I have no labels to tie down what I do, and will never have the burden to decide on them later, because I know the events that I have experienced don’t hold any absolute meaning as to deserve anything of that ilk. They exist in my backlog of life, idempotent or contiguous, influential or lackluster, not whatever I like but whatever they are.

I subscribe to the belief that things are they way they are and my understanding of them cannot shape that, it has to reflect that, or else all I’m internalizing for myself about the world are just creative lies designed to make me feel like I belong.

I don’t belong, because there was never a thing to belong to in the first place. I have no periods to reflect upon. I have no say over how the past is contextualized, only how the future will manifest.

I have no reason of being here.

I just am here.

We just are here.

And the fact that there is nothing more to it than that is what is truly beautiful.

amin.

Originally published on Substack. View the source version ↗