What is the meaning of life?
What am I made for?
Why are we all here?
We need a meaning in life.
We need an identity solid enough to handle the ups and downs.
We cannot have life without some way of determining what’s right and wrong. We desperately seek satisfaction and happiness that can sustain us.
So what is “meaning”?
Purpose + significance = meaning.
Purpose is backward glance. Significance is forward glance.
If it all just ends, then nothing has true meaning. You and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before they were born. Death shouldn’t surprise us, nor should it grieve us.
If there is no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside nature — then all stories will end in the same way: In a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. Our accomplishments and dreams will be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time.
Some may say: Although life is a purposeless universe, human existence is purposeless — your life is not. At a top level, that’s unworkable for most people, and at a practical level, it’s unworkable for all people. What does it all mean?
You may say:
“I don’t sit around thinking about meaning. I have a good family and a job, all is well.”
But, suffering is inevitable. It will come for you, and it will drive you into your meaning of life.
Suffering won’t leave you the way you were.
Each morning, new widows howl and orphans mourn.
How you respond to suffering depends on the thickness of your meaning in life.
What if suffering is painful?
What if suffering is real?
What if suffering is often unfair?
What if suffering is meaningful?
What if, faced rightly, suffering can drive you like a nail into love and purpose?
Suffering drives you more into your meaning in life — enhances it.
Your meaning of life being in this world is impractical, because suffering comes from loss of things in this world.
If your meaning in life is in this world, it won’t be able to stop suffering any more than a spiderweb can stop a rock.
You’re only as durable as what you most love.
“If life had no meaning, we should have never found out. Just like if the universe was without light and we were blind, we would have never known it was dark.”
We feel like strangers here. We come from somewhere else.
Nature is not the only thing that exists.
There is “another world,” and that is where we come from.
And that explains why we do not feel at home here.
A fish feels at home in the water.
If we belong here, we should feel at home here.
“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” - C.S. Lewis
