What Does It All Mean? | The Unanswered Question
Does your life have meaning? Does it have value? Purpose? If you suddenly died or disappeared, would it make much difference?
What if you had never been born? Would the world be better off, or worse, or neither? What does it all mean?
One typically hears “What does it all mean?” from desperate people. But I don’t feel desperate. At least, not these days.
Perhaps I’ve been pondering this unanswered question because I’m approaching the mid-century mark of my life. Then, again, I’ve always been prone to philosophical wonderings.
When I was six, I sat in our suburban Virginia garage and asked myself a series of “what if” questions:
- What if none of this existed? What then?
- What if this garage didn’t exist? Where would I be?
- What if this house didn’t exist?
- What if this neighborhood didn’t exist?
- What if this country didn’t exist? This planet?
- What if the sun didn’t exist? The universe?
- What if I didn’t exist? Perhaps I would still exist in the mind of God.
- But . . . what if God didn’t exist? What would there be?
Nothing. There would be . . . nothing.
What if . . . nothing . . . existed?
My body shivered. I suddenly felt alone and empty. So I went back inside and hung out with my grandmother.
I don’t think my grandmother ever wondered whether her life had meaning. She was a creature of habit; a woman of routines. Making breakfast at 7. Catching up with her friends on the phone, after my grandfather got out of her hair and went to work. Shopping for groceries that she didn’t need, just to get out of the house.
Watching her soaps during lunch; followed by laundry or gardening in the afternoon; followed by a formal half-hour break at 4 pm, during which she took in a soft drink, chips and a game show (She was not to be disturbed during these breaks, by me or the housekeeper.).
Then dinner, clean-up; sifting quickly through the newspaper before prime-time TV began at 8. Dessert at 9. Then to bed at 11, in time to drift off to sleep during Johnny Carson’s monologue.
Do rituals provide meaning? Or do they simply distract us? It might be a moot point. If one is pleasantly distracted for 80 years, then what difference does it make?
Once, in my twenties, while I was, indeed, going through a desperate period, I told my grandparents, tearfully, that I felt worthless. My grandfather replied, “Son, you’re worth a lot to us. We’ve invested a lot of time and money in you.”
I told them I didn’t deserve all that they had done for me. “How can I ever repay you?” I asked.
“We love you, Gregory,” my grandmother replied. “We just want you to be happy.” My grandfather said, “You can repay us by living a long and healthy, good and prosperous life.”
For them, and seemingly many other people, life is just that simple. They live on instinct.
On the other hand, some people are so plagued by perennial questions of existence that they never find any sense of equilibrium. By the way, I used to toss out that phrase a lot—“perennial questions of existence”—when I was in college, on first dates. I never got second dates from those girls.
During the lost years of my twenties, I read a novel by John Barth called The End of the Road. In it, the main character decides to kill himself because his life has no meaning. He goes through the process of ordering his affairs and saying goodbye to his friends; and, in the end, decides not to kill himself because his death wouldn’t have meant anymore than his life.
The trumpet has the last word, which seems arbitrary to me. Perhaps if Ives had let the argument play out, the flutes would have eventually answered the question to the trumpet’s satisfaction.
Some people think that everything means something. I worry about these people. What a burden it must be to see every cigar as a penis; to interpret every earthquake, plague, and tornado as the act of a punishing deity; to imagine every political cataclysm as a cabal between the C.I.A., the Illuminati, and Bill Gates!
Some people think that the search for meaning itself is futile. How do they know? Maybe they’re just lazy. Maybe meaning lies just around the bend, in the form of a blissful relationship or a productive career or even some kind of divine endowment.
Atheism seems as arbitrary to me as Ives’ Unanswered Question. It’s a belief, no different in this regard from any religion. An Atheist friend once told me, over drinks, that her two greatest fears in life were that: there is no God; (followed closely by) there is a God.
In The Book of Ecclesiastes, the wisest man on Earth, King Solomon, exclaimed, “Meaningless, meaningless; everything is meaningless!” And he would know, since he supposedly had everything, including 3000 women.
Nevertheless, it seems disingenuous for the richest man alive to say that everything is meaningless. I might be more inclined to believe Solomon if he had given most of his wealth to the poor and most of his wives to the horny. Then again, there’s no proof that poverty is inherently more meaningful than wealth.
Despite my semantic musings, life for me is pretty simple these days. What does it all mean? I side with the Existentialists on this one. Our actions define us. Our lives mean whatever we want them to mean. No priest, politician or poet can answer that question for anyone else.
And yet I’m not an Atheist, unlike many Existentialists. I believe in a Higher Power. More specifically, I believe in the search for meaning.
There is no pot at the end of the rainbow. The meaning is in the search.
Most of the time, I am grateful for my current position in life; though, in recent years, I have made huge financial mistakes. Compared to my peers, I am poor. In a momentary lapse of gratitude, the other day, I exclaimed to a friend, “I should be conducting orchestras and directing plays; not parking cars!”
I have another friend in Los Angeles whose brother directs major motion pictures. She tells me that he constantly frets over his status as a hit-maker. He spends $10,000 a month on a rental cottage in the Hollywood Hills while his mansion is being renovated. And if his next picture isn’t a blockbuster, he may have to sell the mansion and move into a cheap apartment, at $4500 a month.
What does it all mean? Who knows? Would my life be more meaningful if I were conducting orchestras and directing plays professionally? Perhaps. Chances are, though, I’d still be asking the same questions.
Loved this piece. I guess that im the type of person who tries to find meaninh in everything. Not as you have described, but like the native Americans did… If you see an owl its a sign that someone’s looking out for you etc.
Daily routine is comforting. Not having stable work for the last month i find it difficult to accomplish anything.
I prefer business and routine to dull directionless hours spent nervous over my lack of finances and depressed from lack of self approval. Business and business are blessings:)
Jessica, first of all, thank you for commenting. And thank you for sharing your feelings.
It seems to me that people often get lost in doing the things that authority figures train them to do, rather than going out into the desert alone and finding their own burning bush. And once you have snatched the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.