The Choice of Meaning

 Modern humans first appeared on earth around 300,000 years ago, in the grasslands of savanna, bare, naked and hungry. Feeding his stomach was all that he really cared about. Survival was not trivial then. 

Around 10,000 years ago, when he learnt settled agriculture, man could, for the first time since his beginning, afford to spend time with himself and his thoughts. Leisure, hitherto had been a rare luxury – now a commonplace. Once our stomachs were full, and survival was taken for granted, we started to think. We now could look at our immediate environment and wonder at its diversity and beauty, we started seeking truths or rather explanations about the origin of the world and ourselves. But there was one elusive question that pressed us more than anything else – what was the purpose and meaning of our life ?
Apparently, we were dumbstruck. On the face value, our life had no purpose besides simply existing, but that was too hard for our ego to handle. Moreover, it did not feel substantive and fulfilling, so we came up with stories about meaning, and since then we have been grappling with this question and have come up with stories – albeit some more beautiful than others but stories, nevertheless.

Let us take a look at the varieties of narratives that we have woven around our lives.

The God story

According to this, you were put on this earth as a part of some grand drama that slowly unfolds. You are only a conduit through which some higher power operates and plays his whims. You are enabled and paradoxically captured by your destiny, and your sole purpose is to realise your pre-determined destiny. It must feel like the omnipotent God has created this world and the universe, so the more you flow according to the ‘plan’ of God, the better your life is. Each action that you perform should be dedicated to the God above. You earn some brownie points – punya for acting according to the plan and lose a few – paap for going against it. Attaining moksha or liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth is the ultimate aim here. 

This is the common story that we all grew up with. It is a nice and easy ready-made meaning that has been available to all of us since we were infants, but if we question: where is the rebirth? What does it even mean to be born again? How do we know that the ‘plan’ that is given to us is not our imagination? Is all of this just there to attain a means of social control? Then all of it feels like a hoax, a matrix meant to be escaped from.

The Human story

Since the human mind cannot stand incomprehensibility so it naturally starts to fill the gaps with his own version of interpretation of the meaning of life.
To a significant chunk of people, the meaning of life lies in leaving some kind of legacy behind.  For instance, the great kings of the past have conquered large places and have written lores about themselves in hopes that future generations will remember his presence and impact. For the academicians, it might be to produce some seminal piece of paper that could shape the upcoming discourse. For scientistists, it could be to find a beautiful and all encompassing theory for every materialistic phenomena in nature. For reformers, it could be to bring about a change in the society and possibly to shape reality according to their version of justice and order. Hence, it can be said that for every ambitious person leaving a legacy greater than their mortal life creates meaning. But is it not that legacy too is like everything else–mortal, impermanent and transient. Who will remember when what you’ve created no longer remains. If anything is certain then it is that your creation, one day, will be lost in due course of time.

The story of storylessness

Maybe there is no story here. Maybe there was not any to begin with. Perhaps, the task of finding meaning is a self-inflicted pain whose answer is only a figment of our imagination, and each one of us have built our own narrative to cope with because facing the evident absurdity of life is not as easy or trivial as we like it to be. Amidst this, the way forward is to not get dampened with this meaninglessness, but to embrace it and continue to derive meaning by what you do. The challenge here is: will you continue to do what you think is meaningful even when you know it isn’t objectively. Maybe we should stop chasing false prophets who claim to have figured out life. We will have to be our own creators of meaning and embrace it whole-heartedly.