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Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com
We are all familiar with the fact that we have basic needs in life and we even know what some of those needs are. We need food, shelter from the elements, we need bear spray, we need relationships with other reasonably functional human beings; but there is one critical need that we often overlook, or if we do acknowledge it, we often don’t give it enough consideration for what the implications of having it or not having it are.
I’m talking about the belief that our lives have a certain meaning and not just as a sum total, but also the more condensed experiences of our lives – that they convey some meaning to us. This is probably most pronounced when someone is experiencing a crisis. This is when we tend to most earnestly ask the question “why” in the hopes that we can grasp some meaning to help us survive the tribulation.
This is critical, because without it – many of us would give up. Many of us would not endure the hardships, the suffering, the losses, the setbacks, the difficulties, the distresses, or even just the daily grind and the work that needs to be done.
Most of us don’t want to be doing that work or suffering through these kinds of experiences, but there is a consolation in the belief that, even, and perhaps especially, in our trials and tribulations, there is meaning to it all – there is a lesson to be learned and information that is being conveyed – which, if we are attuned to it, we can grow in strength and wisdom.
Even a nihilist like Frederic Nietzsche said, “that which doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” In other words, some good can be derived from my experiences, including the unpleasant ones.
If any of us conceded that there really was no meaning or purpose to the experiences of our lives and the experience of being alive – and truly meant it, I expect that far more of us would just curl up into the fetal position and stay that way; or worse do something to interrupt the state of being alive.
So it is, literally, vitally necessary for us to be convinced that there is a meaning to our existence and that this meaning is communicated to us as we endure through the struggle of existing. In order to stay alive, which most people agree, is preferrable, this need must be in met.
So, what does it mean for our lives to have meaning? Well, I’d like to answer that question, by way of an analogy. Imagine you’re walking down a trail and you come upon an arrangement of rocks scattered about. There are a couple possible responses you could offer to such a geological discovery.
You could look it and say, what does this mean? What information is conveyed by this arrangement of rocks. Or you could assume that there is no meaning in it and assume that they came to be in this place by a long, random, and accidental process of cause and effect.
The former scenario, where you ask yourself, what does this mean is another way of saying, what does this communicate. That’s what we mean by the question, what does it mean. We’re asking what information, knowledge, or understanding, which we don’t currently possess, can be unlocked from discerning the facts available to us – in this case an apparent arrangement of rocks.
And the only way that it can communicate something is if there is an intellect and a will communicating something by it. Because it takes an intellect to arrange and compose information in a way that it might be received by another intellect and then it takes a will to perform the task of communicating it, either through words, smoke signals, the placement of objects, or through written language.
If you’re on the receiving end of this kind of communication protocol, then by asking what it means, you’re assuming that there is an intellect and will, or a person, on the other end of that transaction, communicating the apparent meaning to you.
So it is with our own lives. You cannot say, “what does this experience mean, what lesson is being communicated through these experiences, or what is the sum of my life’s meaning?” unless you assume that your life is derived from an intellect and a will who is communicating that meaning through the experiences of your life.
The alternative is that you are a temporary expedient in an accidental, meaningless, random, and chaotic sequence of cause and effect that does not communicate any meaning, purpose, or any information at all.
Which might be a logical conclusion based on a certain interpretation of the evidence, but if that is your conclusion, the least logical thing you can retain is any notion that such an existence is imbued with meaning and we’ve already established that our lives HAVE to have meaning for us to survive the psychological paralysis that will descend upon us without such a belief.
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