The Meaning of Life

    What is the meaning of life? This is the classic ultimate question asked by philosophers. Many different groups have their own answers. Many high school students who have never read "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" will say "42" and think they're nerdy and hilarious. (for the last time, its the ultimate question of life the universe and everything, not the meaning of life! NERDRAGE)

     I'm okay. Really. But before we can talk about the meaning of life, we need to think about what we mean by the question. Most of the question is obvious, except for that essential middle word, "meaning". What is a "meaning"? Is it a goal (or as a philosopher would say, an end?) is it a completion? Is it a point of fulfillment? Is it a cause? Merriam Webster says that meaning is "an end; purpose" so we're going to run with that.

     My goal here is to find an answer that is acceptable to people of all customs and creeds. Here we go.

     So, the meaning of life is the purpose for which we live life. Obviously, different people have different purposes for living, let us examine some of them.

1. Material Gain

     Family movies and Democrats would like us to know that all businesspeople live for the sake of money. I can accept this, its a pattern observed since the ancients that there are those who live and breathe for the sake of another buck. But Why do people want to have money? To understand this we need to look back on the origin of money.

     Aristotle in his "Politics" declares that money is a construct of society made to facilitate simpler trade. If I am a home builder and you are a corn farmer, how much Corn is a house worth? We can both put months of work into a single project, and you produce many products that you can take to market, and I produce only one immobile product. But you need a house, and I need corn. Are you really going to give me a season's worth of corn for building you a house? What am I going to do with all that corn? I don't want to take it to market, I know nothing about corn and I cannot sell it. This is an extreme yet plausible example of why a simple trade system does not work. When one product is much more intensive than another, an even trade gets more and more difficult.

The solution is money. We need a good that we measure all other goods by. A way to take that house and split it apart, or that corn and combine it together into one lump of property. This good needs to be worthless by itself, and thus immune to market forces. We want the market to move around our standard, not the standard to move around the market. Hey, I know, lets take this shiny stuff, flatten it, and print its value on it. And thus money was born.

     Okay, so money was invented to make trade easier, but it does so by being an artificial good. Something that people want because it gives them the power to trade other things for it. Which leads me to my next point

2. Power

     Power is a powerful thing. Tautologies are also tautologies, and statistics show that they make the opening sentence of a paragraph more appealing to a reader. There are different types of power. We could talk about political power, physical power, mental power, electrical power. We don't need to talk about these individually though, because they all share some things in common. The most obvious of them is the word "power". Power is the ability to control, or to act with impunity. Honestly, who does not want control and free action? It seems like something ingrained in human nature.

     People who are very powerful also tend to have

3. Fame

     Every child's dream is to be famous like that fifteen-year-old pop star who is utterly full of himself and will be utterly lost to the history of bad decisions and tabloids. Don't get the wrong idea, one of my lifelong dreams is to have fame. I used to do weekly performances in front of a crowd of about a thousand students, and there is something really appealing to being called by name by someone whom I have never met before.

     Is this only a child's dream? I do not think so. I think there are many people who would try very hard for a bit of public recognition. Tabloids, politicians, reality shows, and photo bombers prove this. People like to be known and recognized by a lot of other people, and they are willing to do scandalous, degenerate things to do so (think the balloon boy story)

     Then there are those who live for

4. Righteousness

     These are generally religious people, but not always. Someone who craves righteousness just wants to lead a moral and productive life, and help others on the way. Ever since birth, we are told to "be good", and there are some, such as charity volunteers, emergency responders, and evangelists who seriously want to spend their time just being a good person and a benefit to society. It is a respected way of life.

5. Pleasure

There are others who just want to feel good all the time. Its pretty much a fact that these people end up at the bottom of society, but it is easy to recognize that they did so for the fun they got on the way. Drug users, party animals, low-class college students all fit into this category. They are called shallow, foolish, badly raised, but the fact is that they value bodily pleasure above all else.

What is it about pleasure that makes it so desirable? I think the reason people give up so much to please themselves is a need to be happy, and a faulty idea of where happiness comes from. Most people have gone through a phase where they valued pleasure above all else, and when I look back on that time, I realized that my problem was caused by faulty logic. The logic that leads to a life of pleasure is this: Happiness feels good, when I am happy, I am also pleased, therefore, if I find a way to please myself on demand, I will feel happy. These people soon find that they are wrong, but it does not take long before they don't care, the happiness isn't important anymore, all they want is to feel good.

6. Someone

     There are those who live their lives for the sake of another human being. We have all heard stories about them, and I have met a few. Everyone knows one old couple who love each other so much, that, upon hearing the news of a spouse's sudden death, the other will waste away and die in a matter of days, because their whole life revolved around that one person. Mothers will gladly give their lives for their children, lovers for their beloved, and friend for friend.

7. Creation

     There are many people in the world who get the greatest joy out of the act of making things. I am talking about artists, writers, musicians, architects, people who like to create for the sake of creating. I count myself in this group as a writer of short stories, poems, and essays, and as a musician.

NOTE: I am not at all talking about those sleazy pop-stars whose income is in the millions. No, I call those people entrepreneurs, and thus they fit in category #1. Maybe I will write my opinion on them in a future post.

     A good artist makes art because he enjoys creating art, and being better and better at replicating the natural world in his images. Writers want to make a better story than any every before, and musicians want to capture beauty and emotion in the complex interactions of pitches in time. There is a moment of ecstasy when you look back on something that you have made, and you see that it is beautiful, everything you could have wanted it to be and more, and these people feel that joy and keep creating to experience it more and more.

     So now we have identified seven different reasons that people live their lives, seven commonly held opinions for the meaning of life. But what do these things have in common? What is the singular meaning of life? Are you ready?

     The answer is God. WAIT!!!!!! Before you close the browser and never come back to my blog again, just hear me out. I am not specifically talking about the Christian God. I am talking about what Aristotle calls "The Unmoved Mover", the single omnipotent entity that all but a few world religions believe exists, whether it is YHWH, Shiva, Allah, or Eru Illuvatar. Since I am a christian and I live in America, I will use the word God from here on out, but let the reader understand that I mean any singular omnipotent creator deity.

     I will explain. Remember the definition we set for "meaning"? It is the end, the goal, the purpose for which something exists. The meaning of life is ingrained in human nature: a desire to be/be like God.

1. Material gain

     Who has more possessions than the one who rules the entire universe? People who want things do so out of a desire to be like the one who has everything.

2. Power

     God is all-powerful. He created the universe, each individual life, and he destroys with the power of nature. We established the power is the ability to do anything one desires, and is there anything God cannot do? People who desire power want this freedom, the strength to do anything, just like the one who created the universe.

3. Fame

     God is known to all those who believe in him, and receives their constant worship. People who want to be known and worshiped do so to be like the one who revealed himself to the world and demands their worship.

4. Righteousness

     God is just and fair and good, and those people who live to be good do so to be like the best one that ever was.

5. Pleasure

     God resides in paradise, or heaven, a metaphysical place filled with eternal happiness. As I mentioned before, pleasure comes from happiness and seekers of pleasure strive every day to find pleasure, in the hopes that pleasure will bring them happiness, so that they can be like the one who resides in eternal happiness

6. Someone

     Leaving Jesus Christ out of the equation (because most creator figures do not suffer and die for people), still God put his power into making each of us and the world we inhabit. He gave us everything, and those who would give everything for someone else are trying to be like him who gave us all our very existence

7. Creation

     This one is self explanatory. Artists want to make an image as aesthetically beautiful as the one that God made in nature. Architects want to build a structure that imitates the geometrical perfection of the universe that God created. Musicians strive to replicate the divine music that brings joy to others across time and space, and writers try to be like the one who invented the greatest story of all time.   

     So what does this tell us?  From my christian perspective, this is living proof of the passage in Genesis 1:27 

"So God created human beings in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;"

     Images are imperfect replications of that which the image was taken of.  An image of a beautiful landscape will always lack some aspects that the painter/photographer experienced while there, in the same way our experience as mortal images of God are lacking in some aspects.  However, in this case, we are not simple objects, we are rational creatures, in our deepest heart we feel this discrepancy, the lack, and we have a natural desire to overcome that discrepancy, and thus every human being has an innate desire to be more like god, though the ways that this desire is manifested changes from person to person.