OK, you get it. I figure my preferred title’s been taken, no doubt by some delusional, grandiose fool. Meanings of life are like, well, everyone’s got one. I’m not mad at them! Compassion is what’s required for those poor idiots. If we can find a way to feel like we have the answer, well that might be sort of irresistible, we don’t always deny Grandpa his take over Thanksgiving dinner, so no blame. Who among us who have suffered with doubt would deny one of us crackpots the temporary sense that it’s possible to know what’s going on? Even most atheists don’t try to take that from the religious followers, most of the time. Of course, folks don’t mind taking it when they’re trying to replace yours with theirs, but I digress.

The meaning of life is, you don’t ask what the meaning of joy is.

You don’t ask “Why are we here?” when you’re in a good place, that is the meaning of life.

You ask, “Why are we here?” when you’re far from home, in prison, in a lethal desert, on a sinking ship, at a Phil Collins concert – you get it. All life is sorrowful – but this is not an empirical truth in my philosophy, but a human truth, a human created situation. We make damned sure life is sorrowful, on purpose, if not completely consciously – that is the meaning of human life. Forced migrations, prisons, doomed ocean crossings, these things are not always Mother Nature. It’s human beings that make Phil Collins concerts happen.

You know I think I have the answer, that everything we say we do to make us “good” is what makes us tough and unreasonable, that the “punishments” that “deter” and “teach us right from wrong” are functionally actually abuse that make us mean and crazy and teach us to abuse in turn, just the sort of folks that when you live with them you start to wonder, why am I here?

I know, you were probably looking for some noun, progress, salvation – even procreation. But you can’t get there from here.

From here, the meaning of life is, how about we try to stop spending all day every day making our children and everyone else miserable so that they keep asking that sad question forever?

 

 

Jeff

July 14th., 2019