Human beings have been asking some version of this question for as long as we have possessed the luxury, or perhaps the burden, of wondering why we are here.
We have searched for answers in temples and monasteries, universities and laboratories, sacred texts and philosophy books. We have looked for meaning in family, love, pleasure, suffering, duty, achievement, service, enlightenment, creativity, and God. Entire civilizations have developed different answers, yet thousands of years of accumulated wisdom have not produced one that humanity can agree is correct.
That failure may tell us something.
Or perhaps it is not a failure at all.
The Answers We Have Tried
Western philosophy offers no shortage of possibilities. Aristotle connected a good human life with eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness but more accurately understood as flourishing: living well and developing the virtues necessary to fulfill our human potential. Modern philosophers continue to debate whether meaning comes from God, from objectively worthwhile pursuits, from what we personally care about, or from some combination of these things.
Religious traditions frequently locate meaning beyond the individual. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, human life can be understood in relationship to God, moral responsibility, divine purpose, and what may exist beyond our present lives.
But humanity’s search for meaning is much older and geographically broader than Western philosophy or the Abrahamic religions.
Hindu traditions offer the concept of dharma: duties, conduct, and ways of living appropriate to one’s place in life and the larger order of existence. Hindu thought also recognizes worldly prosperity and pleasure as legitimate human pursuits while ultimately pointing toward moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth.
Buddhism approaches the problem differently. It begins not by asking what grand purpose has been assigned to us, but by examining the human condition itself: suffering, dissatisfaction, attachment, impermanence, and the possibility of liberation. The goal is not necessarily to discover some external purpose for one’s individual existence, but to understand reality and transform how one experiences it.
There is admittedly something Buddhist in the conclusion I find myself approaching. Perhaps our problem is the assumption that there must be a final answer we can possess.
Other traditions complicate the question further. Confucian thought places enormous importance on becoming fully human through ethical cultivation and our relationships with others. African philosophical traditions have also challenged the highly individualistic way Western philosophy sometimes frames meaning, placing greater emphasis on community, relationship, and a person’s participation in a larger human whole.
Even asking, “What is the meaning of my life?” may therefore contain assumptions about what kind of answer we’re looking for.
For readers interested in going much deeper, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s overview of The Meaning of Life provides a useful survey of the major philosophical positions and includes resources on non-Western traditions.
Meaning When the Universe Doesn’t Answer
Some thinkers have taken an even more uncomfortable position: perhaps there is no predetermined meaning waiting to be discovered.
Existentialist thought asks what happens if we find ourselves in a universe that does not provide an obvious explanation for why we’re here. If meaning isn’t handed to us, perhaps it becomes something we construct through our choices, commitments, relationships, and actions.
Albert Camus pushed the problem toward what he called the absurd: the confrontation between humanity’s hunger for meaning and a universe that remains stubbornly silent.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus returned to the ancient Greek figure condemned to push a boulder up a mountain forever, only to have it roll back down each time. The task has no final accomplishment. There is no destination at which Sisyphus can finally say, There. Finished.
Yet he continues.
Viktor Frankl approached meaning from a very different direction. Drawing partly from his experiences as a concentration-camp prisoner, Man’s Search for Meaning argued that meaning can remain possible even under extraordinary suffering. For Frankl, there is no single abstract meaning of life that applies identically to everyone; meaning can differ from person to person and from one moment to another.
And then there is Douglas Adams, who gave popular culture perhaps its most famous answer.
42.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an enormous computer spends millions of years calculating the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The answer is 42.
Unfortunately, nobody actually knows what the Ultimate Question is.
It is a joke, but a remarkably good philosophical one.
An answer is useless if we don’t understand the question.
Every Answer Produces Another Question
Suppose we decide the meaning of life is happiness.
Why should happiness be the purpose? Is a happy life necessarily a meaningful one? Would we choose permanent artificial happiness over a difficult life containing love, loss, struggle, accomplishment, and growth?
Perhaps the answer is love.
Why love?
Perhaps it is family and the continuation of humanity.
Continuation toward what?
Maybe our purpose is to serve God.
Why would God create us for that purpose?
Perhaps there is no external purpose at all, and each of us must create our own meaning.
Then why are human beings so compelled to create one?
We don’t seem comfortable with existence being merely existence. We want it to be about something.
A tree does not appear troubled by its purpose. A dog does not spend the afternoon wondering whether it has wasted its potential. As far as we know, distant galaxies aren’t suffering existential crises over why they exist.
We are.
And that peculiar dissatisfaction with simply being alive has produced an astonishing amount of what we call civilization.
What If the Search Is the Point?
Consider what our search for meaning has caused us to do.
We developed religions partly because we asked what exists beyond ourselves. Philosophy grew from questions about what is true, good, just, and real. Science advances because people refuse to accept that the world merely is and insist on asking how and why it works.
We create paintings, music, poetry, stories, monuments, theories, and entire cultures trying to express things we cannot completely explain.
We fall in love and wonder what love means. We lose people and confront mortality. We have children and wonder what kind of world we should leave them. We stare into space and ask whether anyone else is there. We look inward and ask what consciousness is and why we experience existence from behind these particular eyes.
And when one generation develops an answer, another generation questions it.
Perhaps that isn’t evidence that humanity has failed to find the meaning of life.
Perhaps looking for meaning is one of the things that gives life meaning.
There is something here that echoes Buddhist thought: attachment to a final, permanent answer may itself be part of the problem. There is also something existentialist about it: meaning emerges through what we actually do with the existence we have. And something Socratic too: a life worth living may require continued examination rather than intellectual arrival.
I don’t claim this is the answer. Claiming that would contradict the argument.
It is simply the answer I find increasingly persuasive.
Maybe there is an objective meaning to life. Maybe God knows it. Maybe meaning is something we create ourselves. Maybe different traditions have each grasped different parts of something too large for any single human perspective.
Or maybe we’ve spent thousands of years assuming that the purpose of the question is eventually to stop asking it.
Perhaps the meaning of life is looking for the meaning of life.
About This Seed
When I encountered “I Am What You Call Eli,” one part stayed with me: if God suddenly started talking to you on a train, what would you ask?
I spent more time thinking about that than I expected. There are questions about death, suffering, the universe, free will, and whether God exists at all. But I kept coming back to perhaps the oldest question we have: What is the meaning of life?
This Seed is where that question took me. My answer isn't intended to settle anything. In fact, I suspect the search may be more important than finding a final answer.
I'd be interested in where someone else takes it. Challenge the conclusion in the discussion, approach the question through another philosophy or culture, or create something entirely different from it: a story, image, poem, song, video, or another Seed exploring what you believe gives a human life meaning.
The image used came from: https://pixabay.com/photos/person-man-boy-sunset-twilight-4733756/