What is the meaning of life? In a time of political divisions and gun violence, with COVID still peeking around every corner, this question comes up frequently. I talk to lots of people who wonder, What’s the point? Why are we here?
Nihilism
Or maybe there is no point. Some people have been beaten down so much that they have decided that there is no meaning. Nothing matters. The philosophical word for this is nihilism. It is the rejection of all religious and moral principles, with the belief that there is no meaning in life.
We see signs of this all around us. Politicians operate without a second thought about whether what they are doing is moral or ethical, and some people seek to destroy our cultural institutions without any plans for how to replace them. Mass shootings occur with seemingly no concern for the lives of others.
In the movie Groundhog Day, Phil Connors is a weather reporter who lives the same day over and over again, and finally becomes depressed and attempts to stop the cycle by trying to commit suicide in a number of ways. He has determined that there is no more purpose to his life, and has become nihilistic.
In the Academy-award winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, Jobu Tupaki attempts to make sense of the infinite chaos of the multiple dimensions of life by reasoning that there is no meaning — a nihilistic view. She creates an “everything bagel” which acts like a black hole which will consume the entire universe. (Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen the movie, go to the next paragraph.) Near the end of the film her mother Evelyn rejects the nihilistic outlook in favor of free will and the beauty possible in human relationships.
Concern about the meaning of life wasn’t an issue a hundred years ago, because the vast majority of people held some religious beliefs that provided meaning. God’s plan was the purpose that humankind was moving toward, and there was little debate about it.
Writers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard began discussing nihilism as a philosophical idea in the 1880s. Nietzsche in particular criticized religious faith, and wrote that “God is dead.” He is widely misunderstood to be an advocate for nihilism, but he wrote, “I believe it [nihilism] is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes a master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!” (Complete Works, Vol. 13)
As science advanced, with its emphasis on proof, skepticism also increased. We saw the tangible benefits of scientific thinking, and our world changed. Children were taught the scientific method, and it gained traction as the way that all problems—even religious or ethical ones—should be approached. Belief was no longer enough without a way to empirically test it. People wanted evidence. Organized religion went into a significant decline, with major denominations losing members year after year.
This left a void, however, because some questions are still too grand for science to answer. What was before the Big Bang? What happens after we die? What is love? Why are we here?
Finding Meaning
Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Finding that why can be hard work.
Viktor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning after surviving the holocaust concentration camps. He believed that holding on to meaning and purpose in his life allowed him to get through this terrible experience. But when working with his psychotherapy clients, he noted that the paradoxical secret to finding meaning may be to not look for it directly. He pointed out that meaning comes when one seeks beauty, love, justice, or, as Frankl writes, “a cause greater than oneself.” So finding meaning may be a matter of doing small things in the service of love, curiosity, and service to others.
There are also other ways to find meaning. Traditional religious thought has struggled to find purchase in our modern world, but it is still around. The thousands of years of teachings and scrutiny that it has gone through still have value.
What most people ignore, or choose not to investigate, is that there is evidence available in the religious realm. But it requires work to find it, and most of us have a lazy streak. Here’s how the work begins: we have to learn about what the tradition (you pick) says. Not what we have heard that it says, or what we learned when we were kids. We have to do some studying. Then we have to ask some questions. And we have to participate in some religious practices. It will take time. We can even apply the scientific method to our approach — posit a hypothesis, and clarify it, and then ask questions about it. Does it hold up to scrutiny? Then submit it to the crucible of a community. Do they find the hypothesis helpful?
We need to do the work necessary to validate spiritual truths first-hand, through direct experience. Several things happen along the way: we learn some things about ourselves, about others, and we participate in the search for “a cause greater than ourselves.” Occasionally, along this path, we find it.
