The meaning of life

Beauty in Meaninglessness

I was once passionately religious, until I started to think critically and looked at my religion. Somewhat against my will I began to see many holes in that religion; too many for my mind to patch over with excuses or the possibility that I was looking at it wrong. I was unaware of the crushing consequences of losing this foundational understanding of reality at the time but I as much as I fought it, very soon I found myself filled with a profound emptiness.

The reason I couldn't fight this process is that the conclusion I came to was chillingly logical.


There is no God.

The meaning and purpose you have believed and based your identity on up to this point have been a lie.

You and everyone else on this planet really are macromolecular machines descended from single celled organisms and you are sculpted by evolutionary processes to excel at two things: survival and reproduction. You are essentially a chemical process, just like the chemical processes that occur anywhere in the universe. You are unusual because you exhibit incredible organization, homestasis, the ability to reproduce, to metabolize, and react to stimuli. Even compared to certain other life forms you are outstandingly complex, and of course you are a member of the only species on the planet that is self aware and possesses the ability to feel existential angst. But essentially I’m created by the random whims of the universe and am a tiny meaningless speck in it, whose existence has no bearing on anything. The existence of the universe itself is of colossal unimportance. Whether there is nothingness or matter almost seems a question of semantics.

How sad.

This realization made me physically ill for a long time. I lost motivation to do anything but eat sleep and entertain myself, because really I didn't want anything to do with this existence. I tossed the idea of suicide around briefly but decided I'd figure this out eventually and it would be quite cruel to the people that know me.

I tried to fight it. Seriously. I tried to ignore it. I did a pretty good job of distracting myself from it for awhile but it was always there in the background, deep underneath everything I was doing, poisoning my efforts to meld as a cog into society.

Obviously this way of living is unacceptable. If I couldn't find a reason for my existence at least I had to find a way of coming to terms with it so that I would not be constantly questioning my motives at a core level.

I’ve done it.

Or at least, I’ve found an answer that satisfies me-- that answers the question with enough clarity that the hollowness disappears. (If you’re in a similar situation as what I described I hope you find the same.)

The answer I’ve found has nothing to do with why the universe itself exists instead of empty space. I’m quite sure the answer to that is quite useless to me because it’s beyond anything I am capable of comprehending. What follows is only a way of looking at the universe that eases my hunger for meaning and identity in it.

As a disclaimer I feel that the following is a work in progress and will be to the day I die. Something this important is best left with an open mind.

Although I don’t agree with everything he says I am by and large a fan of Eckart Tolle. One of the things he talks about is resistance. This pervasive hollowness I was feeling was the ultimate form of resistance: Resistance to existence itself. My conflict was that I had a very strong view of the way the universe was but I felt it sucked and wanted it to be different. I wanted there to be a God and angels and an after life but there wasn’t and I hated that. This caused me to suffer at a foundational level.

The solution? Blindingly obvious.

Acceptance.

Acceptance not in terms of accepting something as truth, but allowing that truth to be and not judging it. Before I felt strongly that my existence in the universe was flawed because it wasn’t the way I wanted it to be or the way I believed it was as a child. In truth the only thing that was flawed was my way of thinking about it. There is in fact nothing wrong or right about the fact that I exist or that there is no God. It just is. And I can be ok with that.

Only after accepting this did I began to see things differently. I began to sense beauty in the insignificance of my life on a cosmic scale. I felt a powerful connectedness with the universe and other people, feeling this odd sensation that everything is beautiful just by virtue of it’s being. There was a freedom in the fact that nothing I could ever do or have ever done could matter at all. On a larger scale what happens to earth, the sun, our galaxy, anything, doesn’t have any kind of significance that you can adequately label and judge. It simply unfolds as it does and there is no meaning behind it. My identity now is that I am a part of the universe, and nothing I have or don’t have or do or don’t do has any significance in defining me. My purpose is simply to be, and my motivation to pursue any kind of activity is solely for the activity itself and not any kind of expansion of my self perception, because seeking to define oneself through objectives is illusory and ultimately meaningless. This doesn’t mean I don’t have goals or that I don’t have objectives in what I do, but instead that these goals are dedicated as part of the activity itself and in no way do I possess these things or do they change who I am fundamentally. Not only do they not define me but they are no true significance in life in general.

I even no longer feel the need for there to be any kind of higher power or God to feel content with life. I think many people who are otherwise secular choose to believe in God to give themselves some kind of comfort about the chaos they see in the world.

I could go on like this but it isn’t necessary at this point and most of what I would say would be from Tolle almost verbatim so I recommend reading his work.

The key point in this whole article is acceptance. If you are agnostic or atheistic and it is leaving you with an intensely haunting sensation of hollowness then you may find this quite helpful.

I hope you enjoyed this. This is something that came to me very recently and I am still trying to process but I really wanted to share.