“Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
― Albert Camus

“Utterly pointless,” says the Teacher. “Absolutely pointless; everything is pointless.”
― Ecclesiastes 1:2

On Why

Look at the following elementary argument:
(1) Life has no inherent meaning
(2) There is no need to live if life has no meaning
(3) Thus there is no need to live life

It can be a valid argument. It is a depressing argument, but, in other words, it can be formulated that life has no objective meaning. The following essay will look at the last mentioned, not the subjective meanings that one can ascribe to oneself. The argument above will be broken down into the three statements, then the validity of the last statement will be assessed. A tentative reason why we tend not to acknowledge the fact that life is objectively meaningless will also be looked at. Why we carry go on with life, will be the main purpose of the essay. How is it possible, if one believes that life has no objective purpose or telos, to create a meaning, in other words, playing your own God. The problem is then as follows:
(1) Life has no inherent meaning
(2) I need to create meaning
(3) If I create meaning, life has meaning to me
(4) Life, therefore, has no inherent meaning but has meaning to me.

Is it possible to create meaning, i.e. to lie that your life has meaning, and carry on living? The answer is yes, because looking around you people are functioning and not worrying about it.

(1) Life has no inherent meaning

For more than 2000 years this feeling of meaninglessness has been with thinkers. We as humans tend to appreciate things more if there is meaning coupled with it (take for example sentimental objects that are worthless in themselves). It is easy to form an argument that humans are like the last mentioned worthless things in themselves (except maybe consciousness). Two statements can be made about being: you don’t have a say in your existence and you have no choice in what “form” you get. If you do not have a say in the aforementioned, how can your individual life have an inherent meaning (except if “something” or “someone” chose it)?

(2) There is no need to live if life has no (inherent) meaning

Is this necessarily true? The following can be a counter-argument:
"Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life. (An envelope is handed to her. She opens it in a businesslike way.) Thank you, Brigitte. (She reads. . .) Well, it’s nothing very special. Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations," (Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life).

We have concluded that life has no inherent meaning, but maybe that is in itself the meaning of life (coupled with the quote and the focus on everyday life and actions).

(3) Thus there is no need to live life

This can be formulated in different ways, or reached in many ways. If you have a teleological (goal orientated) view two statements can be made:
i. I state a goal and fail to achieve the goal, thus my life purpose (goal) is meaningless and a failure.
ii. I state a goal and achieve the goal, but afterwards, I have no further meaning to pursue, after I reached my goal life has no meaning, thus the above statement.

Also, someone can just say life has no inherent meaning, why live a moral life (and fulfil social cohesion) if there is no reason to do so?
Above we looked at three ways in how life can be meaningless and thus not worth living. (This is obviously very basic and does not do justice for the complexity of life.)

An Attempted Answer

Why do we do anything? “Why”? If we have a teleological approach to life we live to succeed or achieve the goal, but is that goal in itself a reason why we live? No, it is just a reason for a specific person, or group (e.g. Christians or Buddhism). A teleological explanation is thus not satisfactory because not everyone has this goal orientated view on life. Also, a goal orientated life can be ad infinitum (e.g. goal A achieved, move onto goal B then C…). There must be another answer.

In an article Gregory Bassham (2015) gives an account of Julian Baggini’s meaning of life: we shouldn’t think about life as teleological, with one single goal, or a string of infinite goals, but that meaning can be found in the “present” by only “living our lives”. Living in the present is a good try at answering or giving a reason for life, but this can quickly regress into hedonism. Hedonism in itself is not a reason “Why” we would do anything like a ten-hour workday. The answer is thus not satisfactory. (Baggini’s answer is not only living in the present but trying to find a balance between living in the present and having a goal for the future.)

I will agree with Bassham’s conclusion about Baggini’s balanced theory of a meaningful life: not everyone can live such a life, but that does not make their lives meaningless. Why then do we do “stuff”? Bassham closes the article:
"In the end, Monty Python may have got it right: perhaps meaning isn’t anything ‘very special’. Maybe it is all around us."

This is also not satisfactory: How can someone with the security of food, education and money be compared to someone with no money or food? Where security of a "good life" is not a given? They cannot be compared, but still both (the secured and unsecured persons) live their life's, both keep carrying on, despite what has been said above. They don’t resolve to suicide in either case. Accepting life and getting meaning from “all around us” is thus very arbitrary and subjective.

I suggest that we humans are fundamentally curious beings. (One of the recent examples can be of social media where people constantly check for updates etc.) Why do we do things? Because we are curious, we want to look at how things change, how things update, how the “game of life” is played out. There is no fundamental goal, or meaning in itself, rather there is this need to see things play out. Curiosity drives our lives: “what can I personally do to change this ‘game’?”, and then the aftermath of looking at how you changed it. For example: The studies in biology and experimentation for extending human lives. We do not know the consequences of a population of six billion people who live for an extended period of time, the cost of living and eating so much food, etc., on the planet, but we continue to think about living longer because it intrigues us, we want to see what happens next. It is all we have. Death seems not like the utter most possibility, but rather a immense boredom.

The attempted answer is elementary, but with further insight, more work being done, the answer will be more rigid, if not broken down completely.

References

Bassham, G. 2015. Life’s Purpose. Think. 14(39): 19-25.

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