I have never quite been able to understand how people are able to entertain the thought that life is meaningless. It probably shows a of lack of willingness to entertain drama on my part.
Nihilism seems to me not just melodramatic, but down right false – and obviously so.
There’s no need for a clever argument, i hope, just a simple pointing out of the fact that language is so completely embedded in life that you can’t possibly extricate yourself from it. So as long as you’ve learned a language, you’re good to go, life is meaningful.
It is easy to separate language from the world for a brief moment. Just do like Sartre and repeat a word over and over until it becomes just a sound. This is not a condition under which your entire whole world could labour.
Life being meaningless would be not being able to understand life at all, which would make you impossible to talk to, for a start.
Of course, it also doesn’t make any sense to say you know exactly what the meaning of life is.
The meaning of a long sentence is hard enough to talk about and the meaning of a film or a novel near impossible. That’s not to say they are meaningless, of course. They have a meaning, it’s just very, very complex, and gets understood differently from different angles. You might have to read the book or watch the film to understand it. So it is with life, except you can’t live someone elses life. Do you believe there is such a thing as a final biography of a person’s life? I don’t.
But the utter ambiguity, the ever expanding complexity of the narrative of our lives, means no more than – there is no scientific answer to the meaning of life.
Making sense of our human endeavours is always open to argument, to interpretation, to change. Understanding it is an art, a question of describing and discussing, not of discovering something final.
This is, in many ways, the dullest idea known to man. Everyone knows that this is not what nihilists are talking about. They’re talking about the non-existence of a pre-existant narrative, the knowledge of which will make your life more meaningful. Or they’re talking about a narrative which they’re telling, about the conditions under which life would have a meaning beyond that which already exists, which aren’t met.
The solution to the question about the meaning of life is that what your looking for is not a factual answer, but an idea that helps you make your life more meaningful.
But,because you already have a concept of more meaningful and less meaningful, you don’t necessarily need any more ideas. Just search out more meaningful things, and spurn less meaningful.
Of course some big idea might help you out here. But just keep in mind what you’re looking for, and the fact you already know what it is.
There is reason to be joyful. Your life is not meaningless. It might just have an ambiguous meaning, or a sad meaning, or just a very, very faint meaning. But it is not meaningless.