The Real Meaning of Life

Author

Introduction

I’m afraid you might have picked up the wrong book. You won’t find a glossy cover with some well-dressed guy towering triumphantly over the embossed promise of his book. You won’t find a day-by-day checklist for improving your life. You won’t lose any weight. This isn’t Prozac in an easily digestible paperback format. Please, don’t waste your money if all you want is another self-help guide.

This book is about the meaning of life. What could be more important? The meaning isn’t always pretty, but it is almost always enlightening.

Let me step back in time for a moment. It is the fall semester at New York University. I am a freshman. I have just failed my second calculus quiz in a row. I have a ton of acquaintances, but few real friends. My Barnes and Noble discount card is dangerously close to expiring. In sum, my life is not steaming ahead at full speed. Oh, and I’m at a Starbucks, where I am supposed to be writing a long paper on God only knows what. (No exaggeration: the paper was about God and the cosmic order in Dante’s universe.) Instead, I am doing what any responsible student would be doing: surfing the Internet on my laptop. In a moment of despair, I type, What is the meaning of life? into one of my favorite online forums and hit Enter. I expect the usual level of Internet discourse: a handful of nonsensical responses written in broken, abbreviated English.

To my surprise, when I refresh the forum page fifteen minutes later, there are forty responses awaiting my attention. Within an hour the number grew to sixty — almost all of them deeply insightful commentaries on the human condition. Sure, a few people suggested bikinis and beer, but they were in the definite minority. This particular online forum only stays on a theme for a week. Then the discussion is deleted or moved to some archive I have never been able to locate. I desperately wanted to receive more insight from everyday Internet folks. So I created a bare-bones website at www.realmeaningoflife.com. This is what it said:

At some point in your life, you’re going to look for meaning. Maybe at eighteen, maybe not until you’re seventy-two.

Let’s face it, you have no idea what’s going on. Neither do I. I am soliciting advice on the meaning of life. If you have a few words of wisdom, email them to meaning@ shutterline.com. It can be a few sentences, a few paragraphs, or a few pages. Include your full name — or a nickname if you prefer anonymity — which I will publish along with your response. Just don’t send a link to the Bible. Or to that Baz Luhrmann song about wearing sunscreen. Be original but useful to your fellow human being. Suggestions for making the world a better place are also welcome. Thanks!

To make a long story slightly less long, people really liked the sincerity behind my request. They started to submit answers — advice for making life more meaningful — and encouraged their friends to do the same. It was only a matter of time before publications like USA Today found out about the site and wrote about it. This significantly increased the number of submissions.

What follows are some of the best entries received during the seventy-six days the project was open to submissions. (Of course, I did end up including some passages from the Bible.) I have tried pretty hard to keep my own ideology (whatever that may be) out of the way. Most of the responses are uplifting and positive, if only because life is intrinsically a good thing. I have included some more pessimistic entries as well. Who am I to argue that we are more than just intelligent cell colonies? I can hardly get a C in my calculus class! One visitor wrote, Life is a sexually transmitted disease that is always 100 percent fatal. Way to ruin the party for me.

The entries are in no particular order, so you can read from beginning to end. Or from end to beginning. You can even randomly turn to a new page each day for inspiration and provocative family discussion. It’s sort of like those commercials for Reese’s candy: there is no one right way to eat them. The same applies to the consumption of The Real Meaning of Life. It’s totally up to you, what with free will and all. This is not a textbook ruled by logic and pie charts. Many, if not all, of the entries included draw on the life lessons of individuals. With each approach to the question, we get closer to the answer. The truth is in the sum of all the entries combined. May this book benefit you as much as it has me!

David Seaman

New York City

Spring 2005

What Is the Real Meaning of Life?

When I started attending the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, my parents made me do a work-study program. I got stuck in Sophie’s cafeteria. An incredibly irritating guy there developed a crush on me. One day he really needed the evening off and begged me to take his shift, even though I only worked mornings because it was an hour’s commute from my parents’ house. Against my better judgment, I took his shift. That night, as I was helping to close, the manager sent in a guy to help me put chairs on the table so I could mop the floor.

Eight years later, this coming Thursday, in fact, we’ re still married, with two kids. All because I took an extra shift at my shitty job.

— Barbara Kilpatrick

friday morning, waking up in the arms of someone you love, it’s raining ... so you call in sick to work (giving yourself a three-day weekend), go back to sleep, and at noon ordering chinese, eating lunch in bed, and watching cheesy reruns all day while the world drags on without you.

— avk

The meaning of life is ...

Life.

Here’s the longer version:

All life exists to re-create itself. Blast an island to dust with a volcano, and within a few years stuff is growing all over the place. Why? Because it must. Follow the chain up from RNA and you get replicating organisms. Why are we here? To reproduce. We eat so we’re strong enough to have sex. All else is justification.

— Doug Finner

Life is short, and the end is always unknown ... and closer than we think. What on earth can you do with this time? What would make our time on earth worth the trouble?

Some people go to religion. We are predictive animals; we see into the future. And when we see our death, we can’t accept that we will no longer exist. So religion fills that void — life after death, reward for all our rights, and punishment for all our wrongs.

Me? I just don’t see it. The big guy in the sky seems far too implausible.

How do I go on? How do I continue to respect and honor my friends, live a good life, and try to improve myself? Why? What is the point, when it will all be soon forgotten?

I don’t know.

What I do is I learn. I learn how to make things. Creation by my hands. Computer software, jewelry, robots, balloon animals, the written word, humor, compassion. I create everything I can, as often as I can, without interruption.

A better answer would be that to live is to love, and to love is to bring more light into the world. If we are to suffer this brief interlude, we might as well do all that we can to make the burden light for ourselves and for those around us.

And who knows? Maybe there is more to it than what we can see with our body’s eyes. We can only hope.

— Edwin

I’ve been to the top of the pile, sank to the deepest depths, and seen every point in between. What keeps me hanging on? Morbid curiosity about what will come next. Life is an experience, and there’s always something more, good or bad. The trick is learning to take both with equal reverence. ...

— E. James Jacobson

Having just survived my fourth heart attack, eleven months of unemployment, and a divorce not of my own making, all within the last year, I think that life means the following:

Love those who mean the most. Every life you touch will touch you back. Treasure every sunrise, every raindrop that hits your nose, every slobber of your dog, the feeling of sand between your toes. Be moved by the tears of a child, and try to fix the cause. Be grease, not glue. Breathe deep, exhale slowly, and never miss a chance to help another while on your journey here.

— Don Stephens

Beer, ribs, professional sports, and Miles Davis.

— Mike Barber

Waking up early one morning in a hotel room. Walking down the hall, through some doors, down more steps. Then realizing that you can run away right now and never be found again. Feeling truly free.

Wandering around London. Always having a general idea of where you are, but at the same time being kind of lost. Lost in a sea of people you don’t know.

— Adam E. Heller

Humans generally seem to be goal-oriented creatures. I really hate it when people write cover letters for their résumés saying they are goal oriented. It’s completely pointless to say that, because everyone is goal oriented. It’s just that some people have very different goals. I have a friend whose goal is to get married before she leaves her childbearing years. I have another whose goal is to be filthy stinking rich, and yet another friend whose only goal is to make it to the next day. I think the third friend is the most realistic and perhaps the sanest, though perhaps a little lazy. It’s true that in life there are be-ers and doers, but the be-ers have it right, in my humble opinion, because spending all your life running to get to the same place everyone’s going anyway too often causes you to miss out on all the really nice things the world has to offer. All the hard work you do might bring you great wealth, which will allow you to buy all kinds of stuff, but does that stuff really add to your life? One might guess the guy sitting in a $3,000 massage chair watching a 50-inch plasma-screen TV has a better life than a sugarcane farmer who sleeps in a shack where the only entertainment is the sound of crickets chirping at night. But how many of these so-called comfortable people are actually happy? I would guess that those farmers are often experiencing life on a level the man in the massage chair can only dream about.

— E. J. Sepp

Roughly 10 percent of life is spent trying to shirk death. The rest of life is probably spent waiting in line at the supermarket.

— Tishon Woolcock

If you see a big ring of fire ahead of you and it scares you half to death, jump through it! It is only our fears that veil our true identity. Conquer these and you’ll find what’s left of you is love, a love so brilliant that ten thousand suns would not be your equal. We are all searching for truth, we all want happiness. Learn to love yourself and these gifts will follow. Stop looking outward ... the answers lie within. And for God’s sake, stop grazing in the fields of chaos and fear that the media is cultivating for you. Fear sells, and we’re buyin’. You are more powerful than you know. Enjoy.

— Jack Dempsey Boyd

At the end of the day, it’s not that complicated. We’re here on this planet for a short time. Appreciate every moment. We have a sacred responsibility to appreciate the opportunity of this life and make the most of it. There is an integrity to pursuing your dreams that animates all other aspects of life. Aim to leave the world a little bit better than you found it, whether it is through something as small as standing up for kindness or as big as building a movement to bring about broad change — both take courage. Be the change you want to see in the world. This is harder than it sounds. It is still worth pursuing.

A lot in life urges us to give in to the arrogance of the moment — the assumption that opportunities will be here forever, so why bother to take action? Do not listen to this domestic devil. The opportunity is here and now. To paraphrase Goethe, boldness contains the seeds of genius — take the first step today. Words and intentions are important, but ultimately actions matter more. Some people are lulled into false comfort or confusion by diffusing their sense of responsibility. One way to shake off this complacency is to look at a present challenge through the eyes of history. Imagine how an issue will be seen in twenty years, and the right decision will usually be revealed. Generational responsibility is the bottom line. After all, the deeper purpose in politics is that you get to participate in making history in the present tense.

Remember that worry is a waste of time and that fear is not your friend. There is a temptation among some good people to overthink to the point of paralysis. This does no one any good. It is true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but it is equally true that the overexamined life is also not worth living. Instead, as someone once said, Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

Enjoy challenges: identify and embrace the responsibilities of your time. After the attacks of September 11, I worked for a time at the New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM). Anxieties were running high about the possibility of another terrorist attack. This often translated into indulgence in a nervous parlor game in which all sorts of horrific attacks were imagined. On a metal bookshelf in OEM’s makeshift offices under the Brooklyn Bridge (the original offices had been destroyed with the World Trade Center) was a line of binders detailing suggested responses for the City to a full range of doomsday scenarios. And yet, while people in taxis contemplated fleeing the city or upped their dose of Paxil, the cops and firefighters who worked at the OEM went about their jobs and daily life with a sense of purposeful calm. They had a saying: Hope for the best but prepare for the worst. The trick was not to worry — that was a counterproductive luxury they could not afford. Instead, keep focused and hold on to your sense of humor. Be fully prepared, and look forward. If something comes up, then deal with it.

At the end of the day, we’re all in this together. As Jackie Robinson once said, One life is not important except for the impact it has on other lives.

As I write this, I’m in an airplane looking out the window at the endless clear-blue horizon above thick clouds, and I’m reminded of the importance of perspective, how nature reminds us that there is always a blue sky above the clouds. Likewise, leaves fall off trees at the turn of the season, and plants appear to die after the first frost, but come spring they bloom again. Pain always comes before a child is born. The sunrise and sunsets in life are sublime, and every night we see that it is darkest just before the dawn, but