Cheap Answers

A man is sitting in his kitchen late at night.

Nothing in particular is wrong with him. Beyond a certain age, this already counts as a reasonably good starting point. He has not lost his job, nobody has left him, the bank has sent no alarming letters, and the last thing his doctor told him was that he ought to move a little more. This still falls comfortably within the category of problems that can, in principle, be dealt with.

The flat is quiet. His phone lies on the table in front of him.

A few minutes earlier, he was reading an article about how to live a longer, fuller life. According to the article, this requires sufficient sleep, regular exercise, good social relationships, sensible eating, low stress and a clear sense of purpose.

He can more or less see what to do with the first five.

The sixth gives him pause.

A clear sense of purpose.

Presumably he had one once. As a child, for example, he wanted to become an archaeologist, largely because he had seen a film about one who travelled to exotic places, discovered ancient objects and appeared to spend remarkably little time in meetings.

Later, other ideas took over.

The expectation that a person should have some answer to the question of what they are going to become arrives surprisingly early in life. At eight, doctor, pilot or vet will usually do. By eighteen, it is preferable to know where one is heading. By twenty-five, what kind of career one is building. Somewhere around thirty, ideally with whom. And by forty, it becomes increasingly useful to speak of all this as though, at least in retrospect, some coherent plan can be detected.

The man has little to complain about. He studied, worked and changed jobs several times. In some places he moved upwards; elsewhere, he chose to leave. Years later, he remembers them as rather more deliberate than they felt at the time.

Uncertain choices tend to look better organised from a distance.

For quite a while, a career provided a perfectly serviceable answer.

One had to work. Improve. Earn more. Achieve something. Other people understood these things, and none of them required much explanation. If someone says they would like to be more successful, it is unusual to ask what, exactly, they intend to use the success for.

For years, he did not ask either.

He had goals, deadlines and projects that seemed important. Occasionally, on a Sunday evening, it occurred to him that perhaps he did not need to start quite so early on Monday. By Monday morning the thought had generally passed.

Eventually he became a manager. This brought more meetings in which he and other people tried to work out how to do the work more efficiently, while the meetings themselves left steadily less time in which to do it.

Once, the company even held a workshop on personal purpose. Everyone was given a sheet of paper and asked to write down what truly motivated them.

The man stared at the blank page for a while, then wrote:

creating value.

It sounded appropriate and fitted reasonably well with what everyone else was writing. Nobody put down paying off the mortgage, having a decent boss and getting home before six, although several such ambitions were probably represented in the room.

Work can serve as the meaning of life for quite a long time, particularly if one is too busy to examine the arrangement closely.

Then, occasionally, something very small happens. On a Friday afternoon he closes his laptop and realises that the task which has seemed extremely important all week will probably make no measurable difference to the condition of the world before Monday.

Nothing collapses.

At worst, a spreadsheet remains unfinished.

That is often when other answers become available.

Family, for example.

This is more serious. The man has a family, and they genuinely matter more to him than most of what occupies his days. But family does not behave much like a neatly framed answer to the larger questions of existence.

Children sometimes slam doors. At other times they barely speak for weeks, then announce at half past nine on Sunday evening that they need something for Monday morning which, at that particular moment, appears to be available only on another continent.

The love is no less real.

It simply bears less resemblance to the photograph in which a family walks along a beach at sunset.

Money presents a similar difficulty.

When he was younger, the man assumed that above a certain amount, people became calmer. This turned out to be broadly true. Later he discovered that calm came in several financial levels.

First, one needs some savings. Then more savings. Eventually it matters where the savings are, because inflation slowly reduces their value, so they need to be invested. Once invested, they naturally have to be watched to make sure they have been invested properly.

Before long, a person may find himself regularly checking the money he originally put aside so that he would not have to worry about money.

The man sees no great contradiction in this. He checks the markets, puts the phone away, and if he checks again the following day, it feels more like staying informed than worrying. He still regards money primarily as a tool. He simply prefers to keep an eye on what it is doing.

Health is even harder to argue with. Without it, a great many other things lose their importance. So he exercises, pays attention to what he eats and wears a watch that prepares a detailed report on his night every morning.

The watch knows when he fell asleep, how often he moved, how his heart rate varied and how well he recovered.

One morning, he wakes feeling particularly good.

Then he looks at the screen and discovers that his recovery was poor.

For the rest of the morning, he feels slightly less rested.

He does not throw the watch away. He puts it on again the next day. Over time, he has grown accustomed to learning some things from his body and others from the device monitoring it.

Meanwhile, help with the meaning of life has become remarkably easy to find.

Every so often, the man comes across a book, video or conversation promising greater clarity. Some people say we must find ourselves. Others argue that the problem is precisely that we spend too much time thinking about ourselves. One person believes in achievement, another in letting go, while a third recommends simplicity, usually alongside a small selection of objects, apps or courses that may help to achieve it.

Most of the advice is not foolish.

Work really can provide meaning. So can family. Money can provide freedom, health can provide time, faith can provide something to hold on to, and a community can give a person the sense that they belong somewhere.

The difficulty begins when one of these gradually becomes a complete explanation, and whatever falls outside it has to be treated as an exception.

The man finds this especially easy to notice in other people.

One acquaintance talks almost exclusively about work. Another has organised his healthy lifestyle so carefully that there is barely room left in it for an unplanned dinner. Someone else turns every social question into a political one and, after a while, can detect evidence of an entire worldview in a badly parked car.

The man usually listens patiently. Sometimes he agrees. At other times he quietly corrects a few of their exaggerations in his head.

His own views naturally seem somewhat more flexible.

After all, he knows the reasoning behind them.

Ready-made answers make life considerably easier to organise. There is no need to reconsider, every time, what matters, what sort of person one is, what one is trying to achieve and what to make of people who live quite differently.

Uncertainty is less convenient. Questions have a habit of returning after they were supposed to have been settled, and occasionally a person is forced to reconsider something they had already filed away as understood. Sometimes this includes admitting that, years earlier, they were more certain than the circumstances really justified.

His own life offers enough examples.

A job loss that once felt close to catastrophe looks, years later, more like a turning point. A relationship he was certain would last for ever now survives mostly in photographs, places and a handful of remembered sentences. Other people he never expected to matter very much somehow stayed.

There are also apparently insignificant afternoons he can remember perfectly twenty years later, while events that occupied him for months at the time have almost disappeared.

Such things are difficult to fit into a version of life in which everything has a clear role, a consistent narrative and several conclusions that can be stated neatly.

Yet afterwards, he does what most people do and tries to make them fit.

A bad decision becomes a lesson, a wasted year a necessary detour, an old mistake experience. Often they really do become these things, but a person rarely knows that while still living through them, when what he mostly wants is for something to start moving unmistakably in the right direction.

The man in the kitchen is still not entirely sure what to make of some of his old decisions.

Some he would make differently now. Others probably the same way. And there are a few he still cannot decide whether to call good or bad.

Once, this might have bothered him more.

Now he just looks at the phone again.

The article is still open. He is no closer to formulating a clear sense of purpose, although the text suggests there may be measurable benefits to having one.

For a moment, he wonders what he would write if someone handed him the same sheet of paper from the workshop again.

Family.

Freedom.

Meaningful work.

Peace.

None of these would be untrue, and he would probably like some of each. He is simply less certain now that any one of them ought to carry the full weight of an entire life.

A faint sound comes from the bedroom. Someone turns over in their sleep. The fridge starts humming, then a few seconds later the flat is quiet again.

The man gets up and rinses his glass.

Before switching off the light, he looks at the phone once more.

Beneath the headline, the same instruction is still there:

Find your purpose.

He does not read on.

He holds the phone for another moment, then saves the article to his reading list. There are already two similar pieces there: one about recognising what truly matters, the other about how to live a simpler life.

He leaves the phone on the table and turns off the light.

By morning, he will probably have something more urgent to do.