“Not every question remains open because we have yet to find the answer.”
— Illusions Not Included
There are evenings when, without any particular preparation, a person finds themselves asking: what is the point of all this?
It rarely happens on a mountaintop or in a monastery courtyard. More often it comes sometime after dinner, when the washing-up is done, the phone is charging, and it suddenly occurs to someone that they have spent eleven hours dealing with matters some of which will have lost their historical significance by the following morning.
In earlier times, a person might have opened a book, gone for a walk, or had a drink. The order naturally varied according to culture and temperament.
Today, the situation is considerably more favourable.
One can type into a search engine:
What is the meaning of life?
The answer arrives in less than a second. This is, in itself, remarkable progress. Humanity spent thousands of years wrestling with the question; people today still have enough time left over to see what other content might interest them on the same subject.
The selection is impressively broad.
The meaning of life may be happiness, love, family, service, self-realisation, success, spirituality, financial independence, mindfulness, or becoming the best version of oneself. If none of these proves entirely convincing, a few results further down there will usually be someone offering an eight-week programme to help uncover one’s personal purpose.
The first consultation is often discounted.
None of these answers is necessarily wrong. That is precisely what makes the matter more interesting.
Bad answers are relatively easy to recognise. Convenient answers are more troublesome. They fit neatly into life, do not interfere too severely with the timetable, and do not require anyone to spend months or years living with the same uncomfortable question.
They make it possible to move on.
People today are fond of progress, preferably in some measurable form.
From this point of view, the meaning of life suffers from certain methodological weaknesses. It fits poorly into a project plan, is not especially suitable for a weekly status meeting, and tends to respond rather unhelpfully to the question, “Where are we with this?”
Perhaps that is why ready-made explanations are so attractive. Not necessarily because people are foolish. Often they are simply tired.
Uncertainty is fairly difficult company. It remains at breakfast, gets into the car, and occasionally stays in the room late into the evening. It solves nothing, offers no practical advice, and has the particularly irritating quality of refusing to be ticked off a list.
A ready-made answer is a much easier guest. It arrives, briefly explains how the world works and, in favourable cases, also confirms that the person listening occupies more or less the correct position within it.
It is generally much easier to live with.
The modern world, incidentally, has nothing against questions. Quite the opposite. It is extremely fond of them. Questions can become videos, podcasts, books, lectures, courses and newsletters. A well-phrased existential uncertainty can support a perfectly respectable business model.
The difficulty begins when the question remains a question for too long.
And this is not confined to the meaning of life. Public discourse today is generally uncomfortable with questions that fail to become positions quickly enough.
If someone admits in conversation that they do not yet know what they think about something, there can be a small and curious pause. Not a long one — just enough for everyone else to check whether they heard correctly. By the time that person has properly thought the matter through, the discussion is often two subjects further on, while the previous issue has already acquired its camps, arguments and an appropriate level of outrage.
After a while, it can seem faintly suspicious if someone is unwilling to join any of them immediately.
Uncertainty is difficult to present. It has no particularly good logo, fits badly into a profile picture, and “I’m still thinking about it” is a rather weak slogan from a communications point of view.
It is much more convenient to choose a position that already comes as a complete package: arguments, responses to objections, quotations, a few easily recognisable opponents and preferably a short explanation of how the world ended up this way.
If the whole thing can be reduced to five points, it is considerably easier to distribute.
None of this is a new human tendency. It has always been reassuring to belong to a community that knows not only what it believes, but also how to interpret everyone who believes something else.
The difference is that the selection is faster now, and the distribution considerably better.
An ideology once required time. Books had to be read, people sought out, ideas debated, and sometimes one even had to travel somewhere. Today, the five sentences that appear to bring order to an entire life can be found within minutes, usually with someone already presenting them confidently on camera.
The vast amount of information now available has genuinely opened up the world in many ways. Philosophy, science, history, religion, art, other cultures and the thoughts of people one would once never have encountered are more accessible than at any previous time.
The same technology has also provided access to every confident person in the world.
That has shifted the balance somewhat.
People who are uncertain are generally quieter. People who are certain they understand everything often have better cameras.
Certainty is, in any case, an extremely attractive product. It reassures, creates order, establishes causes and consequences, tells a person who they are and, in particularly fortunate versions, who everyone else is.
Life immediately begins to look more comprehensible.
Not necessarily any truer, but on a Monday morning the distinction can seem less important than it really is.
People are especially fond of simple answers that broadly agree with what they already thought.
Such explanations have a pleasant familiarity. A person walks in, looks around, and finds all the furniture exactly where they expected it to be. Nothing needs rearranging.
The more uncomfortable form of thinking usually begins when something does not fit: a fact, an experience, a person, or perhaps only a sentence that refuses to cooperate with the carefully furnished explanation.
At that point there are two options. The explanation can be altered, or whatever fails to fit can be treated as less important.
Humanity has considerable experience with both procedures.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty, then, is not that people do not know the meaning of life. There may simply be no single answer that works in precisely the same way for every person in every situation.
The more interesting question is how quickly someone is willing to settle for something that sounds good enough.
Something easy to remember, easy to share, perhaps suitable for placing over a photograph of a sunset. Sunsets are especially useful backgrounds because they rarely ask follow-up questions; ideally, the answer should not require anyone to live very differently on Monday morning from the way they did the previous Friday.
Real questions are often rather impolite in this respect.
They have a habit of rearranging the furniture.
Perhaps that is why the search for meaning has once again become an almost private activity. Something largely done away from the screen, without an audience or reaction buttons, and occasionally without even a useful result.
By contemporary standards, this is not an especially efficient process. A person can think for hours and eventually arrive at the conclusion that they do not know.
That is difficult to summarise neatly, and it hardly counts as a spectacular outcome.
It may not, however, be a failure.
In a world that can provide some kind of answer to almost any question immediately, the harder task may not always be finding an answer.
It may be resisting the temptation to accept the first one that arrives.
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