What to do when life feels meaningless
Despairing Desperadoes! Graham here.
I’ve been diving into a bit of philosophy lately.
Specifically, I’ve been exploring how some of the more prominent thinkers of the past two centuries have answered that most philosophical of questions...
Just what exactly is the fucking point?
I’ve been asking this question a lot myself. Maybe it’s the quarantine - the lack of my usual routines. Maybe I’m just depressed. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m on the brink of some kind of personal breakthrough.
All of the above?
Here's where I've got to so far. Two theories on the meaning of life...
Theory #1. Schopenhauer - falling out of love with life
Schopenhauer, a 19th Century German philosopher, says there are basically two kinds of people. People who don’t think too much about the meaning of life, and people who do.
People in the first camp tend to get on with things, chasing the sorts of goals society deems most important - career, family, and so on. They might occasionally wonder what it all means, but any background existential dread can usually be quelled through distraction - sport, art, entertainment, sex - and through diving into their next project.
Then there's camp 2. (If you're on this mailing list dear reader, camp 2 might sound quite familiar.) In camp 2, for whatever reason, you've lost faith in all this restless striving. Like falling out of love, but with life itself; you no longer hear the music.
People in camp 2 are either depressed, because they’ve decided nothing really means anything, or they’re anxious, because each day they wake up primed to restlessly strive, but they have nothing that feels worth striving for.
Depressed or anxious you say. Hey, why not both?
What to do if you’re in camp 2
Schopenhauer’s prescription is thus. When you’re in camp 2, your job is to somehow find your way back to camp 1. To find something that you can believe in again, something worth striving toward. This may take several years.
I can see examples of this in my own life. To me, I wouldn’t quite describe it as ‘finding’ meaning again, I think it’s more that you have to create it, from scratch. For instance, in setting up rituals of connection with other people, like my weekly games night, or weekend basketball. These are the rhythms of life I turn to when life gets gloomy again and I’m convinced nothing’s worth it.
(Not that this rhythm of life is always steady. It doesn’t help that the basketball courts are closed. And in my pandemic funk, I have attended our new Zoom-based games night precisely once in the last two months.)
Plan B: run away and become a monk
There is a third camp, for Schopenhauer - a kind of exclusive club that very few people ever enter. These are the ascetics. The monks and nuns of the world who somehow manage to embrace the meaninglessness of life as a kind of liberation.
When I’m at my most doom-and-gloomy, I call this ‘Plan B’. Run away and live in a mountain lodge somewhere. If these newsletters abruptly stop one day, you’ll know what happened.
Theory #2. Simone De Beauvoir - to be human is to be confused
A hundred-odd years after Schopenhauer, Simone De Beauvoir has a crack at this meaning of life thing. She was one of the big name existentialists (you know, those philosophers with the big feels).
For De Beauvoir, to be a human is to be ceaselessly torn between the ways that you are free and the ways that you are not.
For each of us, there are things about ourselves that are fixed (what the existentialists call your ‘facticity’) like your height, and your personal history. And there are things about each of us that are open to change (your ‘transcendence’). These include things like your career path, the partner you’re with, and so on.
The tricky part is that a lot of things fall somewhere in between these two poles. Your state of mind, for instance. Am I depressed and anxious because of my upbringing and my brain chemistry (things I can’t change)? Or am I depressed and anxious because of the choices I’m making right now (things I can change)?
The stories we tell ourselves
This ambiguity is confusing, so the temptation is to pick one of these two poles, facticity or transcendence, once and for all. Many pick the side of pure facticity, telling themselves a single, all-encompassing story about who they are. ‘I’m a serious person, on a career track.’ Or, ‘I’m the anxious type. There are some things I simply can’t do, as much as I might like to.’
Then there’s the other option, pure transcendence. ‘I’m a totally free individual. So free, in fact, that I never actually commit to anyone or anything.’
For De Beauvoir, either one of these approaches is a recipe for feeling that life is ultimately meaningless. You’re either a slave to things outside your control, or you’re awash in a sea of overwhelming choices.
What if ambiguity is the point?
De Beauvoir asks, what if the meaning of life lies in this uncomfortable in-between, in navigating the ambiguity of what we can and can’t change? In short, she argues that ambiguity is baked into the pie. You can’t ever ‘figure your life out’, because you will always be more than the sum of your life choices to date.
There’s always that pesky element of freedom. The challenge of life is learning to balance this freedom with a few anchoring truths.
For De Beauvoir, one such anchor was to be found in embracing your responsibility to others. She argued that we can’t be truly free without enhancing the freedom of those around us (the basis of her highly influential writing on the liberation of women).
Me: Maybe looking after others will help me feel more anchored?
Bodie: I can help with that
So what does all this mean?
Both Schopenhauer and De Beauvoir seemed to agree that finding meaning in life is hard work, and that some of us find it harder than others. Perhaps we just live more closely to that ambiguity De Beauvoir describes, we feel it more keenly. Maybe it’s something in the way the world has responded to our particular brand of suffering.
How many of us have been told by well-meaning helpers that our pain is a simple misfiring of signals in the brain, a quirk of mistaken chemistry? This can be a relief at first (especially if you’re one of those for whom the pills actually work). But after a while that explanation can wear on you. If it’s all just chemistry, what does your suffering really mean?
Both Schopenhauer and De Beauvoir also agree that meaning is an active process - something personal to be made, rather than something objectively true to be discovered.
Where this gets tricky is that, at the very moments in life you are most likely to lose faith in the meaning of life (times of change and loss), these are also the moments you have the least left in the tank. So it's extremely tempting at moments like these to fall into one of those fixed storylines ('life is meaningless', or 'my life is ruined').
None of this is easy
There’s a kind of leap of faith that needs to happen (or really, several small leaps, one after the other). You do the things you think might eventually bring back a sense of meaning and purpose, and you have to keep doing them over and over, long before you start to see the reward.
In fact, this is the feedback I most often get from your emails: ‘I know what I’m supposed to do to look after my mental health, I just can’t bring myself to do it.’
To add to the ambiguity, that list of things that bring meaning and purpose to your life will change over time. What worked once may not work now - and that's not necessarily a sign you're sinking into some new depression. It may simply be that you're growing, and your needs are changing.
This is the more optimistic reading of Schopenhauer's 'camp 2', those people who've fallen out of love with life. It's a painful place to be, to be sure, but just like the end of a relationship, it can herald a period of profound personal growth, as you slowly rebuild your life from the ground up.
(But of course, at the time, it just feels like your world is ending. It wouldn't be a leap of faith if you knew what was coming now would it?)
At least it ain't just you
From what you tell me in your emails, it can help just to know there are others out there, finding it just as hard as you do to find meaning in life. (This includes even big name philosophers who, clearly, spent a whole lot of time wondering just what the fuck was the point.)
And sometimes knowing this doesn’t help. You feel that in the end, it’s all on you anyway.
That’s where I am these past few days, I think. But I've been here before. I know from past experience, it probably won’t last forever.
And if it does? Well, there’s always Plan B.
Want more philosophy in your life?
My go-to source is a podcast, Philosophize This!
The host does a great job of tying philosophy to the question of how we live our lives. I recommend starting with the episodes on Stoicism, or any of his stuff on the existentialists - De Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus.
Also, hey remember that book I was going to write?
I mentioned it a while back - my magnum big feels opus.
One unexpected benefit of all this existential angst? I've started writing the book again, after being stuck for months. It's changed a lot from my original idea, but I really feel I'm onto something.
If you haven't already, add your name here to be the first to know when it actually exists (or just to encourage me to keep writing). That's all for now.
