The Meaning of a Meaningless Life: The Journey, Utopia, and Death
Reading Time: 8 minutes
Yurui’s Summary
We strive so much towards goals, but never find satisfaction when we reach them - you can always be better. Each destination marks the start of a journey to the next destination. Instead, we must fall in love with the process and the journey, not the result.That’s all we can do.
There is no utopia, as the struggle is essential for man. Adventure and experience is what makes life so exciting and amazing.
There is no perfect life, so we should stop trying to find one. Instead, we just go with the flow, follow our heart, mind, and intuition; make the best decision in the moment, and live without regret.
Suffering increases your tolerance of discomfort and pain; it pushes you outside of your comfort zone in whichever domain you choose. We need suffering to grow.
Choose your battles wisely - keep in mind that suffering is relative.
We can’t control the passage of time, only how we spend it. As death means that life is finite, we must make the most of the time we do have with the ones we care abou. Ephemerality brings purpose. Death brings urgency, which in my opinion leads to agency. Death
The fear of death is actually the fear of not having lived life to the fullest - I want to minimise regret and live each moment to the fullest. Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent.
“To philosophise is to learn to die.” - Michel De Montaigne
The Process
I was at the gym and some intrusive thoughts were pounding on my conscience in the middle of a leg day, drop set of squats.
I asked myself: “What’s the point of another rep if I’m going to force myself to do another anyways?” I always tell myself to go to failure (sometimes I don’t even count how many reps I do each set) and have often noted the seemingly meaningless pursuit of a grand goal.
After a bit of thinking, I realised that we push ourselves through the process of struggle to find out what we’re capable of. Pushing to your limits, and then seeing if we can go further.
The struggle of life is in a similar vein.
We so often strive towards huge goals. During another workout session, I asked myself: “If you could have anything in the world right now, what would it be?” I immediately thought of getting bigger, because I’m at the gym, and that everything I’m doing in the moment is for a more aesthetic body. But then, I realised that even if I was bigger, I’d still want to progress and become even bigger.
Then, I thought about my education and my career. I realised that if I’d already built a billion-dollar start-up, I’d be quite bored. I’d want to build another one. If I had gotten into an elite US college already, I would’ve thought “well, okay”. What’s next?
There’s always going to be chasing and there’s always a better version of ourselves that we can be. Once we realise that there is no end goal, we can allow ourselves to be a lot happier with what we have in the moment. When I think about it, I think we chase the process much more than we chase the result.
Tim Ferriss used to book week-long holidays years and years in advance so he could get as much enjoyment out of the anticipation as possible. I think that this puts a new perspective on “it’s not the journey it’s the destination”.
There actually is no destination. Each arrival at a destination simply marks the beginning of another journey toward the next destination.
We must fall in love with the process. By principle, desiring more in life is normal; progress is what makes us believe in the process. But realising that there is no end goal, well, it’s a reality that we have to come to terms with.
We get so caught up in these huge grand goals that we often feel that life is meaningless if we don’t achieve them. There is joy in life without those things if we look for it – by just appreciating the moment. We have to live each moment of life.
Is there a utopia?
I was thinking about the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which describes a utopia where all citizens are satiated by the drug Soma to induce artificial happiness. I realised that in our own world, there is no utopia. If there was, it could be argued that a utopian world is dystopian, as the reality is that struggle brings meaning to man. There is no perfect body, no perfect job, nor a perfect relationship, nor a perfect life, so we should stop expecting them.
We must accept that there is no real end goal and that we will never be allowed to rest indefinitely until death. Instead, we must fall in love with the journey, take every moment as it comes, follow personal principles, and find success in the common hours.
If everything always goes to plan and you never take a risk, then sure, you might live a comfortable life. But on your deathbed, you won’t have any cool stories to tell. Adventure and experience is what makes life so exciting and amazing. Embrace it.
The Perfect Life
If one takes a mediocre job and has a life, they'll wonder what it would've been like if they had worked hard and progressed in their career.
If one goes after their career and doesn't have a life, they'll wonder what it would've been like if they had a life.
It's called being human, we can never achieve complete satisfaction. There is no perfect life, so we should stop trying to find one. Instead, we just go with the flow, follow our heart, mind, and intuition; make the best decision in the moment, and live without regret.
Man’s Search for Meaning
My best learning from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, in which Frankl details his experiences in four Nazi Germany concentration camps, is that suffering gives life its meaning.
In my time alive, I’ve asked myself so many times this one question: Why do we suffer?
What is the meaning of all this? Whether voluntary or involuntary, the reality is that we all need suffering to grow. Suffering increases your tolerance of discomfort and pain; it pushes you outside of your comfort zone in whichever domain you choose.
You have to wash your hands first in order for them to be dry. Learn to find meaning in suffering. If you don’t immerse yourself in suffering, you’ll always be stuck in your comfort zone. How can you grow when constantly immersed in comfort? Suffering forces us to be uncomfortable and change our perspective. You have to be on the edge of your comfort zone and push through.
However, choose your battles carefully; introspect carefully to realise what stands to be gained from the suffering. If suffering is unnecessary, you’d be called a masochist for engaging in it. For example, manual work will push your pain tolerance, but are you really learning? Is there any potential for you to suffer in a better way?
That being said, suffering is entirely relative to ourselves. It’s incredible how two people can feel the same level of suffering with completely different objective experiences. For some people, the worst suffering they have felt is something like imposter syndrome, which I found quite crippling. Objectively though, my suffering is nothing compared to a lack of basic needs which billions of people lack worldwide. An interesting reference point is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; I lacked the highest level (self-actualisation), and others may lack even the most basic physiological needs. I feel very grateful to be living in circumstances which don’t cause me to experience that struggle.
If you are lucky enough, be mindful of your privilege. The world is truly your oyster. Take every task as something you get to do, not something you have to do. Realise what needs to be done to fulfil your dreams.
Whenever you have a task that you don’t want to encounter, tell yourself that to achieve your dreams, you have to get past this hurdle. It’s something that you have to get over and done with. Sometimes there's no solid answer. Work is work, and there's always going to be things that you don't want to do. You have to tell yourself that to get where you want to be, you need to do this. You need to readjust your perspective on it, and really internalise these thoughts.
You need a hypothesis you're testing. Why are you doing said task? Why do you need to do well? Work to live, don't live to work. Afterwards, you will have the opportunity to learn more, work on cool projects, travel the world, whatever it is.
“Suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether it is great or little. Therefore the ‘size’ of human suffering is absolutely relative. It also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys.”
“It is an exceptionally difficult external situation, which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself.”
A friend recently told me that he lacked meaning or purpose in his life, and I know how he felt. Waking up without meaning is terrible psychological torture. Perhaps there is no meaning in this life, but the meaning we define for ourselves. I think the secret is to define for yourself what life you want to live, then consider the life you’re living right now, and make the appropriate steps to close that gap.
“Each situation has its own distinguished uniqueness. Sometimes a man must shape his own fate by action. Other times, it is more advantageous to make use of an opportunity by contemplation, and other times he must simply accept date, to bear his cross.” - Viktor Frankl
Albert Camus says that your life’s meaning is the reason why you haven’t committed suicide.
We all live and die. Meaning is what happens in between.
Death Leads to Agency
Spoiler alert: you die at the end of all this.
Death causes anxiety, which leads to agency and urgency (if correctly framed).
I can’t recommend this article enough: https://moretothat.com/the-finality-of-everything/
It’s about the finality of life, by the maestro Lawrence Yeo. We are constantly pushing towards a final time; each dinner is one closer to our last, each time we see our family and friends is one closer to our last time seeing them.
If I told you that you would see your friends only ten more times for the rest of your life, you’d panic, but realise that there’s nothing you can do about it and that you have to treasure these last ten times. However, this urgency seems to fade away when that number increases to a thousand times. And more, and more; life seems so long, yet when we concentrate our conscience on the length (and finality of life), it seems quite short.
This article is must-read as well: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
There’s a Ted Talk by this guy as well - Tim Urban is awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU
It was quite confronting to read this article; it graphically displayed the number of weeks in our lives, which is frankly not a lot.
I may leave home soon; 95% of the time I have with my family has passed, in the grand scheme of things. Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.
And that’s just life, I guess. My parents still have two of my brothers to nurture, and the world will be my oyster as one day, I build my own family.
Here’s another cool infographic: https://www.instagram.com/p/C0EB2uFCYUJ/
But as Viktor Frankl noted (albeit paraphrased here), the old may lack future opportunities when compared to the young, but they hold the advantaged of experience and actualised potentialities.
“What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.” was du erblest, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.
That you have or have had it (or them) is itself a wonderful thing, something to be so grateful for. Whatever comes after, whatever fortune has in store for us in the future? It can’t change that. It can’t take away that we’ve had it all, and in fact, we need less in the future. What happens next matters less because of the wonderfulness of these few fleeting seconds.
We can’t control the passage of time, only how we spend it.
“To philosophise is to learn to die.” - Michel De Montaigne
But I suggest an amendment: to philosophise is to learn how to live and how to die. I think that the fear of death is the fear of living (as death is a part of life). Hence the fear of death is the fear of not living life to the fullest.
After chatting with my mates, I know many of us teenagers are becoming conscious of our mortality. Waking up in the middle of a night, stressing about death, having to go outside to drink some water. It’s something I’ve identified as a manifestation of death anxiety, and I’ve thought a lot about how I can view my life despite it - reframing death as something empowering rather than destructive.
Something we don't discuss much in casual conversations is the idea of death, and using it to empower us with agency and urgency rather than to demoralise us with Nihilism - questions like: if I were going to die in 6 months, what will I wish to have done?
A great way to frame it is to fast forward 60 years. If you were just about to die and an angel gave you the opportunity to go back in time to this very moment, how would you view life in a different way?
I think that realising that you are going to die changes how you live. It makes you appreciate the time you have, with the idea that your time is limited.
When you internalise the fact that you could die at any moment, you realise what you truly value. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to say, “if I died right now, I’d be happy”. By extension, if you can’t say that, then how should you change how you live your life?
One of my mates sent an article to me the other day that said that in Bhutan, part of the school curriculum is to get kids to think about death 1-3 times a day. Here’s a quote: "To not think of death and not prepare for it … this is the root of ignorance.”
Steve Jobs' quote on this always gives me goose bumps.
“Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent.”
Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech is perhaps my all-time favourite speech - I regularly come back to it, and every human needs to listen to it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
I’d take it a step further and even say that, on the macro scale, death seems to be the greatest motivator for humankind. If we were to be immortal, there’d be no need for urgency with our actions and the way we live; we could just stay in the comfort of our beds and do the work tomorrow. To me, death incites the greatest ambition, curiosity, and agency. To find meaning, I must learn, build, and do as much as I can before it’s too late.
Something I’ve been wondering is how humans have this revelation, how we become motivated by our mortality without some intense revelation.
When I was a kid, my dad got me a bunch of new stuff: a mouse, tennis racquet, and laptop. I was hyped up, but then he told me that everything is going to break someday, and I didn’t know this at the time, which lead to a pretty huge shock to an excited ten year old. I was terrified when I thought about losing everything.
It’s okay. It’s only because we lose things that we should cherish them - ephemerality brings purpose. Death is the gift of man.
I conclude with a seemingly trivial anecdote that provoked some thought:
The light on a road on my way to the gym every day didn't turn on today, and I was confused how to react. But as with all things, there will be a final time. Today may well have been the final time that the light up the road did not turn on. The last time it did turn on was yesterday and I didn't even know; I need to enjoy every time.
If you enjoy each day as if it were your last, one day you will surely be right. That means living life to the fullest; if you do that, you will never regret a thing.
Yurui
