Everything is meaningless.
And I’m not the only one who thinks this! Have you ever read Ecclesiastes? That entire book of the Bible is a list of things that are meaningless. Solomon was quite the existentialist, really.
But I personally prefer absurdism, which is related to existentialism, but different.
The basic construct of absurdism is as follows:
Humans have an innate desire to understand the “ultimate” meaning of everything. They look for meaning everywhere.
There is no ultimate meaning. The universe has no ultimate meaning to give.
This creates a conflict (and cognitive dissonance) which is absurd, according to Albert Camus, hence the term absurdism. It is absurd to seek for meaning when there is none, just as it is absurd to search for something like Bigfoot, when none exists.
There are three ways to respond to this realization or belief about the universe and existence:
Deny it and allow someone else to provide or create meaning for you—this is sometimes referred to as “philosophical suicide.” (A lot of people choose this option, but you don’t have to)
Give up and die, because everything is meaningless. (Don’t do this. Don’t give into the absurd. Don’t let the universe win! And if you want more detail on why, read The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.)
Accept it as a form of freedom and use it as permission to find or create meaning in your own life in spite of the fact that there is no ultimate meaning.
The difference between this and existentialism is small but important: in existentialism, the meaning you create for yourself becomes The Meaning. The ultimate meaning is the meaning that you create for yourself. In absurdism, everything is meaningless, and no matter what meaning you create, it’s still ultimately meaningless. And in that is freedom and joy.
Albert Camus, a 20th Century philosopher called the contradiction between how desperately humans desire to know the ultimate meaning, and the fact that the universe has no meaning to offer, absurd. Hence, absurdism.
The idea of “creating your own meaning” can be found in a variety of philosophies, however, when paired with the idea that “everything is meaningless regardless,” it opens up a wealth of possibilities—not only ideologically and philosophically, but also practically.
Think of it this way: life is made up entirely of stories we tell ourselves to explain the world around us. Right now, I’m staring at a TV screen in an emergency room waiting area, telling myself that cable TV is boring and wondering why people watch it. This is a story I’m making up—that other people find cable TV interesting… even though literally no one else in this room is paying any attention whatsoever to the television, no matter how bored and miserable we all are.
I can acknowledge this is a story I’ve told myself, and then change it if I don’t like it or if I don’t like the way it makes me feel. Perhaps I could alter the story to something like, “Wow, media companies spend a lot of money on creating shitty, boring content,” or “I am too intelligent for banal content like this,” or “I’m addicted to TV because despite how boring this is, I can’t tear my eyes away,” or “People do like this content but they’re pretending they don’t”–and I can story myself in circles all day long.
Everything around us is made of stories—our thoughts are stories, feelings are stories religions are stories, tradition is stories—even science is made up of stories. Useful stories, sure, but stories nonetheless.
Collectively, we assign relative importance and value to our stories—like my story about how boring cable TV is, is a story with little to no value to other people—unless I could get enough people to agree with me or I use it as a way to connect with some of the other people in the emergency room waiting area. But the stories we tell about how bad people go to hell? That story has a LOT of collective, cultural weight, because the eternal, universal stakes are incredibly high.
It is backed by another story, a story that is potentially so dangerous, that many people do not want to risk considering that it might be false. A story that the ultimate meaning in the universe is what happens to us when we die.
So how do we decide which stories have more or less value?
We vote.
Yes.
We vote by retelling stories.
A pastor preaches from their pulpit that all sinners go to hell—and then we tell our friends and our children and our spouses and our neighbors, until everyone around us knows the “truth.” And the reason we repeat the story is because we believe it. And we are afraid for the eternal, universal consequences of the story. We might not think we can reach everyone in the world, but it is our job to at least make sure the people in our close circle know. Because otherwise, they could go to hell. Forever. For eternity. Until the end of time, if such a thing exists.
The reason why we retell any story is because we believe it has meaning.
Social media has exacerbated our ability to repeat stories because now, all you have to do to retell a story is hit the share button, which means that stories that would normally have been buried in the past carry much more weight—simply because people keep retelling them. Algorithms play an important role too, because they prioritize action (all an algorithm wants you to do is interact with the content—like, share, comment, watch), and it since people are more likely to respond when they’re outraged, they add weight to stories that cause outrage.
Which means the stories in our culture that have the most weight right now are the ones which make us angry or afraid.
So what happens when you remove the “ultimate” meaning from the picture entirely? What happens when there are no cosmic consequences?
You live your life and you die your death. You’re alive for the time you’re alive, and when you die, you’re dead.
That preacher shouting fire and brimstone? It’s just a story. Nothing more. The behaviors you could make that would send you to hell? They’re now just… behaviors. Things that you do. Actions you take. With no ultimate meaning behind them.
And to get to heaven? What heaven? There are no cosmic consequences at all, so all those “good” things you do? Well, keep doing them by all means, if you want, but don’t expect a pair of wings and an infinite library once you’re dead. Because you won’t get that. Because you’ll be dead. Just plain old dead.
Of course, put this way, it might seem like a recipe for chaos, right? After all, if there are no cosmic consequences, and everyone can do whatever they like, what is to prevent everyone from murdering, raping, and pillaging all the time?
Well, don’t forget about the first part of absurdism: we all experience an innate drive to find meaning (even if there isn’t one). So in the absence of ultimate meaning, we are left to find and create our own meaning. The ultimate freedom, perhaps, instead.
So while yes, you might have some people who will seek meaning by murdering, raping, and pillaging (and remember, those people still exist and even twist the cultural ultimate meaning to justify their actions), you will also have people who find meaning by protecting the weak and vulnerable, standing up for those who can’t stand for themselves, and enacting justice on those who are true shitheads. You’ll have even more people who will find meaning putting a system in place to take care of and manage people who live by no rules whatsoever. And in essence, you’ll create a society which operates pretty much like the one we live in today.
Which leads us to the next important question, which is: If it’s basically the same thing in practice, what is the advantage of abandoning the ideology of cosmic consequences in favor of absurdism?
Power dynamics.
The threat of cosmic consequences leaves swaths of people vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. It’s easy for a charismatic leader to say, “If you don’t do as I say, you’ll go to hell!”
“If you don’t submit to your husbands, wives, you’re going to hell.” Oppression.
“If you don’t tithe at least 10% of your pre-tax income, you’re going to hell.” Exploitation.
“If you don’t reach out to other people and tell them they’re going to hell, you’re going to hell.” Manipulation.
Granted, most statements aren’t this clear in their intentions. It’s more like, “To be a godly wife, you must submit to your husband,” or “We must be willing to give of our wealth to advance the kingdom of God.” But if you step back and ask, “Why would I want to be a godly wife?” the answer is basically, “Because if you’re not, you’ll go to hell.” Or, “Why would I want to advance the kingdom of God?” the answer is, “Because I believe everyone is going to hell if they don’t believe, and if I don’t do everything I can to save their souls, I will also go to hell.”
As long as the threat of cosmic consequences is there, everything points back to an eternity in heaven or hell.
Think about the situation of a priest abusing a child.
A priest is a leader in a religious organization, whose main responsibility is channeling the will of God, being a mediator between regular people and God, and providing guidance for congregates. A priest does this because he believes that it is his responsibility to help shepherd God’s people, to ensure that as many of them make it to heaven as possible. Because if they don’t go to heaven… then they go to hell (or purgatory, but the ultimate, ultimate consequences still end up being heaven or hell).
The people in a religious organization look up to the priest and respect his authority as a leader, and as someone who communes regularly with God. They are likely to do what he says to the best of their ability, because if they don’t… again, hell. They imbue the stories he tells about what it means to be human, how we are supposed to behave, and determining right from wrong, with extra, weighted meaning, through obedience and repeating his words to their children, families, and community.
So what happens when the priest commands something that is not the will of God? The people in his congregation are forced to make a choice: obey or disobey. And it can be so easy to become confused. Because if the priest is speaking the word of God the rest of the time, how are we supposed to be sure what he’s saying now isn’t actually the word of God? And if we get it wrong, guess what? Hell.
In a situation like child abuse, it’s easy to say, “No. That is wrong. That is not the will of God.” But the child doesn’t know. And what happens when your leader asks you to do something that is more of a gray area, such as shun someone who has left the church? Or if the priest orders women to submit to their husbands, no matter the husband’s desires or commands? Or if they tell you to cut ties with any family members or friends who have actively rejected their specific teachings?
What happens when the orders, rules, and ideologies being commanded or taught are so subtle that it is impossible to parse out right from wrong?
And I’m not just talking about cults here.
Because a leader’s (not just a religious leader either—any leader, in education, a workplace, science, politics, a family unit, a community, etc.) words are imbued with more meaning than everyone else’s, it can be easy to simply follow the path they lay out, step by step, into a state of violence and exploitation. And once you’re there, it can be difficult to see how you got there in the first place, and even more difficult to find a path back out.
But remove the meaning behind the stories—and then what? Take back the power to create and manage meaning individually—and then what?
You get to choose which stories have meaning and which ones don’t.
For example, my focus thus far in this essay has been primarily on finding or lacking meaning in a cosmic, universal sense. But what happens when you pull your focus in a bit narrower? Into a local context?
First of all, I want to point out that we will assign meaning to things. Absurdism posits that humans have an innate desire to find and seek meaning—which means, even if there isn’t any, we will still assign meaning to something, whether we want to or not. And things do have meaning, if not in a cosmic sense than at least with in a specific context. I personally believe that while there may be no ultimate, cosmic, eternal meaning to anything, there can still be contextual or personal meaning.
For example, I am still in the emergency room waiting area. The order that people are treated matters here, because the whole point of a hospital is keeping people alive. It doesn’t matter if you think life has meaning or not, or whether there is a point to keeping people alive in the first place. The whole point of the hospital is to reduce pain and keep people alive. We, collectively as a society, have decided that the concept of a hospital has value and meaning. And while we may exist and walk through life in a self-centered way, we cannot entirely discount the experiences of everyone else just because we want to. Because their experiences affect our experiences and vice versa.
So, within a specific, localized context, things do have some type of meaning.
In addition, we will attribute meaning to things because we were taught and socialized to (and debatably born to, per absurdism—I think we probably were, but I’m not knowledgeable enough on the nature vs nurture research to include it here).
So if nothing has ultimate meaning but something have localized contextualized meaning, how do we go about the process of determining what has meaning and what doesn’t in our own lives?
This is where we can use absurdism to take a practical approach to life.
I believe that we can make the argument that if anything has an inherent meaning, it’s life.
Making the statement, “Life is meaningless,” only allows us to give in to absurdism, rather than grow from it or use it to build an ideological foundation. Life does have meaning. Why? Because without life, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place.
Because if anything matters to us, it should be ourselves. Us. Our brains. Our lives. I. Me.
Does all life matter? That’s a different debate. But at very least, I believe that I matter. Why? Because I’m interesting to me.
“Because it’s interesting,” might not seem all that sexy or sleek as a reason for assigning meaning to anything at all, but is it any worse than assigning meaning to something because a magical being in the sky created us to run a mortal rat race where we all always die in the end, only to be condemned to an eternity in either heaven or hell, based on our actions in life, except for that there aren’t any rules in life but the ones we make up, most of which don’t make any sense to begin with?
“Because it’s interesting,” pretty much defines my ultimate philosophy for determining what does and doesn’t have meaning.
You’re probably familiar with Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” Cogito ergo sum.
Or, as Descartes put it in the mid-1600s, "We cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt.” As long as we have the ability to conceive of our existence, we exist.
Everything we do, feel, and experience happens to us. Our entire lives revolve around us. Even when it seems like our lives revolve around something else, like a significant other or our kids or a career, the reason always points back to us. To me.
“My life revolves around my kids because I love them and their lives bring my own life meaning and purpose.”
“My life revolves around my career because I want more money or I’m passionate about what I do or I care about the people my services provides assistance to.”
“My life revolves around my spouse because he is violent when angry and I am afraid for my wellbeing if I do not cater to his every whim and need.”
These things all point back to us, our existence, and how we feel. The feelings might not be good or healthy, but they are ours, and they drive our interest—they dictate what things we choose to pay attention to and think about.
The things that have meaning to us are interesting; the things we find interesting give our lives meaning.
In a practical sense, what does this mean? What do we actually do with this information?
I personally have begun by questioning everything. What do I find interesting? What do I not find interesting? What do I think has meaning to me? What things am I spending time and energy on that actually aren’t all that interesting and don’t have meaning to me? And how can I build my life around the things that are interesting to me?
I’ve been questioning things for as long as I can remember, comparing my own life experiences and thoughts to other people’s. My questioning has always tended to revolve around the thought: Why do I have to feel or think something, just because someone else does?
And the answer is: I don’t.
They get to choose what they want to ascribe meaning to, and I get to ascribe meaning to things which are of importance or interest to me.
One example is this:
Say your mother wants you to attend Thanksgiving dinner with all of your siblings and their families. But the thing is, you don’t get along with your siblings. You don’t like them. You don’t have anything in common with them. You don’t find them interesting, and you’ve never found meaning in your loose relationships with them.
Do you go to Thanksgiving dinner?
Collectively, most people assign meaning to the idea of “family.” The TV show Supernatural is essentially fourteen seasons of “My family is more important than averting the apocalypse.” This idea is all over in media, books, TV, and pretty much everywhere you look. Family first. Family is important. “Blood is thicker than water.” Though that’s not necessarily the original aphorism—”The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” is another variation, and there are several others.
Regardless, people suggest and believe that biological family is the most important thing in life, and you shouldn’t do anything to risk your relationships with them.
But what if your family is abusive?
What if your family has abandoned you?
What if your family thinks you’re evil? Possessed by the devil? A terrorist? A liar? Evil?
What if you never had a family in the first place?
Then, this large story that we collectively tell can cause significant pain because the story is backed by a cosmic consequence.
Because most people agree that:
If you are bad —>you’re going to hell.
If you don’t love and appreciate your family unconditionally —> you’re bad.
Look I made a loop.
But if you remove the ultimate consequence from the equation, there is no weight behind this story anymore. If hell doesn’t exist, there is no ultimate consequence for being “bad.” And in fact, the concepts of what equates to “good” and “bad” become wholly diluted, because suddenly, it doesn’t matter what other people think good and bad are.
It only matters what you think.
To be continued….
