What’s the meaning of life?
Wrong question!
Asking what is the meaning of life is like asking the best chess player in the world what is the best move. Both questions are invalid. The best chess player will know enough to tell you that the best move depends on the situation and the personality you’re playing against. There is a best move for every situation, yet the ultimate best move simply doesn’t exist.
Although not accurately analogues, such a superficial example peeks into the answer of life’s most daunting question. Just like the best chess move, the meaning of life changes with changing situations. In other words, life’s meaning is uniquely stored in each situation encountered daily waiting to be discovered and fulfilled. Most people argue that human suffering is meaningless. Some even claim it to be the most meaningless situation of all. Keeping in mind that 67% of Britain prime ministers lost a parent before the age of 16, that survivors of concentration camps embrace such experience as a one that changed their lives forever and that Vietnam war captives claim their experience, although stressful and almost deadly, to be a growth experience such claims are hard to believe. Human suffering always offers the opportunity to turn itself into human achievement. Unable to change the conditions around him, man has no choice but to change himself, to grow and become more than he is. Such meaning, unique as it is, hovers around man in each situation encountered in life.
In the words of Viktor E. Frankl :
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
Yet, if each life’s situation has a meaning of its own, does this void the idea of a complete meaning, a grand meaning, to one’s life? To give another analogy, think of a movie. A movies is a collection of thousands of frames each stores a specific meaning of its own. A meaning simply understood by carefully examining the shot. Yet the meaning of the whole movie can’t be understood till the last frame of the movie is shown.
A movie gains its grand meaning by the collective effort of the individual frames. A grand meaning that can only be grasped at the end of the movie. Analogues to a movie, the grand meaning of life is a collection of stream of meanings fulfilled everyday. Freely chosen by man to make whatever meaning he wants of every situation, the grand meaning of life is the collective result of man’s free will to make of his life whatever he thinks he should.
In a word, the meaning of life is for man to make whatever he wants the meaning of his life to be. Thus man bears responsible for his own life’s meaning. A meaning that can only be uniquely fulfilled by him, for no other man stands in his shoes. Nor should any other man do.
