Why Must My Life Have Meaning?
I am haunted by the smallness of my life.
I failed in 2021. The fragile mental stability I had cultivated deteriorated. The resulting academic failure forced me to confront the litany of failures that played into the sense of insignificance characterizing my life.
From these failures, the contradictions in my thinking grew to a sharp crescendo that was made all the worse by the emotional volatility which clouded my mind. Nevertheless, in the depths of a mania that had not struck since three years prior, I tried to solve the riddle of my unquestioned convictions.
I have long believed that life has meaning. This meaning, in my mind, serves as a perfect complement to life’s value. One cannot be had without the other. And life has value. I know this, know it because I have seen the actions of those who reject that basic creed. Know it by the horror that spawns within me in reaction, know it by the revulsion and righteous disquiet that takes hold. I have figured, then, that all life must be valuable and all life must contain meaning.
Yet there is a fracture within this dictum. I have struggled both with its logic and with the rift that has grown within me between emotional knowledge and intellectual knowledge. I have arrived at conclusions that fall at the seams the moment I realize that there exists no emotional recognition of their supposed truth. I insist upon the impropriety of my emotion, yet the yearning which it constitutes does not abate.
While manic, I wrote in journals and letters never sent on this subject, seeking a conclusion that has never come. During certain attempts, I tried to define my belief that life has meaning, scrutinizing it and trying to see what weight it holds. In other instances, I have let the pain which I felt pour onto the page in a dramatic show of grief — no attempts at logical reasoning made.
Time and time again, I have clung to this conviction with a sense of desperation, rejecting any views to the contrary for the dark impulse they stirred within me. If life has no meaning, then you must die — whispers a cruel, nonsensical voice.
The voice insists that I must live in pursuit of a purpose. Without that purpose, I feel as though I cannot continue living, simply because there would be no point in it.
To worsen matters, there is an impulse within me that demands that I become remarkable. I have been captured by ambition, and rather than move me forward, it has ensnared me in fear and shame. It demands a legacy, a way for me to make my mark upon the world. I yearn to be known in a way that matters, for my life to have left an impression that retroactively deems me worthy.
It is implausible, but it is not solely its improbability that has provoked my dilemma. I think it is a selfish impulse, and as much as it is mine, I am outraged by it. There is nothing of me that marks me as deserving of this grandiose state.
I am not the hero; I tell myself. There are no heroes and we need no savior — the people save themselves. I see the lies that spew forth when looking for the messiah, the attitudes that flourish when we think of the tides of history as dictated by those who are somehow above the cut and I try to reject what I feel cannot be. There are enough power-tripping bastards with hero complexes in this world, and considering the terror I feel at making phone calls, I doubt I can even attempt to join their ilk.
If all lives are valuable and all lives have meaning, then I cannot be special. No one is. They can’t be. No individual life can be deemed as having more value than any other, as that derides the value of their fellows in life. To place life on a sliding scale of value is to mock the initial decree that it must matter.
And yet.
I feel myself fleeting — a ghost of a person. Not quite dead, but not fully here either. If I am remarkable, I am remarkably temporary — flitting in and out of people’s lives, with no real roots in the world. Within this perception, I feel a desperation to not only prove my existence but to create it. To claim what had previously not been there. Through my ambition, I aim to exist.
On the small scale, I feel as though I have failed to prove any meaning to my life. Though I write concerning the grand, it appears I cannot so much as matter to another person. My lack of mark upon others has continued as a steady pattern throughout my life, leading to pathetic despair. My solitude spells my insignificance.
Once, my ex told me I didn’t have much of a presence. He went to eat after we had spent the night together, and I had tagged along with him. It was at a building affiliated with our university, and he had once worked there.
After he had begun talking with whom were presumably his past co-workers, I sat on one of the dining stools on the right side of where we had ordered. Once the conversation was done, I caught up to him as he went to find seating and my appearance startled him. He told me I had disappeared for a bit. It was after I had joked about my mother’s complaints that I walked in people’s blind spots he told me I just didn’t have much of a presence. I was marked both invisible and hollow.
It wasn’t a particularly cruel comment, but there lies my perception. A blank non-thing. More so the absence of a person than a presence. It also marked the last conversation we would have before he broke up with me.
I felt horrid desperation after our relationship ended. I tried to ease my grief and my thought that I had been only a ripple in his life by reassuring myself that I still had what we once did. That I could still have the joy in it, even though it was over. I swiftly lost touch with this comfort and wrote a letter begging him not to leave me like the sad and self-obsessed creative I am. Thankfully, I never sent this letter.
The letter is characterized by what I felt to be the insignificance of my life.
“I don’t think I left any mark on your life at all. I suspect I just occupied your time. Please prove me wrong. Show me that I exist, even as, in your words, I don’t have much of a presence. I disappear. I flit, I flutter, I die… I would like to remain alive in your life… I want your presence. Don’t leave me to disappear.”
And so went the words of a lonely woman.
Looking back, I feel an acute sense of disgust with myself. I felt as though I loved him, yet I had designated him as the arbiter of my existence. Even looking beyond the small scope of time in which we were together, what a foolish act. How can any sort of love flourish when such a dynamic is built? Our relationship felt uneven and imbalanced, and in my desperation to rectify and resurrect it, I failed to look to the desperation itself as a potential cause.
Beyond him, I was left alone. I returned, it seems, to my default state. Yet I question how much suffering I could have avoided if I had allowed my life the grace of personhood before we had met.
Within this framework of non-existence, I create my own hell. Despite all my lofty idealism, I am only human. I seek to escape my pain, and in my flight, I carve my grave. In placing my personhood upon the grounds of my ambition, I make it nigh impossible to escape the arrogance I have condemned.
My pursuit of a purpose has become empty and self-defeating.
I am struck by the dilemmas I have created for myself, and the flaws in my own thinking. I have paraded myself around in a circle. I think myself small, and so I create the need to be grand. Seeing my fears and my disgust, I intensify them and give cause for their intensity.
I have attempted to address these contradictions before. When trying to define my conviction that life must have meaning, I tried to reassure myself by finding a sense of purpose within my perspective on life.
Part of what I concluded to lie behind the meaning in life is its special status as the singular state of being that all things living are guaranteed to be given. It is the defining baseline experience, as it is the starting point of all that is. Concepts such as beauty and truth and art would be meaningless without life. They wouldn’t even exist. Life must matter, I had thought, as it is all the living truly have.
From this, I told myself that ‘life is what truly matters in this world.’ Grandiose and feeling as if I was teetering on the edge of existence, I insisted to myself that I must become deeply committed to life. ‘For a worthy life, one must service life,’ I wrote, then tried to conceive of a strategy for how I would do that within my lifetime. Even as I did this in an attempt to reconcile my grandiosity with my values and my reality, I still desired the grand.
Throughout my exploration of what I think of the meaning of life, I have operated on certain assumptions and unquestioned lines of thought. As I am wont to do, I have rested my case upon the intensity of my emotions and taken feelings for a fact.
I do not make light of feeling, but as I have been instructed before, the feeling is a messenger that does not speak in a plain tongue. If I am to make a proper exploration of my relation to life, it follows that I must make sense of what that relation even is.
I have written that life has value and that it must carry value given its status among the living. Yet what does it mean for something to be of value?
As I have been referring to it, it has meant that life matters in the sense that it is worthy of being valued. Essentially, the lives of the living deserve to be treated as something to be honored. That our suffering and our joy, our passions and our hates, the fruit of our experiences, all deserve to be treated as if they matter. As if they are significant enough to give a damn about, because what exactly are we left with if they don’t?
I realize that it’s a rather circular definition. One may sum it up as life is valuable because it is, goddamnit. It sounds like the outcry of a frustrated parent who refuses to explain what appears obvious any further. But it’s not obvious, and what it means for life to have value isn’t obvious either. If I am to accept that life has value, then what does that entail and why do I feel it must come with a meaning or a purpose?
To refer to something as being of value, it is generally meant to describe the extent to which what is being described as important, worthy, or useful.
Placing my dilemma on such simple and common grounds, I can then begin to clarify my conflation of value with meaning, and my conflation of meaning with the merit of a will to live. To have meaning is to have a purpose or significance. The qualities of what is meaningful then may imply the qualifying factors for value. For something to be useful, it must have a use. Generally, if something has a purpose, it has a use, and therefore is useful to some extent. If this concept or object has significance, then that implies a level of importance of some sort. Depending on what entity this thing is important or useful to and to what level, then it may be worthy according to some factor.
But is it necessary for life to have meaning to be valuable? Is this conclusion necessitated by the conditions of life and, if so, what does it mean to live life with meaning?
I have tormented myself because of the lack of meaning I sense in my life. Yet why must my life have meaning?
If life is valuable partially based on it being the starting point of all that exists, then it seems as if it carries a use even in the absence of a clear significance.
Considering the dependency in which life exists with other life, our usefulness is made virtually inevitable. We all depend on one another, even in the absence of modern systems of connections. The rich man is useful to the revolutionary if solely to influence them to pick up the gun. We all depend on the farmer, and the conditions of the farmer depend on the acceptance of those conditions by those of us who consume their goods. If one carries life, then one must carry meaning and value, even if the meaning carried is simply to live.
Therefore, it appears my life does not need meaning, as the virtue of its existence entails that meaning is already imbued within it.
And so, to answer my alternating bouts of grandiosity and self-hatred, I must instruct myself to live.
