Does Life Have a Purpose?
A search for meaning in an increasingly depressed generation
The body bags were blue.
In every movie I’d seen body bags were always black. Even the gurneys on the side of the road after a fatal car accident showcased the black. Why were these blue?
“Gimme a hand here, willya?”
The voice is hard to hear over the punishing whip-whip-whip of the helicopter blades. I stand entranced, making no effort to move while I continue to stare at the ocean blue bag the pilot and my friend are having trouble navigating through the hatch door.
My mental checklist continues. Funerals? Black. Death Metal? Black. Body Bag? Blue?
“SLEDGE!”
The voice rips through my daze and I sprint forward enduring the gauntlet of pebbles and gravel that careen into my face. When I grab the side of the bag, there’s a sickening slosh that causes bile to rise in my throat. The three of us straddle and duck walk away from the helicopter while the slosh-slosh-slosh continues until we place the bag in the bed of a truck.
“The family asked we return the body as is. It’s against their beliefs to have us prepare the body, hence the sloshing noise. It’s taken a few days to get him out to such a remote place with all the sandstorms.” The pilot speaks the words absently to his clipboard as he continues to sign paperwork.
“All yours now,” he says after scratching furiously and handing the clipboard over. Without another word he jogs back to the helicopter leaving us with the body.
Most of my life up to this point has been a page out of a family friendly sitcom. Mom and Dad are still married. My brother and I are close and we’re a loving family with the occasional zany antics and a cat. Just like the old sitcoms, I grew up navigating peer pressure (I get caught smoking weed), bullying (I got beat up a few times), and struggled to fit in at school (I liked “nerdy” things).
Life, by all means, was good. Sure, people at school could be dicks and there were gangs, but all the things I read about in history books — things like the Holocaust — happened in faraway places with evil people bent on world domination. Death, destruction, cancer, infidelity, war, and suffering were items so far removed from my day-to-day life I never dwelt on them. Does the girl in 3rd period think I’m cute? was the extent of my worries.
That all changed after September 11th.
In 1999, I joined the Army to pay for college since my parents couldn’t afford it. At the time, Bill Clinton was President and Prince’s song about partying like it was ’99 finally became relevant (The song 1999 released in 1982 of all things).
By 2003 I would find myself on a small forward operating base next to the Pakistani border and deep in the heart of Taliban country. I guess I can thank the Taliban for opening my eyes to the depravity of the world as they did some horrific things ranging from raping young male children (called bacha bazi) to blowing up all girl schools (with some of the girls inside).
But back to the blue body bags.
The family we turned the body over to was thankful as they never thought they’d have a chance to bury the man. The Taliban captured members of the village who stood in opposition to their practices and ended up executing them in another province. Coalition forces discovered the bodies and ensured they were identified and returned to the families. After shaking hands and bowing for some odd reason, I stood and watched the sun set as they drove off our dusty base surrounded by sandbag barriers.
“What do you think this all means?” I asked a fellow member of my team while motioning to the surrounding valley.
“War?”
“No. Life…” His eyebrow lifted in response to the sudden existential crisis I was having as if to say, “Someone in a body bag made you go all Freud on me?”
“…I just mean… what’s the point of life? Why are we here as humans? Because as a species we’re awesome at maiming, wounding, and hurting each other. We’re so smug about how were so much more enlightened than our predecessors, but we’ve only figured out how to kill each other with greater efficiency and in larger groups.”
I didn’t get an answer that day. And I didn’t find an answer for a long time.
The Search for Significance
I left my faith tradition when I was seventeen years old, fading into the background like a phantom disappearing through a wall. I never told anyone I left, I just vanished.
While overseas I attended a few religious services while searching for that age old question to the meaning of life, but found nothing except the tired platitudes I was used to hearing.
After the wars, I found myself like many in this generation feeling lost and wondering if my life held intrinsic purpose. What was I designed to do?
Before you write me off as a hack tossing out blanket statements, know I work in the mental health industry, and interact almost daily with young men and women that find themselves depressed because they feel their life carries no value. They aren’t in the job they want, or they are and it’s unfulfilling. They’re not where they want to be in life, or they’re anxious about the future. Hell, according to Psychology Today, “the average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.” 61 percent of college students surveyed in 2014 reported overwhelming anxiety within the last year and 35.5 percent said they “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function.” Once you see and hear it, the voices of those searching, lost, and depressed become rather hard to drown out.
As one of those former voices, I began my search and looked to the data, history, and science behind human origin and purpose.
As someone who loves science, when I asked about purpose, the scientific community was overwhelmingly pessimistic in its response. In all honesty, it’s probably the worst place to find answers for someone struggling with depression and their question of purpose. Within the scientific community the common answer boils down to “Life doesn’t have a purpose. Get over it. Live free.” While an oversimplification, just google “Does Life Have a Purpose?” and the top scientific articles (along with psychological ones) point to the common assertion we are products of our biological conditioning. Love is a chemical reaction in the brain to advance the species and keep us from annihilation. Even the ones that entertained the notion of a Higher Power for the sake of argument point to there being no real purpose even from a divine creator’s standpoint. It would be nothing more than a cosmic experiment. Purpose, therefore, is what you make of it since the species will one day end (but from a philosophical standpoint it’s problematic. We’ll get to that in a moment).
Author and social critic Christopher Hitchens once remarked in a debate about the scientific evidence pointing to the entropic heat death of the universe by stating:
We don’t believe anything that could be called wishful. In other words, we don’t particularly welcome the idea of the annihilation of ourselves, as individuals — the party will not go on, we will have left and we’re not coming back — or of the entropic heat death of the universe. We don’t like the idea, but there’s a good deal of evidence to suggest that is what’s going to happen. So I’m willing to accept on the evidence conclusions that may be unwelcome to me. I’m sorry if I sound as if I’m spelling that out, but I will.
I’ve always respected the scientific and atheist community for their response — taking the good with the bad it would seem — but ultimately it proved unhelpful.
I remained haunted like the vast majority of us trying to figure out life. It was something I read by French philosopher, Luc Ferry, that drove the point home. In his book A Brief History of Thought, he remarks:
“For the first time in the history of life, a living species holds the means to destroy the entire planet, and this species does not know where it is going.”
Where Am I Going?
There’s a science-fiction story about an astronaut marooned on a barren chunk of rock in outer space. Within his possession he held two vials: one containing poison, and the other a potion that would make him live forever. Realizing the predicament, he gulped down the poison. But then to his horror, he discovered he swallowed the wrong vial and drank the potion for immortality. His existence forever cursed to a barren rock with a meaningless and unending life.
I think this story illustrates our definition of what hell would be like — an utterly meaningless existence. Yet, with the increase in depression and mental health issues, we’re seeing hordes of men and women who feel this way. Suicide remains on the rise, and I’ve had friends take their life for this reason.
A student in one of my philosophy classes in college pressed this issue pointing out that one’s purpose could be a great career, serving others selflessly, creating radical change in the world, or even one’s family. Our professor pointed out those definitions are subjective illusions. It’s nothing more than one person’s interpretation of what their intrinsic purpose could be, but it’s not the meaning of the human existence.
So thus far in my search I was left with, “Sorry you’re down kiddo, but life is purposeless. But if you accept that you can live free then find hope,” or “Live for whatever you derive purpose from.” Neither offered a hopeful solution, especially since the second option allows for gross injustices. If I derive purpose from becoming rich and powerful while caring nothing about the plight of the poor, is that a meaningful existence?
One evening I sat on a paisley covered bed spread with my thoughts spilling into the dark abyss of my soul. I hated the red bedspread from Pottery Barn we received for our wedding. I didn’t have the money to replace it and couldn’t bear the thought of getting rid of an expensive piece of fluffery. But I was twenty-seven and divorced, my wife having left while I was away at war. If life held no meaning, then neither did my actions. After all, love was nothing more than a chemical response, and morality only furthers the species so we don’t devolve into barbarians. So I felt I had two options. 1) Kill myself or 2) kill her and the new guy in the picture. Maybe I’d do like the music video “Tears Don’t Fall” from Bullet For My Valentine where I catch them in the act and douse them in gas. Then I’d flick a lighter while they scream only to discover I filled up a gas can with water. I walk away triumphant and cue… going to my job the next day. Sigh.
Exploration into the Divine
A year later I would find myself in a church and beginning to to entertain the thought of the divine after studying major world religions. You may think, “Aha! The Jesus Juke! I knew it! The ‘ol bait-n-switch.” But I assure you this is not how this essay ends.
An atheist friend took me to a church because he saw how depressed I’d become about life and my circumstances. He thought perhaps there might be some deeper meaning I could derive in a search for God. ”Maybe I’ll meet a cute girl or find answers? What could it hurt?” I figured. Even Sartre and Camus, philosophers who rejected the idea of the divine, wrestled with this question. If God exists, then it makes a tremendous difference for man.
It was something author C. S. Lewis said that got to me. He remarked that “God is not the sort of thing of thing one can be moderately interested in.” If God does not exist, there’s no reason to be interested in God at all. On the other hand, if God exists — much like Sartre and Camus pondered — then it is paramount to our interests, and our ultimate concern ought to be how we relate to this being and derive our purpose.
The reason why any of this matters, is that people who shrug and say purpose or meaning bears no real thought or importance, haven’t thought deeply about their life or others. While we claim to be more enlightened than our predecessors, we’re just more entertained. Social media, binge-watching Netflix, and serial dating through the myriad of romantic matchmaking apps has an anesthetizing effect on the deeper questions we should be asking. That is, until we begin the comparison game and see the photos of others we believe are living more meaningful and fulfilling lives. Then the inner murmur starts up again, and your conscious will only stay quiet for so long.
How we relate to the world and where we derive purpose are important questions we’re desperate for and yet dismiss. The mental health crisis alone can attest that many are wandering aimlessly through their existence. Questions like purpose, meaning, the divine, or the absurdity of life make a huge difference in the way we interact with the world and others, and there’s a big reason why.
In his book After Virtue, Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre uses an illustration about our need for narratives to derive meaning. Imagine for a moment, you’re waiting for a bus and a young man walks up to you and says, “The name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus histrionicus.” While you may understand the sentence the man uttered, it makes no sense without a greater narrative. Perhaps the man is homeless and mentally ill. Maybe he’s just mistaken you for someone he met at the library who asked the Latin name for a wild duck? Or perhaps he’s a spy trying to identify his contact. The first narrative is sad, the second comical, and third dramatic. His point in the illustration is to show that without a handle on the story, there’s no way to understand the meaning or how to answer the young man.
When we ignore the story of life and our purpose, or ask others to, we do ourselves a disservice. We hand out entertaining band-aids through our advancement in technology, and yet shows like WestWorld remind us of the continual nagging in our guts that asks, “What is it to be human? What is the meaning of life?”
We will need stories, nights wrestling with deep and troubling thoughts, engaging conversations, differing viewpoints, and maybe a little faith to begin to combat the numbing agent so many of us have drank in today’s culture.
I’ve found my answer to purpose. I pray you shirk the voices of dissent and continue to search and question until you find yours.
Question, all that you knew
Question, It’s how you’ll find the truth
Question, question
It will only make you stronger
— August Burns Red, Twenty-One Grams
