Does life have meaning? Perhaps that doesn’t depend on life, but on you
I envy those people who seem to possess this unshakable ability to live life without having the occasional existential crisis.
If one good testimony to one’s existence having a point is that the question of its point does not arise — what is that they’ve figured out about the meaning of life that I have yet to learn?
Whatever the proposed answer to this question, I’m afraid it’s just not going to do it for me.
Consider, for instance, this 1776 statement by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (in a letter to Padre Martini):
“We live in this world to compel ourselves industriously to enlighten one another by means of reasoning and to apply ourselves always to carrying forward the sciences and the arts.”
Mozart was convinced his life had a reason.
It is this specificity and certainty of purpose that make me jealous.
Why do I find myself — or, it seems, my generation of ‘millennials’, for that matter — utterly unable to accept such ‘we-humans-live-in-this-world-to-do-X’ arguments?
God is dead
According to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche — who is now dead — “God is dead”.
