A Quest for Meaning — The Beginning
There is perpetual urge to cling to nihilism once you understand not only your own destiny, but that of all life around you and all that will be following your own existence. I have fought this urge since the fall of my thirtieth year. It was 2001 and a few months had passed since the fall of the Trade Center towers. That year, I not only managed to lose my faith in humanity, but also my religion.
I had spent the majority of the previous summer and fall alone, my daughter having returned to her mother — another attempt for the two of them to live in harmony. My only company that year, a small fuzzy Basset Hound mix named Jasmine who was but a year old and steadily becoming a best friend. I was completing my undergraduate degree, studying the great philosophers, religious history and literature.
I would come home in the evenings, have dinner with Jasmine, go for a walk with her and study until it was time for me to work the third shift in the local factory. The highlight of my day at the time was my walk with Jasmine and my studies. The exposure to existentialist thought, ethics, religious history and quite generally the liberal arts began to reshape my thinking. I gave up the fairy tales of religion I had been raised with and began to give up the idea of an afterlife.
All it takes is being open to the possibility of there being nothing following this life. If you can accept that as so much as a possibility, then it forces you to consider the meaning of our time here.
It was easier, for me, to fight off nihilistic thoughts early on. There are, of course, our relationships with others which give us meaning. And there are the footprints we leave in this life — a sort of immortality, if you will, in how we are remembered. Many who are dead still live on in our minds. There is our offspring, which can serve as a legacy — those who come and will come after us. These concepts comforted me for nearly 15 years. But an inward vacuum emerged this past summer — the summer of 2014 — I have not been able to fight back. The seed was planted nearly a year before that summer though.
I wrote about this realization at the time. The essence of it is that everything we know and have known — all of humanity and life on this earth — will eventually cease to exist. The magnitude of this thought is almost to great to fathom. All of our art, literature and great inventions will eventually be swallowed or incinerated by the sun as it expands in about 5 billion years. It will be as though we were never here. And should we never venture farther than our own solar system, no one will ever know of our existence, our words, our art, our achievements or failures. It seems such a waste. And if the whole of civilization here on Earth will eventually be endangered, what are we to make of our own singular existence as individuals? We are but tiny grains of sand on an infinite beach.
The only answer I could come to in relation to this conundrum was that meaning could only be centered in “the now” and meaning cannot be found in retrospective consumption. This sounds very Buddhist and it is. And while I would much rather subscribe to Buddhist philosophy than any other religious philosophy, I can’t quite swallow the transient nature of meaning and events in that religion. For if we are to only concern ourselves with the now, then we must forget the past in some respect. This only makes a stronger case for nihilism.
These aren’t problems that most people think about daily or even weekly. And for many years, I did not think much about them either…until this past summer when I lost a very good friend. I lost Jasmine — my fluffy Basset Hound mix — to kidney disease. I had to make the gut-wrenching decision to put her to sleep — a merciful death to end her suffering, I told myself. Fourteen years, a third of my life, was spent with that animal. It may sound strange, but I loved her as much or more than I love some of my closest relatives and friends. I watched the light fade from her eyes and in an instant she was gone, sucked into some black void never to exist again. All that remains is photographs and memories and questions. Her death became a catalyst for my existential crisis.
How can such beauty in our world and lives be so quickly expunged? The greatest and strongest love in this world is simply lost when our life’s light is extinguished — never to be reunited again. Where, then, is the meaning to be found in this life or any other? And if we can entertain the possibility there exists no divine being driving the universe, no afterlife, no other life than this one, then how are we to live with any sort of sanity or direction?
Albert Camus saw us as Sisyphus — doomed to repetitive, meaningless actions in the face of an absurd life. I have spent the past 6 months walking around in what feels like a haze but slowly waking up to the realization there is a lack of meaning in most things. I’ll find myself in a meeting or waiting in line or answering a phone call and suddenly be struck with the meaningless of it all. And thus I have decided to embark on a quest over an indefinite period of time — a quest to find what, if any, meaning there is in our lives. This isn’t about being happy or even fulfilled. This is about figuring out what really matters and what does not.
Perhaps this quest is impossible. I am not, after all, the first person to question the meaning of life. But this is less about finding absolute answers and more about simply obtaining a deeper understanding of a “life lived.” Perhaps, I am little more than Sisyphus and my quest will be much like his — an exercise in futility. But I must face the absurdity of it all and rail against the impossible.
