Meaningless
What’s the point? Why do we live? And what the heck are we doing here anyway? Only a fool waits for an answer! And yet: It is one of the most important questions of life, because it is the question about our life. we feel lost — and we are: We feel alienated from a world that offers no meaning -a world whose nothing has meaning- a world in which the masses hunger and freeze a world in which not honey, as in paradise, but blood flows.
What meaning, what sense does life have? Probably none at all: If there were the meaning of life, it would have to be a final and definitive and unquestionable meaning. The meaning of life would have to be completely clear before our eyes. It would have to jump at us with a “Bam, that’s it!”; it would have to represent the unshakeable foundation of everything. The sense would have to be simply there, simply valid, simply true.
If one says, “X is the meaning of life!” a second immediately comes rushing up and asks, quite rightly, “And what is the meaning of X?” so we are dealing with a “Matryoshka problem”: Inside each of the Russian wooden dolls is another doll. As soon as we declare anything to be the meaning of life, the question of the meaning of this something arises. And because we will never know an answer, life has no ultimate meaning. The very fact that we can ask about the meaning of life indicates that the world cannot have a final meaning. Therefore our lives are meaningless.
Life has no meaning. If God or the “plan of salvation” were to be the meaning, we would be virtually incapacitated in the question of meaning. We would be a mere tool for another sense. This condition would be pathetic. Every sense, no matter how beautiful, can in turn have no sense. There is no sense of sense. We can hardly escape the naked meaninglessness of life already on a purely logical level. There can be no objective and generally binding sense. every postulated sense is untenable, because it must be senseless in its turn. The existence of all things — be it an atom, a plant, a human being, the Milky Way or the whole universe — can never have a sense. Because we can always ask: For what is this and that thing in the last consequence there at all? For God, for example?
Even God, who for generations has had to serve as a stopgap for the emptiness of meaning, cannot provide us with answers.
For the question about the sense of the life it is completely unimportant whether God exists or not! God may be concrete like an apple tree or a mere illusion — both possibilities have no meaning for the meaning of life.
To this thesis I would like to propose a new way of thinking about God and the meaning of life. There are many ways to think of God: for example, as a white-bearded, male, omnipotent and omniscient ruler. Or as a pure, absolute, intangible, infinite and soulful spirit. Or as the destiny unknown to us. Or as the uninvolved observer of the world. Most often, God is referred to as the Creator of the world; perhaps He has a plan or a task for man to fulfill on earth. Perhaps the meaning of life lies in this very task. Or perhaps it lies in union with God beyond earthly life — whether through mystical contemplation, or through the ascent of the immortal soul to the kingdom of heaven. No matter whether these things actually exist or whether they are figments of man’s imagination and opium. All these things can tell us nothing about the meaning of life.
Even if there was a God (or many gods), he (or they, or it) could not be the ultimate meaning of life: If God is the meaning of life, then what is the meaning of God? Why does God exist? What is he for? And who or what created this creator? God cannot have a meaning, because we can always question the meaning of God. God can never be the sought-after answer to the meaning of life — and for this thesis it does not matter at all whether he exists or not. The most radical (and coherent) position in the wrangling over the God question is simply: God doesn’t matter. Whether God is really there or not is completely irrelevant.
The ancient world and the Middle Ages, despite all doubts and crises of meaning, always had “their” truths to which they could adhere. Only by the Copernican turn, the triumphal procession of the natural sciences and the following questions we killed God. (Or the idea of God, after we had invented God.) By dragging God to the scaffold of the history of ideas, we have also devalued our values. For we can no longer believe in God-given values — God has become untrustworthy. God is dead and God remains dead. We are lost in the universe. Without ultimate truths. Without meaning. The world is without reason, it is an abyss.
However, our present is deeply influenced by the nihilism of the last century. According to nihilism, nothing is true, everything is questionable, God and our lives as well as our values and norms, nihilism has hung like a sword of Damocles over the heads of everyone and not only over their heads the theme of meaninglessness has long since nested in our minds. Rarely has a philosophical idea had such a great influence on our attitude to life.
Time of great narratives is over. The sense of pointless waiting for answers that Samuel Beckett describes so vividly in his play Waiting for Godot (1953) will never leave us. That is precisely the feeling of alienation: We have become alienated from the world; we no longer feel at home in the world, but alien. The cozy house of God has collapsed — and we wander godforsaken through the streets of a world that has become strange to us.
Sometimes the scenery collapses. Get up, public transport, four hours office or factory, eat, public transport, four hours work, eat, sleep, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, always the same rhythm — this is usually a comfortable way. One day however the ‘why’ rears its head, and with this weariness, in which astonishment is mixed and everything begins. The overdrive stands at the end of the actions of a mechanical life, but at the same time it initiates a stirring of consciousness. It awakens the consciousness and challenges the next step.
We are busy in our lives: with ourselves, with our family, with our money, with our job. But sometimes the scenery collapses. This can be the result of a serious existential crisis, such as illness or the death of a loved one. But it can also be the result of mere melancholy. Or it can be the conscious questioning of one’s own life. We ask “What for?” and receive no answer. We look into a yawning abyss — and then it can happen that the absurd haunts us: “The feeling of absurdity can jump at any person on any street corner. It cannot be grasped in its bleak nakedness, in its lackluster light.” says Albert Camus, the father of the absurd.
What is the absurd? The term means something like “absurd” and “senseless”, in the root word “ab-sonus” there are meanings like “discordant” and “deaf, not understanding”. The world and our life are senseless, they do not make sense. The only thing we understand in life is its incomprehensibility! And therefore it can happen that our life feels empty like chives.
The question of “why?” eclipses all others. The absurd can suddenly snatch us from our slumber. It arises in the clash of our seriousness with which we do everyday things and worry and our ability to take a bird’s eye view of our lives, to distance ourselves from ourselves, to look at ourselves critically, to make fun of ourselves and doubt ourselves, and finally to question everything. We stand in front of the mirror in the morning and ask ourselves why we are here and if we are living the life we really want to live. Now this sounds more tragic than it is. There is great potential in the question: If everything — really everything! — is for nothing, nothing we do has any impact and all that remains is suffering and despair.
Albert Camus, although he is the father of the absurd, was afraid of the abyss and took refuge in the myth of Sisyphus to say that although life has no meaning, things should be done in the same way without worrying about emptiness, that is where I differ from Albert’s thought Camus I consider that he was afraid of the emptiness of accepting that since life has no meaning we fall into decadence and despair longing for the void to take us, being aware of this nonsense we do not stop thinking every day that everything is too absurd and that only we are alive because he does not have the courage to commit suicide.
This life does not deserve to be lived, I would rather have never existed than to have existed, consciousness is a virus that makes us yearn for emptiness..