What is the Meaning of Life?

There is a question that most people avoid asking out loud: what is the purpose, in the end, of everything you do? Four responses tried to face it head on, each one starting from the same silence of the universe. Only one of them does not depend solely on your own willpower to support yourself.

The Stoic Answer: Living According to Reason

The oldest came from a portico in Athens, the Stoa, which gave its name to the school founded by Zeno of Citium. Centuries later, Epictetus summarized the idea in a single practical rule: separate, in any affliction, what depends on you (your judgment, your reaction, your virtue) from what does not (other people's opinion, illness, death), and invest all your energy only in the first half. It's the dichotomy of control.

It's a noble response, and even today it helps many people get through loss without breaking down. But it has a silent limit: it asks for serenity in the face of the cosmos, without ever asking if this cosmos wants something from us, or if it just spins around, indifferent.

The world without God: the stone that always returns

Philosopher Albert Camus called the divorce between the human hunger for meaning and the silence of the universe in the face of it absurd. To portray this condition, he used a character from Greek mythology: Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a mountain forever, seeing it roll back down just as he reached the top.

In the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, from 1942, Camus reaches a conclusion that became famous: "it is necessary to imagine Sisyphus happy". Not because the task makes sense, it doesn't, but because Sisyphus can choose to inhabit his own destiny without surrendering to it. It's a courageous response, but it's a courage that stands on its own, with no support beneath it.

The extreme of godless logic

Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky wanted to know what happens to those who don't stop at the edge of the abyss. In the novel The Demons, the character Kirillov reaches an icy conclusion: if God does not exist, no law is above man, nothing prevents him from doing absolutely anything. The supreme proof of this freedom without borders would be the only action that no survival instinct can explain: taking one's own life, out of pure will.

It's the same starting point as Camus, taken in the opposite direction: instead of the revolt that continues to push the stone, self-destruction as the final proof that no one is in charge of me.

What survives the darkest night

It was in a place even darker than any novel that someone found the ground that the previous two were missing. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, and observed that, among prisoners who suffered the same hunger and the same violence, those who had a reason to live for survived better.

In the book In Search of Meaning, Frankl describes logotherapy: meaning is not something you invent on your own, like Sisyphus trying to convince himself that he is happy. It is something that is discovered, always facing outside of oneself, whether in a work to be carried out, or in love for a specific person, or in the attitude with which one carries suffering that cannot be avoided.

Meaning is not invented, it is received

If meaning only appears in a relationship with something bigger, the next question is inevitable: bigger enough for what? A project ends, a loved one dies, and if the "biggest" thing is just that, the stone rolls again. There needs to be a bigger one that doesn't end, that isn't also a stone rolling down a hill: the Logos, the reason that orders all things and that also became the Word.

If there is a personal God behind the universe, meaning is no longer a stone that we push alone or an act of courage without an echo. It becomes a response to a call that was already there before we asked, and that waits in return, not performance, but relationship. This does not nullify either Camus or Frankl: the courage to continue and the donation to something greater continue to be the human path of living meaning, only now supported by Someone, not by ourselves.

Continue: What is Stoicism · The Dichotomy of Control, by Epictetus · Where does the phrase "who has a reason to live" come from?
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