Sunday 3 October 2010

Meaning of our existence

Yesterday, late at night, I had a discussion with a stranger about the meaning of life. It was an interesting one in the way it bore more fruit than I had expected, and made me think about what kind of a life would be a life without meaning. Eventually I arrived at the conclusion that no person can think their lives as meaningless as long as they wish to achieve something.

When a person presents himself the question "Does my life have a meaning?", he comes up with something to use as the comparison unit, using which he measures wether or not his life is meaningful. This all is highly paradoxal however, since the unit is what the person values and would like to have or achieve - Or in other words, at least a partial meaning of his life.

There is of course the possibility that a person doesn't know what to value and thereby finds himself incapable of defining his comparison unit. Now this would defy the above, but since a person like this wouldn't even ask himself wether or not his life is meaningful as he'd be in a state of not caring about matters such as that, this really presents no problem. And even in the event of outside intervention in form of someone asking him to think if his life has a meaning he would either dismiss the question as absurd or be shocked out of his state of having no values.

As I conviniently put it in the discussion I had, "If you can dream, your life has a meaning." So, can you dream?