Carrion Luggage

What Do You Meaning?

Almost everyone I know, when starting to read the headline from this Guardian article, would blurt out "forty-two!"

    What is the meaning of life? 15 possible answers – from a palliative care doctor, a Holocaust survivor, a jail inmate and more  

They'd be wrong, though. Forty-two is the "Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything," as revealed by the great prophet, Douglas Adams. Says nothing about "meaning."

As this article is an ad for a book, I conclude that the author's actual Meaning of Life is to sell as many books as possible. But in doing so, at least he includes others' points of view, opinions from those who probably aren't trying to sell a book.

In September 2015, I was unemployed, heartbroken and living alone in my dead grandad’s caravan, wondering what the meaning of life was.

And it never occurred to you that being broke, depressed, and trapped in a tin can with your dead grandpa might actually be the meaning of life? See, this sort of thing is why we push people to have jobs. Not so they'll have money, but so they'll be too busy to contemplate philosophical questions.

What was the point to all of this?

Apparently, selling books.

Like any millennial, I turned to Google for the answers.

Aw, this was too early. Try that now, 10 years later, and an AI bot will confidently and definitively answer your question. Or so I assume. I'm not going to try it, because I might not like the response. Or, worse, I might like it.

I trawled through essays, newspaper articles, countless YouTube videos, various dictionary definitions and numerous references to the number 42...

I told you 42 would be involved. It's a red herring. To be fair, so is everything else.

...before I discovered an intriguing project carried out by the philosopher Will Durant during the 1930s.

The problem with letting philosophers have a go at this question is that none of them, not a single one, has a sense of humor (or humour, as this is The Guardian). And any answer to "What is the meaning of life?" that doesn't involve humor in some way is categorically and demonstrably false. We have a different name for philosophers with a sense of humor: comedians.

Durant had written to Ivy League presidents, Nobel prize winners, psychologists, novelists, professors, poets, scientists, artists and athletes to ask for their take on the meaning of life.

See? Not a single comedian in the bunch. In the 1930s, there were any number of humorists he could have polled, many of which are still revered. The Marxists, er, I mean, the Marx Brothers had been active for at least a decade. There was a Laurel and a Hardy. The Three Stooges got their start in the late 1920s. I'd want to hear their answers. Nyuk nyuk.

I decided that I should recreate Durant’s experiment and seek my own answers. I scoured websites searching for contact details, and spent hours carefully writing the letters, neatly sealing them inside envelopes and licking the stamps.

I can almost forgive the low-tech throwback of writing letters, folding them into envelopes, and sending them through the post. What I don't get is stamp-licking. Here in the US, stamps have been peel-and-stick for decades; is it that different in the UK?

What follows is a small selection of the responses, from philosophers to politicians, prisoners to playwrights. Some were handwritten, some typed, some emailed. Some were scrawled on scrap paper, some on parchment. Some are pithy one-liners, some are lengthy memoirs.

When I saved this article (not that long ago), I had in mind to quote at least some of the responses. But upon reflection, I'm not going to do that. The answers are as varied as the people giving them. Some are non-answers. Some contain the barest glimmers of a sense of humor. Some are highly specific; as a trained engineer, I could very easily assert that designing systems that work to make peoples' lives better is the ultimate meaning of life, or, as an untrained comedian, I could just as easily state that the meaning of life is to laugh and to make others laugh. Or I could just say "cats."

The point is, the answer is different for everybody, and even for one individual at different points in life. For some, perhaps even this author, the meaning is in the search. For others, there is no meaning; this can be horrifying or liberating, depending on one's point of view. In my more literal moments, I assert that the meaning, or at least the purpose, of life is to generate additional entropy, thus accelerating the inevitable heat death of the Universe.

Mostly, though, I don't concern myself with meaning or purpose. A Jedi craves not these things. It's enough for me to occasionally sit outside on a nice day, listening to music and drinking a beer.