Some people are perpetually amused at the world. They see clearly the faults of humanity and find them food for laughter. Other may think they are unkind, but there’s a different sort of kindness in them for doing no more than laugh at us.
Others are simple; they take life as a gift and don’t care to look it in the mouth. My husband is this sort of person; despite his intelligence, his primary motive in life is just to live it.
Then there are people like me, mad with a weighty sense of the pointlessness of life. The book of Ecclesiastes makes all too much sense to us – free will and sanity are both illusions.
I am that kind of person. My brain likes straight lines with beginnings and middles and ends. Yet everything around me appears to be running a circular track, and circles are pointless.
If I wonder why I am suffering, the first kind of person laughs at me for thinking I deserve better; the second kind of person says kindly that I’m alive at least and it’s better to be alive and suffer than not to exist at all. (It’s hard to be sure they’re right.)
And then, along come the people who do not seem to be real folk at all. They are a collection of painted-on attributes, borrowed from the dump of human sentiment and opinion. These will tell me that I suffer so that I can help others who suffer.
And immediately a the circular track pops into my head. If others never suffered, I wouldn’t need to either. Yes, if folks have got to suffer, it may be well and good that someone suffers needlessly in order to help the people who have got to suffer. But what’s the point of the suffering in the first place?
And by suffering, I do not mean anguish only. I mean all the things through which I pass – my passion – which come upon me and happen to me as if I were a blank canvass that exists only to be painted on. But by what madness does it come about that the canvass was made to be aware of the inescapable sludge that is being traced upon it?
Unless someone thought it would be a grand thing to turn the canvass into the artist by these means…I’m speaking madness now. It’s the rain.
When the rain passes, I will perhaps remember that moments of contentment can be found by doing whatever is set before me, with all my might. When you are doing something that must be done (and within the circular track it certainly must, I don’t quarrel with that) you are not thinking about why you are doing it. And so for people with my kind of insanity, the fear of God functions as a sort of temporary ”student’s answer” to unanswerable questions.
I don’t want to get you too down, but another thing that continues to bug me about the pointlessness of life is the constant reminders of how primitive and understandable our brains are becoming. That complex, creative mystery is becoming a testable and tracable thing. It seems to be blow to our hope that we will ever figure a reason to be happy with our lives when science is quickly proving our wants and desires, our seemingly “random” thoughts, and our individuality is all programmable.
I don’t claim to be a learned scientist by any means, but it seems my little understanding combined with what I think is common sense might give some hope in this matter: when humans are formed, chemicals and such are moving about in a way that is (right now) uncontrollable. This gives us individuality and interest, even if it is only that. Interest for the sake of interest. Nothing grand or meaningful about it, just something to take comfort in… if you can.
I struggle with this same problem, and so I googled “the pointlessness of life,” and came across your blog. My aim with this little comment was not to further upset you, but maybe to share my concerns as well so that the great, happy minds of the world can find some way to calm us all down, as I hope your husband does.
-Devon
Devon, you’ve named what may be the largest looming reason for despair in the modern world. I thank you for your frank, thoughtful comment.
I also think about this sometimes: what if there’s something more, and science is, by its very nature, unable to detect it? In that case, scienctific people can go on and on about there being no mystery but we can just take that to mean “no mystery of the kind that is detectable by science.” And that’s comforting in itself, because what kind of mystery would that be anyway?
I try to be really honest. I wrote this post because I was genuinely feeling this way. I’m not a saint, not someone who has had a certifiable mystical experience of God. In the Orthodox Church we hear a lot about people like that, from the ancient past right down to our own day. I’m not one of them (I’m a sinful person, with all the pain, confusion, and despair that entails) but I do have faith.
What I mean by faith is that I’ve taken the side of the argument that says, “what is good is true and what is true is good.” I believe in God and his Mysteries because it would be better for them to be true than not to be. I know some people will draw comparisons between that and flying spaghetti monsters and so forth. The difference is one of quality. God is immeasurably better than any such monsters. A Christian saint is far better than Superman or the Easter Bunny. However, honestly coming to this conclusion is by no means an easy, flippant process.
So yes, human existence is pointless in itself, by itself, and especially when it tries to explain itself according to itself and nothing more. We all experience life in that way, but I suspect that when we do, our experience is less real (because less good) than it was meant to be. In other words I still have hope that there’s Something outside us that can render us free and our lives meaningful if we become part of it and it becomes part of us. I’ve chosen to call this Something by the name, Jesus Christ. I think that’s who it is.
Thanks for coming to my blog.
Funny thing, I’ve found your blog by typing “the pointlessness of life” in google, exactly like Devon.
But to the point – sometimes I envy the people who don’t feel the need of asking questions. Those who can be happy with their lives just living it. It seems that we have as much free will as stones that fall when dropped, and the only difference is that we’re far more complex – the difference of quantity, not quality. But there’s one question remaining – why do we feel? Why do we experience all the things that happen to us? I don’t mean any physical changes in our brains, I mean the inner experience of just being conscious. Where does it come from? Is it limited to us, humans, or animals? Maybe it does make sense to ask “How does it feel to be a stone?” or even “How does it feel to be a Universe?”. For me, it’s still a great mystery. And one (if not the only) thing that makes me want to live is plain curiosity. There’s always something you don’t know.
Madman,
That is the question I come back to again and again, also. Well put.
It’s pointless to point out the pointlessness of human existence.
I disagree that it is “pointless to point out the pointlessness of human existence.” In fact, perhaps we should push the theme a bit. Not only is life pointless, but free will and subject-object dualities are illusory, as are our very selves as traditionally defined. We are virtual selves involved in a groping, ultimately hopeless, quest for a more substantial mode of being. We crave a sort of thing-like facticity (Sartre, Camus, Heidegger). But we cannot be as things; through the medium of our various projects, we become … always somewhat ahead of ourselves with our pro-jects.
Anyway, its good to know that a few people out there are thinking.
Thanks, Dasein.
I suppose I should add that what you say about our being “virtual selves involved in a groping, ultimately hopeless, quest for a more substantial mode of being” fits in rather well with the kind of Christianity I practice, at least as far as it goes. In this ancient version (see Athanasius) God, a completely indefineable and incomprehnsible being beyond being, calls us into an existence, from nothing, in which we truly live and exist only so far as we inter-subsist in Him. Having failed to sustain the communion that feeds and extends this existence, we find ourselves falling back toward the non-being from which we came, “virtual selves” as you say. Restablishing communion, then, is the whole method of salvation and with it comes the hope, not of a life after death so much as a new kind of life that is the real existence we crave. This is why Christians consume Christ in the Eucharist, under the forms of bread and wine. It’s not canibalism – in Baptism we are incorporated into Christ and in the Eucharist Christ is incorporated into us. And we benefit from this communion as we live according to it – that is the point of the instruction and commandments. The whole Christian religion is a movement toward being through communion with God.
When I wrote this I had not yet experienced baptism and holy Eucharist. I had only the faintest glimmers of the possibility of communion with God. Now the glimmers are a little brighter. It’s a long hard road upward from this failing bewildered consciousness to real subsistence as a person. So, for me, I understand your definition of our existence but I have to say it’s not finally and utterly hopeless unless you consider our lives in themselves alone and not through the glass of the Christian religion.
You might enjoy reading The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. Some of his later work is very good as well.
I’ll check it out.
while i might not be a deep as the my fellow commenters i feel i should say some thing as to the fact, that finding this blog through google suggest that random surfers no entirly happy with there lot, personally i find denial a great way to deal or not with life. how about you?????
sorry that was rude of me this is your medium and your need i’ll but out
I too used google to look up the pointlessness of being, mainly as a way to seek out links to more esoteric Buddhist websites because the first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering, so I figured those who perceive life as pointless would likewise seek out the path out of such a woeful mindset. I find it interesting that none of you has mentioned Buddhism as well and that Heidegger came up (as I did a grad paper addressing the question would androids have dasein?) Anyway, since I’m becoming ever more a student of Tibetan Buddhism (thru reading of course), I’m finding myself ever more coming around to thinking in terms of rebirth, which is strange way of thinking for me as an American raised in the predominantly Christian ideology which saturates our culture. so, the question for me is whether being is in fact pointless once you perceive being as a constant progression from ignorance toward ultimate awakening (buddha consciousness). Finally, it’s likewise interesting here to note that Thomas Merton had just arranged to practice Tibetan Buddhism firsthand in the weeks preceding his untimely death in 1968. Thanks for the topic discussion and please address the notion of compassion in relation to pointlessness.
Samantha, I don’t think it was rude. It may very well be, as you suggest, a flaw that for many of us, contentment with our lot is a massive struggle that consumes our lives, instead of coming naturally like it does for others. All the same, the very fact that some people are discontented with their lot (and that many many people have plausible reason to be) brings up questions that people want to explore. If you are the sort of person who wants an explanation about the nature of human existence, then you have to answer questions about human pain, about tragic accidents, and so forth.
Jack, I don’t know much about Buhddism but perhaps your fellow commentors will have something to say. I still haven’t read Dasein, either, so I will have to withold my comments till I have.
As far as compassion and pointlessness, I can only give you an answer from the perspective of an Eastern Orthodox Christian.
It seems to me that true compassion can only descend toward those who are caught in the tension of human existence, from That Which Is Above All Being. When a man is united with the Lord God in an existential transformation, he incomprehensibly grasps what is neither being nor non-being nor a transitive state between, but transcends all this. Then he comprehends in his own person the pitiable state of his fellow-creatures, and like the Lord he sees that they are only dust, and to dust they will return, and he has pity on them and pours himself out for them and gathers them into himself, because this is what God, who has become a principle of Life within him, does continually. (He does it continually but we are blind to the fact because we cave in on ourselves seeking pleasure, or because we open ourselves to the Universe and seek to be absorped into what has less being even than we do and thus seek the dissolution of the soul that he has constituted within us.)
However, very few people ever reach such a state of union with God, so in the meantime the rest of us must bear our captivity – this transitive state in which we strive toward the being that our nature craves and also fall toward the non-being from which we were called by the Word ofGod. So we must try to practice a sort of imitative compassion in which we experience something of the nature of the true compassion, but incompletely and without any visible end or goal. It seems pointless but we should not become weary of it because the hidden fruits of such efforts will appear in due time. I believe that this is the activity of faith, and that for the sake of such blind efforts God loves those who seek Him in the wellbeing of their fellow-man. And whomever he loves he will eventually bring home to Himself, and that is when pointlessness ends because an infinite Goal has been given to the beloved.
alas ignorance is bliss. why, do we live? if all of our species committed suicide would there be any consequence? i think life would go on. although i struggle hopelessly for an answer that seems to actually mean something(nothing short term) so hmmm. why?
Adam, my prayers go out to you tonight. The answers are found in the questions: if it’s meaning you are searching for, then it’s meaning you are made for. This will lead you back to God if you can allow yourself to become simple enough.
So interesting that we humans actually question the reason behind our existence. definition of human? I know that my existence is no more than a natural phenomenon, no more than the fact that water and rock exists. i will cease to exist one day and that does not bother me, its just a fact. It used to bother me until I realised that it was only bothersome because it IS the driving force of life. we reproduce, gather and consume resources in order to continue to exist. It explains all life functions: evolution, greed, relationships, etc.
so should I care if i will cease to exist? really …no. it is going to happen eventually. however, if your existence was primitive and pointless as in you did nothing more than act as part of the animal kingdom then your existence is pointless. but our given ability to understand that our existence can actually interpret and understand why all living things have a force behind them and eventually we understand that it is one common force then I am quite happy to exist. religion tries to explain it but it is quickly falling behind explaining all the occurences which happen and ultimately just gives us a bunch of rules. It (religion) can also be taken advantage of for personal benefit.
I truly believe it is as simple as that.
Tom.
Tom, sorry I missed your comment.
Religion can certainly be taken advantage of for personal, and institutional benefit. No one knows this better than I and I could tell you many stories to illustrate the point.
But if we are going to talk about what “can be done” we shouldn’t forget about the good things religion can do, as well. Nor should we forget that secularism can be used for evil ends as well. (For instance, vastly more people were killed by atheist states in the 1900’s alone than by religion through all of recorded history, even when you take into account Islam and barbarian human sacrificers.) Ultimately religion is human. That doesn’t make it bad. We are human, and our ways are our own.
So the question becomes, where is the Divine in any given religion? It seems clear to me that God enters into some religions more than into others.
I read all your comments and I must say that I fully agree with some statements, but disagree with others. Like jack said: life is suffering. There is no doubt about that fact and atheists (most commonly) who tell you that life is pointless and that it’s ok because “who cares!? Enjoy life while it lasts” are missing a GREAT point: Almost everyone in the world is miserable. Be it war, starvation, death or disease it’s all the same: People are suffering. And most of them have no luxory of “living life to the fullest”. To them, life is an agonizing horror that they can’t escape from. These people are not to be laughed at! It’s not their fault they need a god to justify their suffering! And I think this “feel good” crap is just a feeble attempt of most atheists to cope with their own inability to deal with life’s purposelessness. And finally, let’s not forget the self delusional fools who beleive they are not conscious (what a way to cope with problems!).
What I can honestly say is this: We are conscious. We experience the world internally, which our science cannot( and I beleive never will) understand. It is in our nature to ask questions and some questions defy explanation. We know very little, but not nothing (if we knew nothing, we wouldn’t exist). What we don’t know, we speculate about for it is within our nature. Speculations are just that, speculations.
Faith comes from ignorance and inability to cope with reality, but… lets also not forget that nothing happens without a reason! We have consciousness for a reason. We ask these questions for a reason. We “feel” for a reason… for if the reason didn’t exist, neither would we…
Great points in general, Robert. It’s very kind of you to not blame people for reaching out to something greater than themselves in their time of need. If someone’s physical existence is indeed a horror, why would they not want to develop an alongside spiritual life filled with dignity and light, love and beauty, accomplishments, goals, personal worth, admiration for someone great, guidance, the promise of future reward, and everything else the human heart craves? Of course if this spiritual life becomes a very real dimension of their lives, actually populated with angels and demons and saints and some unapproachable inescapable Light and most surprising of all the discovery of previously unknown and untapped regions of one’s own soul, the question turns back on itself – wasn’t that world there all along waiting to be discovered?
Also, you musn’t forget the most important point of all, and that is the overpowering attraction that God himself exerts on the human being, irrespective of whether that human being is suffering or not. It may be – in fact if you search history I think you will find it is – that some people become very attached to God without the rod of suffering driving them in any way.
But perhaps you have never encountered any representation of God that made you feel this attraction. In this time of religious ignorance and decay such spiritually horrifying existences are common.
Friend, thanks for stopping by.