September 13th

Arbitrary

Meaning in life is arbitrary.
Why ruin the universe with rigidity?


Why do we make the choices we do? After all, we do not have unlimited freedom to do things. We find ourselves constrained by our gender, our race, our economic circumstances, our personalities that were shaped both by genetics and the random processes of life. Furthermore, we find that other people have their own ideas of what we should be doing, and they constrain us still further. A person born into one culture will have entirely different options that one born into another. They may both lead valuable lives, but they will most certainly differ in many respects. The meaning that they find will come from different palettes. We cannot say that one person's life is more valuable than another's.
Of all the people who have lived, have any of them been truly "better" than another? We see in their lives only the exercise of preferences, not differences of inherent meaning.
All meaning in life is arbitrary. It is not tied to god, family, or self unless we define it as such. Nothing in life gives us meaning in and of itself. It is we who assign meaning to objects and relationships. We all try to make the structure of our meaning pretty, but in the end, there is no escape from the feeling that it is all arbitrary.
It might be better not to ruin the universe with our own patterns.


Personal Interpretation

What is the meaning of life? We strive to find a satisfying answer to this question by turning to philosophy, religion, philanthropy, any any number of other things. There is nothing inherently wrong with giving of ourselves or affiliating ourselves with a particular religious denomination, or seeing the world through a particular philosophical framework, unless doing so prevents us from exploring, asking, probing into the unknown. Truly, we are the ones who give meaning to the things that come to mean something for us. Two people born into two different cultures will have different life experiences, and yet neither has had a more meaningful existence, for there is  no objective way of determining what has value and what lacks it. We connect meaning to abstract concepts like god, religion, happiness. What are these things? When queried, many of us cannot answer. And yet, we a are a part of the fabric of existence. We affect our environments and our environments affect us. We will always attach meaning to particular things and people. The trick is to recognize that we are doing it.