Solutions. Answers. This is how many people think of life. Life as an answer. This is the only way that they conceive of meaning in life. The idea that there is a reason to live.
Some scientists use a computer model image of life. That life is a solution to the problems of evolution and an answer to the environment around us. Philosophers and religious types say they have answers about what is the meaning of life. As though it is a code to be cracked.
Even Camus’s absurdism, which espoused an idea of the meaninglessness of life seemed to suggest that Sisyphus should push the boulder up the hill time and time again and find fulfilment from that. That seemed to be a life as an answer. The reason why we should live and not commit suicide. The reason to live.
How about if life is not an answer? How about if there is no reason to live? How about if there is nothing but brute existence and just one thing after another? Why is it so troubling to imagine that live in this world has no meaning at all? No solution? That there is no code to be cracked?
We want our lives to be meaningful. We want to feel that we are gaining wisdom over the course of our lives, that we are learning something, that we are progressing. We want our lives to have some effect on things. But Camus was right for the most part. There is only emptiness. There is no meaning in life. There is no overarching story that we are part of. What Camus did not want to face was the idea that there is no reason to live.
What can we say then that we should do in our lives? Camus says to push the rock up the hill time and time again only for it to roll back down. And to find fulfilment in the process. To find something in a meaningless act, a reason to live.
There is no reason to live. Yet we are alive. In my culture, once you are alive, you have to prove that you are alive. You have to serve society. You have to achieve. You have to succeed. Because you have been born in a family and a community. You are in the world. And suicide? That would bring dishonour on the family and the community. You have a duty to others. You have to fulfil your duty.
In a Hindu background, life in this world is punishment. The aim of duty and morality is to escape from life in this world through rebirth. To transcend the ugliness and suffering of this reality.
There is no reason to live. You just have to live. It is the reluctant acceptance of the brute fact that you are alive. And it is this reluctant acceptance of the brute fact that you are alive that no one can really take. They all want to sneak in a reason to live. There is no reason to live. But because of this reluctant acceptance, time and time again, people keep on trying to give themselves a reason to live. Life is not an answer. Life is just life. Life is not a solution. And life is not a problem which begs for a solution. There is just existence in nothingness.
