In your moments of quiet contemplation, have you ever wondered what the meaning of life is? Or perhaps had long discussions on the topic with friends late into the night?
We’re born, we live, and we die... There might be some meaning behind all of this, you may have perhaps thought to yourself.
Ever since I was young, I’ve had a deep longing to understand what life is all about. I had many questions about life, death and everything in between. Is what I am experiencing real, or is this a dream? This is just one of the questions that crossed my mind many times when I was younger.
Finally, once I stumbled upon the Conversations with God books, they provided me with answers to many of the questions I was seeking answers to as a kid. The books also offered me a very interesting perspective on what the meaning of life is all about, which I’d like to share with you.
So, without building up suspense and having you read pages and pages before I finally reveal what it is, I’d like to go ahead and say – life is meaningless. But first, allow me to explain. Now, what exactly do I mean by that statement?
We, as humans, have a tendency to automatically attach meaning to almost everything that happens in our lives. However, if you ponder over it, all the events in our lives are merely neutral. Nothing is inherently positive or negative, nor does anything have any in-built meaning; it all depends on the perspective with which we view an event.
As Shakespeare profoundly remarked, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.
Take the case of Steve Jobs. More than half a decade after he founded Apple, Jobs was forced out of the company he had started.
He was angry at what had transpired and, for a brief while, even considered running away from Silicon Valley. As he said in his famous Stanford Commencement address, “What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating… I was a very public failure.”
He admitted, "I really didn't know what to do for a few months and felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me."
However, the very same event took on a different meaning when he looked back on it decades later: "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter into one of the most creative periods of my life," he said.
In truth, there was no inherent meaning behind him getting fired. Only Jobs himself assigned meaning to the event, not life itself. The event had not changed—only his perspective did, which goes to show that all events are neutral.
In the same way, there is no hidden or solitary meaning to be discovered in life, because nothing has any meaning save for the meaning we give it. Or to put it differently, life does not assign meaning to events; only we do through our own thinking and perspective.
This is liberating, for it gives us the opportunity to create meaning. So the real question is not, "What is the meaning of life?" but rather, "What meaning do you want to give to your life?"
