4. Response to comment by lecturer on the meaning of life

Trigger warning: Discussion of the question if life is meaningful or meaningless, may trigger some people

4. Response to comment made by lecturer on the meaning of life, saying it would be “very depressing to talk about. We’re born, we suffer, we die.”

Dear lecturer,

I don’t know if you actually meant what you said there or if it was meant to be some kind of bad joke. Perhaps you meant it in some kind of scientific/factual way, as in aging equals suffering. The question arises why life would still be worth protecting if this was actually the case. Searching for the meaning of life is perhaps a pessimistic way of looking at the world: why would there be just one meaning, THE meaning OF life? It excludes all the little moments of happiness and fulfilment. Is the meaning of life happiness? If I’m not happy, have I failed at life? No, of course not. Perhaps we should phrase the question differently. Perhaps it shouldn’t be what is the meaning of life, but where can we find meaning in life. Every moment of happiness and contentment contributes to that, as does every moment when we’ve learned something from our dreadful experiences, every moment when we’ve helped somebody, basically every experience we can find meaning in. It still doesn’t answer the question why we’re on the earth in the first place. Why some people suffer more than others. If there’s a God. If he/she/it means for us to suffer. If you’ve had the experience of living through dark periods in your life, recovering, relapsing and recovering again, you soon learn that you can take nothing for granted. What it made me do is try to focus more on the little things, on the little, happy moments. It made me appreciate and value the good things that happen to me more. We’ve got to celebrate moments of happiness. In bleak, dark periods of our lives we often feel like this is never going to change, that we’re always going to be unhappy. Sometimes it’s impossible to see the light at the end of the tunnel. False hope and disappointments make us feel like our brain is betraying us. The fact is, it is betraying us. Humans have the tendency to focus on the bad stuff. There can be thousands of wonderful comments on something you’ve posted on the internet, but one hateful comment can make you question everything you thought you knew. Especially with depression you have the feeling like it’s never going to end, like you’re always going to feel this way. But it will end, and you won’t always feel this way. Life is a mixture of good and bad, suffering and enjoying, happiness, contentment, hatred, disappointment, false hope, justified hope, love, heartbreak… I could go on. The bad stuff, the bad emotions have a right to be there, too, as long as they’re within certain limits, otherwise, there’s help for that. The good emotions have an equal right to be there. So life is not birth, suffering and death. It’s being born, being loved, learning to love, being sent on an unsteady road with lots of surprises, heartbreak, emotional turmoils, but also value, miracles, unexpected kindness and the lessons that you learn from all of these things.