The 4 Words That Could Make Your Life Meaningless
It happened at the strangest times.
Whether arriving home from coaching my son’s soccer team. Or finishing a long-distance bike-ride with friends.
Without any warning, I felt it:
A blanket of emotions – depressive, suffocating – descended on me. Taunting me. Whispering to my soul. Making me feel things I had rarely felt before.
And riding at the head of those emotions came four words. Four cursed, oppressive words. These unwelcome words made my life feel meaningless.
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So what are these four words?
1) The Four Words That Could Make Your Life Meaningless:
‘What’s it all for?’
Soon after I turned 40, those words gate-crashed my life. They haunted my daily existence.
For months I struggled against them. They ate away at something I had taken for granted my entire life: that life has meaning.
And that's no surprise, for when taken to heart, those words can be psychologically corrosive. Atheist Philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his essay ‘The Absurd’, argues that in order to find some activity meaningful, we must answer that critical sentence: ‘What’s it all for?’. There needs to be a point, a purpose larger than ourselves. [1]
So for example, what’s the point of caring for our health? We answer: so we can work. But what is the point of working? We answer: so we can make money to care for our family, and help others in need.
But that question – ‘what’s it for?’ – never goes away. We can keep asking as we go up the chain of our reasoning: So what is the point of that? As we move up this chain, we find the answers get more and more difficult to find.
That is, if we accept the secular view of reality.
As Nagel points out:
Even if you produce a great work of literature which continues to be read thousands of years from now, eventually the solar system will cool or the universe will wind down and collapse and all trace of your effort will vanish…The problem is that although there are justifications for most things big and small that we do within life, none of these explanations explain the point of your life as a whole…
He concludes:
It wouldn't matter if you had never existed. And after you have gone out of existence, it won't matter that you did exist.' [2]
In the secular worldview, we’re here for a short time. And there’s no ultimate purpose behind it all. At the end of the day, considering the universe is going to collapse in on itself, it won’t make an iota of difference what sort of person you were. Or what you achieved.
It’s a depressing thought.
So what’s a common secular response to this thinking?
We need look no further than John Lennon’s iconic song Imagine.
2) John Lennon Epitomised The Secular Response: ‘Just Live For Today’
Don’t think about your ultimate destiny.
Imagine there’s no heaven. (It’s easy if you try)
No hell below us. Above us only sky…
Imagine all the people, Living for today.
- John Lennon
Just live for today, and don’t worry about your ultimate destiny. In fact, avoid thinking about where you'll end up. (Which, according to the secular worldview, will be sheer nothingness). Put it out of your mind, and just concentrate on today.
Sound familiar?
But there’s a problem with this view.
3) The Problem With This Secular Response
You need to suppress your rationality.
If you want meaning as a secular person, then rather than facing life head on, you need to avoid thinking about the big picture, about the ultimate outcome of life. You must disconnect what your reason tells you about the world, from what you experience emotionally. [3]
The way to have meaning in life is not by reflecting on and accepting reality, but through avoiding and suppressing your thinking about reality.
In other words, if you want a meaningful life as a secular person, you need to be irrational (at least when it comes to the big questions of life).
4) But Suppressing Your Rationality Doesn’t Always Work
Reality Often Comes Crashing In.
Suppressing our thoughts about ultimate reality only works for so long.
Once I climbed the mountain of life and hit 40, I looked over into the distance to see what was ahead. And I saw a wall – a solid, impenetrable wall. A wall called death. It's where I'm headed. It's where all my loved ones are headed. And it's where you're headed, too (sorry to break it to you).
Furthermore, despite our latest technology, there’s no way of stopping it.
And what's worse, once I had climbed that mountain, and seen that wall, there was no going back. I couldn’t avoid thinking about it any longer. The reality of my inevitable end kept breaking into my life as an unwelcome intruder, eroding my sense of meaning.
Author Leo Tolstoy had a similar experience. He too climbed that proverbial mid-life mountain, and saw the same wall. This is what he wrote in response:
Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?…Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?…How can we fail to see this?…This is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud!' [4]
Having seen secular reality for what it is, Tolstoy couldn’t go back to his pre-reflective state. Suppressing your thinking about reality doesn’t always work.
Which is why we’re a culture so desperate for distraction. The entertainment industry is (in part) built on the idea of escapism. We want to escape from the trials of our existence. We want to escape from that nagging thought that life is ultimately meaningless.
At least, that’s a common secular response.
So are Christians any different?
The surprising answer is this: Christians deal with feelings of meaninglessness not by suppressing our reason, but by embracing it.
5) The Christian Response Is To Embrace Rationality
Thinking More, Not Less, About Reality Is What Gives Christians Meaning
Secular people need to suppress their thinking about ultimate reality, and just live for today, if they’re to have a meaningful life. But Christians are the polar-opposite.
As Pastor and author Tim Keller points out:
[I]f you’re a Christian…but you are not experiencing peace and meaning, then it is because you are not thinking enough. There is a shallow, temporary peace that modern people can get from not thinking too much about their situation, but Christianity can give a deep peace and meaning that come from making yourself as aware and as mindful of your beliefs as possible. [5]
Unlike secular people, Christians don’t have to avoid facing ultimate reality. Christians can – Christians must – face ultimate reality head on, if we’re to have meaning in our life.
When it comes to having a meaningful life, Christians must be rational.
The ‘Dangerous’ Idea That Brings Meaning
The four words 'So what is it all for?' could make your life meaningless, if you have secular worldview.
But the Christian worldview has a compelling answer to those four words, which brings real meaning.
British Journalist Peter Hitchens summed this up when he spoke these words at the ABC’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas in 2014:
The most dangerous idea in human history and philosophy remains the belief that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and rose from the dead…It turns the universe from a meaningless chaos into a designed place in which there is justice and there is hope.’
It’s this ‘dangerous’ idea of the gospel that brought meaning back into my life.
After months of being haunted by feelings of emptiness, it was thinking, meditating and immersing myself in the reality of Jesus and His resurrection that brought me to a place where I felt my life had meaning.
Joy had replaced despair. Fullness had replaced emptiness. And eternal hope brought peace.
And let me tell you, it’s a great place to be.
[1] This section is taken from Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God - An Invitation To The Skeptical (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2016), 65-66.
[2] Thomas Nagel, "The Absurd," in The Meaing of Life, ed. E. D. Klemke and Steven Cahn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 146-147. Quoted in Keller, Making Sense of God, 66.
[3] Keller, Making Sense of God, 67.
[4] Leo Tolstoy, A Confession (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library), 1998, 16. Quoted in Keller, Making Sense of God, 67-68. Emphasis added.
[5] Keller, Making Sense of God, 69. Emphasis added.