The Meaning of Life?

Hey guys, I hope you are all well!! Recently I've just been super stressed about revising and trying to do well in my end of year exams because I have big ambitions for university and I just really need the grades. It's caused my days to be extremely monotonous and you know what that leads to: me branching out and discovering a new philosophical school of thought. I have started reading The Heights of Despair by E.M Cioran and I've simply just fallen in love. The complexity of his writing makes his work so addictive to read, each line just makes me want to fall deeper and deeper into academia and study philosophical texts and essays all day for the rest of my life. His work is quite hard to understand and since he isn't as popular as other philosophers, I can't even find any websites or books with an analysis of his work so I'm just stuck with my thoughts, never knowing if they're right or wrong. Anyways, as you can tell, existentialism and nihilism has become an area of interest and something I definitely want to spend more time researching, even if it's just to come up with criticisms.

Each day we wake up, we brush our teeth, eat breakfast, get ready, go to school/university/work, come back home, study/relax, eat and sleep. This cycle goes on for nearly our whole lives. We simply carry on again and again and again in a never ending loop. Not many people ever sit to question why our life is like this, or if it will always be like this. It makes everything in our lives seem so dry and then we slowly come to a realisation that there really is no meaning to our life. We just do what we do everyday and eventually it becomes a habit. Our life starts to feel meaningless and it doesn't really phase us because we are stuck doing the same things we do everyday without a second thought.

The people who are stuck in this are the people who tell me it doesn't matter if there's a meaning to life or not, as long as we do what we can and stay happy. Which then makes me think, is our meaning as humans to be happy in life? Do we not need to become academics or professional athletes or some sort of revolutionary businessperson to have a meaning in life?

For the longest time, I've always thought that in order for my life to have meaning, I need to be the best at everything. That I need to prove my place in this world by doing something life changing. If I don't do that, my life is meaningless. It's like a waste of a life because if I weren't born, someone else who could have cured cancer could have been born. That's when I changed my viewpoint.

I soon figured out that the question in itself that I was asking myself was incorrect. I don't need to search for a meaning in life. Life itself may be meaningless and searching for a meaning could just leave me depressed because in a way, it makes me realise the meaninglessness of life and existence. The question I really need to ask myself is that even though life as a whole is meaningless (because in the long run, the human existence is nothing on the scale of the existence of the world) does that make my existence as a person meaningless? 

No. That's what I think the answer is and I'll always stand by it. Just because the life we may live has no meaning, does not mean we as people have no intrinsic meaning. I like to differentiate between a person and their life they live. The life you live is purely due to circumstances. Hard work, talent, everything like that plays a role but no matter what anyone says, whatever is meant to be for you will be and whatever is not meant to be for you will not be. However, your meaning as a person is completely different. As a person, you do so much, you develop intelligence, you form relationships, gain respect, help people, do good, do bad, do everything.

I think that the existence of humans has no meaning, because to some extent, we have made the world a much worse place than it was before human civilisation began. This does not mean that you have no value as a human. Your good actions have meaning, just as much meaning as your not so good actions. All the times where you've been there for people, where you've been there for yourself, where you've just been has all got so much value.

I think that instead of chasing this idea of trying to find a meaning, we should all just be. Stressing yourself out by holding yourself to a standard of who you must be in order to have value is realistically not doing anyone any sort of good. I'm going to end this in an annoying ambiguous way by saying the meaning of life is that there is no meaning, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to find a way to make our lives somewhat bearable. Sometimes reminding yourself that as a human, you have more intrinsic meaning than anything in this world can really switch things around.

Despite saying all this, I am still going to continue reading and researching into the darker and more depressing side of philosophy because it provides me as well as many other aspiring philosophers with so much comfort that nobody or thing can really provide for the sole reason that they just don't understand the philosophical nature of overthinking extreme concepts. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this weeks post!! I hope to see you all next week, love you guys <33