Sean Johnson - Intentionally - The Education of Sean Johnson

Had an interesting conversation with a budding improv comedian and weekend philosopher last night. The conversation was over drinks, and as such it jumped from topic to topic every 15 seconds or so. But looking back it seems the heart of the conversation was about meaning.

My friend asserted that by focusing on meaning (referring to my faith) I was confining myself, limiting myself to a tiny view of a much larger world. He said the only way to appreciate life is to understand that there is no meaning (since we’re all accidents, the result of an endless series of evolutionary mutations large and small over billions of years) and to ‘embrace what is now.’

This troubled me, because my entire life is constructed around meaning. The more I thought about it, the more It seemed as though all our lives are constructed around meaning. The things we say, the things we do. The job we have, the shows we watch, the things we buy.

The reason we go to school is so we can learn as much as we can so we can get good grades so we can land a great job so we can work as hard as we can so we can get promoted so we can make lots of money and feel as though we’ve accomplished…something of meaning. The reason we put on nice clothes and comb our hair and wear deodorant is largely because we want to have a chance meeting with a young man or woman in a train or at a coffee shop or at the gym, so we can strike up a conversation with them and make them laugh and feel good about themselves and hopefully convince them that we’re a pretty cool person that they should want to get to know, so we can begin to date them and have a string of successive days and evenings full of laughter and fun and eventually love, so we can make that all-important decision to spend our lives together and construct a relationship that has….meaning.

Meaning is involved in just about every decision to make. Which is all rather odd. Given that we are living in a world without any sort of a creator, a world full of meaning doesn’t seem to fit. You tell someone that the world is the result of a long evolutionary chain and they don’t bat an eye at you. But take that to the next level, tell them that since the world is all a result of chance, their lives are the result of that same chaotic mess - and that as a result, every dream they have, every decision they make, every thought about love or poetry or heroism or beauty or joy is all meaningless - and you’ll run into resistance.

It’s strange that we want to live in a world that wasn’t intentional, but still want to beleive that our own lives are intentional. There’s a part of us that is unwilling to give up the idea that our lives are a big, important story. A part of us that is unwilling to let go of the notion that there is indeed meaning in this world, and a part of us that will always want to discover what that meaning is.

The most brilliant philosophers and debaters would take me to task on this topic. They would claim claim that we need not be the result of deliberate act, that our lives need not have a purpose that serves as the reason for our existence. They claim that, in spite of the fact that we are all accidents, some basic, natural instinct has developed and that is what we derive this “meaning” from. They call it “being human.”

But what’s strange is that being human is so damn complicated. Instincts are rarely complicated. We all pretty much have a desire to eat. There aren’t a great myriad of opinions on what it means ‘to eat,’ and there aren’t a great many people sitting in nutrition classes or writing books arguing against the concept of eating. If our moral code, our meaning were instinctual, we wouldn’t be debating it in books and lectures and at bars with drinks in our hands.

But we do. We argue about it because there are as many different ideas about what represents meaning as there are people. We don’t see anything like this in nature. We don’t see birds debating which route to take in their migration south, with some saying that the south is the only way to avoid the pits of hell, others handing out pamphlets suggesting that flying west is a better alternative, and still others chirping “how do you know that the south even exists?”

If we don’t see this search and struggle for meaning in nature, and if our individual searches for meaning are all over the map, instinct seems to be an unsuitable explanation. So what can we explain it with instead? We could say that we all create our own meaning, that “meaning” is a tool we use to frame our world and make sense of it. But why the need to to understand? If there is no meaning other than what I create, why am I fretting over injustices caused in Africa? Why does what’s going on in Russia or India matter to me? Why am I not concerned with simply living my life, making whatever decisions I feel? After all, whatever’s playing out in Africa or wherever is simply the survival of the fittest being played out in its current form. Why would I choose to feel so much sorrow for the situation? What good does it do for my frame of meaning? Why am I not just shopping?

For those brilliant philosophical minds arguing with me in speech or in books about the certainty of meaninglessness….why are they writing the book in the first place? Why are they wasting their time getting into arguments with simple-minded fellows like myself? Why do they seem to forget that if our lives are characterized by meaninglessnss, that must mean that their opinions are meaningless as well and there are probably better things they could be doing than arguing about something that doesn’t matter anyway?

Going further, if “meaning” is a tool each of us use for our own lives, and my version of meaning represents something vastly different than yours by design, why do we say that some people’s version of meaning is wrong? Why do we talk down to Republicans or Democrats, homosexuals or women or children or the elderly or Muslims or Jews or Christians or that guy leading the small cult in his backyard down the street? If our meaning was simply individual decisions and we accepted it as such, why would we get all bent out of shape when someone had created their own meaning that happened to conflict with ours?

Lastly, if by focusing on meaning we’re missing out on “what’s here and now,” what exactly is it that I’m missing out on? More precisely, if none of this means anything, none of this has value. And if none of this has value, than I’m really missing out on anything. It seems to me that a world without meaning isn’t an exciting place, but rather a pretty dull, depressing one.

Unless, of course, I choose to forget that the world and my life are meaningless, which is the only recourse left for my philosophical friend pursuing improv. Once he’s done convincing me that my life and the world I live in are pointless, he’ll go back to trying to make people laugh. Because it makes him feel good. Because if he’s good enough at it, he’ll get to become a part of a bigger comedy troupe, be able to perform in front of larger audiences, maybe make more money, and enjoy his life more, and above all feel that he made people’s lives a little bit better, which is very….meaningful….to him.