Opinion

What is the Meaning of Life?

Thanksgiving serves as perfect time for deep philosophy

By Brian Sylvester

Posted on Nov. 30, 2006, at 12:00 a.m.

Over the course of our recent Thanksgiving break, I tried to isolate and identify the Meaning of Life. This was an ambitious undertaking which failed spectacularly. I am no closer to knowing the Meaning of Life than Michael Richards is to getting a stand-up gig at the Apollo.

I did identify several things that most definitely are not the Meaning of Life. As you fellow seekers of meaning in an otherwise empty and soulless college career are no doubt aware, every yahoo and his brother try to give you advice on what the Meaning of Life is. I therefore present here, for your edification, a few of those things which are not the Meaning of Life on the off-chance that you, like myself, have been pursuing this vexing question with the same narrow-minded determination of a Michael Moore film.

Eating: Eating presented itself as a candidate as the primary activity for most people in my family. However, there are problems with this theory: Firstly, there are tons of foods that are horrible. The meaning of life cannot reside in stale fruitcake. Besides which, eating makes you fat. No benevolent deity – or blind process of natural selection if you prefer – would cause the purpose of life to be turning ourselves into bloated sacks of immobile flesh tissue.

Sleeping: Despite being possibly the best part of life, sleeping is also disqualified from being the Meaning of Life in light of it’s being traditionally defined as the Meaning of Death.

Family: I was not able to find a suitable reason to disprove the theory that having a family is the Meaning of Life. I merely decided that I vehemently hope it is not the case.

Love: This idea is charming, in that it allows you to give an answer to “What is the Meaning of Life?” without actually saying anything.

42: I spent a long time carefully, analyzing Douglas Adams’ popular theory that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is 42. Alas, despite my enormous respect for that author, I must disagree. For no other reason than if the meaning of life really does reside in mathematics, I might have to kill myself in horror.

And so I leave you, intrepid searcher for meaning. I can only hope that by avoiding these pitfalls, your search will be more successful than mine.

Brian Sylvester is the Meaning of Life.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.