The Meaning to Life: Godless Edition

You wanna hear a theory? I think huge swathes of “Christians” are people who have been socialised into thinking they believe something they don’t truly believe in. The Church tells its children lies. And those lies make people emotionally and socially dependent on the church.

This is what leads to children growing up and staying in Church even when deep down they don’t believe in the God they claim to worship.

( I also think the more that theory pisses you off the more likely you’re the kind of person I’m talking about so think twice before you get annoyed)

If you’ve already left the church, you might find that these are the lies which are still affecting you and making your life harder than it ever needed to be. If you are still in the church, I wonder what you’d do if you didn’t believe in the lies I am about to talk about.

Lie number 1: There is no meaning or purpose in life outside of God

The meaning of life is an audacious topic to tackle in my second blog but fuck it, I’m going to give it a go.

Here’s where Christians aren’t entirely wrong. Their definition of “meaning” doesn’t exist outside of God. The version of meaning which is heavenly ordained, mystical and deterministic doesn’t exist outside of God.

Pre-written purpose doesn’t exist outside of God. A universal point of life doesn’t exist outside of God. I call this kind of meaning “cosmic meaning” and it's the kind of meaning most people want to find when they try to discover the “meaning of life”.

People want to discover some universal, cosmic magical reason to do things.

But I don’t believe that kind of cosmic meaning can ever be discovered outside of some kind of God. In that sense of meaning, life outside of God really is pretty meaningless. However I also don’t think true meaning is something you ever “discover” and once you realise God (probably) doesn’t exist you realise that cosmic meaning doesn’t really exist either. And anyone who thinks they’ve found cosmic meaning is most likely lying to themselves.

So that’s it, there is no true objective meaning in life.

But that doesn’t mean life can’t be meaningful.

Meaningful in ways that bring out the best of us. Meaningful in ways that inspire us with an appreciation for life and a resilience to carry on. That doesn’t mean life outside of God cannot be lived with a sense of meaning that is so profound it makes you leap out of bed in the morning with all the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas morning.

Meaning Is A Jumper We Must All Knit Ourselves

Now you might be thinking; How do I find meaning in life without God that is genuinely inspiring and uplifting?

Where would I even begin to find this Godless but beautiful meaning which will give me childlike wonder and hope?

Isn’t it obvious? The starting point is clearly a healthy dose of nihilism. The worldview with the most depressing claims ever.

I think every person on the planet should sit for a little while with the cold hard truth of nihilism. Writer Mark Manson summarised this cold hard truth like this:

“One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing.”

Now just sit with that for a moment and then scroll onto the rest of the blog.

No, no, don't rush. Sit with it. Read that quote again.

I meant it when I said sit with it. Nothing you do really matters in the end there is no meaning to anything beyond your death. Think about that for a second.

Okay I think you’ve sat with it long enough let’s get a bit more upbeat.

Now obviously initially this is a very depressing realisation. But if you’re clever enough and determined enough, I think you can turn it into one of the most freeing and life invigorating realisations you will ever have.

Because here's the thing. If nothing matters, does the fact that nothing matters.. Matter? And if there is truly no reason to do anything then surely on the flip side there is truly no reason to not do anything??

Death is coming and there is no way to avoid it or to truly live on after it.

But doesn’t that make the task of enjoying this life and making the most of it all the more pressing and urgent?

Shouldn’t that fact inspire us to free ourselves from the huge piles of bullshit we so often allow ourselves to get buried in?

And doesn’t it free us to determine what our own individual meaning of life is?

This is what I think is so brilliant about the truth of nihilism. It places all the responsibility for making the most out of life and making this life meaningful squarely in our own hands.

The only meaning that will ever be true in your life is not something you discover. It’s not something you get from God. It’s something you build.

And that’s amazing because it means instead of outsourcing the process of deciding what we should do with ourselves to some obscure deity who hates the gays we get to decide what matters and what we should do with our fleeting yet precious lives.

We’re free to decide our own meaning for life and this is what every individual human ought to do. I know that’s probably a scary or ludicrous or worrying statement to a Christian who's been taught that individual humans are nothing but depraved, weak little monsters who can’t do anything for themselves.

But this freedom truly is a beautiful thing. Meaning is a jumper that we all must knit for ourselves and I think that is far more meaningful and profound than any meaning we could contrive from a God we made up.

And here’s the other thing, it means we can be more flexible with our meaning. For a time your meaning of life might be one thing and then as you change and develop your meaning of life might also change and develop. What beautiful freedom.

I am going to leave you with my current best guess for what the meaning of my life is. Perhaps you’ll find some meaning for yourself in it, perhaps you’ll find it stupid or short sighted. I don’t really care.

Why Agreeing With Nihilism Hasn’t Made Me The Biggest Downer Ever

The TDLR version is this. Enjoy the passage of time.

The universe appears to have been a thing for at least 13 billion years. According to science's best current guesses about the history and future of the universe, by the time everything ends human life will have been possible on Earth for something like 0.000000000000000001% of the time. 99.99999999% of the humans that may have existed won’t have existed, won’t have had the opportunity to even take a shit or eat a pancake let alone have a full blown 80 year life.

And yet here I am.

Here I am on this awe inspiring planet filled with so much beauty and wonder. Here I am in this miraculous experiment of civilization. Here I am living in a universe of dead things. Here I am consciously experiencing the passage of time. What a fucking gift.

A gift which I have to make the most of. A gift which I have to enjoy. Because I owe it to myself and the trillions of souls who will never have the opportunity to experience what it is to live for even a moment.

Being upset about dying and having no cosmic meaning becomes an arrogant position once you realise how lucky you are to even live.

So my meaning and purpose is to enjoy the passage of time, to make this life of mine as good as it can be which sets me on a lifelong journey of constantly asking what a good life is.

Right now my best guess to what a good life is involves taking responsibility for yourself and your mental health. It involves being present enough to notice and appreciate all the wonderful little things. It involves helping others when you can and trying not to get bogged down in unimportant things. It involves determining what your values are and living those values out.

I have so much more to discover about what a good life is and so many more mistakes to make along the way (made a shit ton already believe me). And how exciting is that?!

If you don’t like my answer to the meaning of life or if you think I don’t have any meaning in my life because I have no God, you can, and I say this with great love, go fuck yourself.

While you’re doing that I’ll continue to build, develop and improve my answer to what the meaning of life is.

(my answer rather sadly used to be drugs so… you might say drastic improvement has already happened)

If you think you can’t die happy or content thinking your life had no cosmic or everlasting meaning, or if you don’t think you can live day to day without any sense of cosmic meaning.

Here’s a simply idea to think about:

“You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived’

You don’t need to add external meaning to life. Life itself is the meaning! So get building.