Today on my lunch break I stopped at Borders bookstore. I picked up the book "The Elegance of the Hedgehog"(Muriel Barbery) and began to read. In this book, there is a 12-year old girl who is extremely intelligent. She is intelligent enough to surmise that life is absurd and has no meaning. I continued to read what little I could, since I was falling asleep as I was reading--this had nothing to do with the book's content.
On my way out the bookstore's door, I thought, Indeed, life has no meaning in the since any inherit meaning to discover. Life's meaning is not like a hidden room in a mansion; it is there all you have to do is find it.
Life at its most fundamental sense is formed, like babies are, from two components (the mother's egg and the father's sperm). The two people did not create life, they formed life using their collective resources. I think the fundamental shaping of life is analogous to the meaning of life, we shape it with what we have i.e. the resources of our life.
I began to think about this shaping of life like a painting (I am a painter, so I began here). Often, you begin a painting with a white "blank" canvas. This white "blank" canvas analogous to life's meaninglessness. However, because the canvas is white I can apply paint to it and shape the colors into whatever image I want (to the best of my abilities). Life's meaninglessness provides this same opportunity. Because life is meaningless I can apply and shape any meaning I want onto it. Therefore life is meaningless, but my life can have any meaning I want.
Then I thought, Wow that is overwhelming. I have heard an economist say that products don't sell if there are too few or too many choices. Too few and you want more options, and to many and making a choice is too difficult. When I considered a market economic point-of-view I thought of a quote from the film "Adaptation," when Susan Orlean says, "There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. "
To create a specific meaning for life, or even to believe life has a meaning and all we have to do is find it allows us to whittle the world down to a more manageable size. I am skeptical about this approach. However, I see it happening all the time. I see people constantly limiting how much of the world they can manage. They only have a few close friends, or only hangout with their significant other, only communicate with people who are in their immediate location, etc. I am not suggesting this is incorrect. I think they are examples of people whittling their world to a manageable size. But why?
I infer, just as the character from "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" posits that life is meaningless and absurd, if we can manage, narrow and "whittle the world down" shaping a meaningful life is a less difficult task. However, the flip side is that shaping a meaningful life is not a difficult task, no matter how small or large we perceive the world to be. It is not difficult because there is no need to control life.
Hence, you can not control the meaning of something which is meaningless. However, you can use your acquired, meaningless resources to compile and shape and impose meaning onto life. Then, from your perspective, life will appear to have meaning.
The inverse of this would to say life has no meaning and in saying that, life has a meaningful meaninglessness.
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