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Discovering the Meaning of Live from a Chat with a Teenager

What's your "meaning of life?" This is mine

By Jamie JacksonPublished 10 months ago 5 min read
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Discovering the Meaning of Live from a Chat with a Teenager
Photo by Malik Sagdiev on Unsplash

My 13-year-old stepson has grown curious about life. He recently told his mother he’d had a moment of existential reckoning when he suddenly realised he was an individual human, walking and talking in the wider world.

I too vividly remember having these moments.

As a young teen, I would stare into the mirror and think “That’s me!” over and over, whilst not quite being able to compute what “me” meant until my stomach flipped with anxiety and I felt giddy.

He’s also dipped into religion; some church activities at school and a Christian friend have fuelled his curiosity.

He borrowed The Book of Common Prayer and The Bible from the town library just to know more.

“What’s the meaning of life?” he asked me, one weekend as we both sat listless, staring at the TV. My 5-year-old son had left it on and a cartoon played out on mute.

We were both semi-hypnotized by its primary colors.

“Do you really want to know?” I asked.

You see, I’d thought a lot about this question. And I do mean a lot. It was a sort of obsession for me as a grew up - Why are we here? What is space? Where did everything come from?

So, when he asked me, I felt prepared to at least offer my perspective. I’ve had enough existential freakouts for two lifetimes.

“Yeah, I want to know,” he said.

“Well,” I said. “Here’s my theory…”

Intuition as a Guide

I started by telling him these are just my beliefs, my own conclusions, and I might be wrong.

He nodded.

“Ok. I believe there’s a guiding light in all of us. Everyone is born with a destiny to fulfill, and this light, this intuition, will always be trying to pull you toward your destiny.

Your job is to pay attention to the light, to feel it, to hear it as it speaks to you during the day and taps you on the shoulder at night. It is intuition, it is gut-feel, it is knowing.

This light is your protector and your messenger. It’s an internal compass, pointing you in the right direction. And it is always right.

Every time you ignore this feeling or go against it, you’ll feel it deep down. People might consider this their conscience talking to them.

You will feel both a pull towards something you should be doing, and also feel a push away from it, as it will be scary. Fear is an indicator of what matters to you. Lean into the fear.

Therefore, your job in life is to understand these feelings and emotions and work out which are genuine and which are false, what is fear and what is genuine disinterest, and most importantly, what are your thoughts and what are merely opinions given to you by others.

This is a life’s work, but that’s the point. That’s your meaning, that is your purpose.”

The boy looked at me.

I could see he’d already glazed over. He was hoping for an easier answer. Or perhaps he didn’t want an answer at all, he just wanted to express the question or the feelings the question had stirred up inside of him.

It’s not for me to persuade him I’m right. This is my best guess, but truth chimes in different ways with different people.

My speech landed on deaf ears. It wasn’t for him, not at that moment. It was, in fact, for me. I articulated something I hadn’t managed to express before. He’d drawn out of me something I’d been prodding and poking over for years, these half-baked ideas are littered throughout my writing, they’re embedded in my every thought. But only at that moment was I able to summarise them clearly.

Is this really the meaning of life? Who knows. Author Elizabeth Gilbert would agree. She wrote:

“I believe this is one of the oldest and most generous tricks the universe plays on us human beings, both for its own amusement and for ours. The universe buries strange jewels within us all, and then stands back to see if we can ever find them.” – Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

So is my answer as senseless as Douglas Adams’ “42” in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Sure, my answer means something. But 42 means something, too. Every answer means something.

Adams picked 42 as he thought it sounded like the funniest number. But ironically, it happens to also be the critical angle of light and the basis for a universal constant of light crossing a proton (light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton).

I don’t even understand that. I looked it up. But Adams’s wider point was that answers are meaningless unless you understand the question. He also wrote that it is impossible for both The Answer and The Question to be known in the same universe.

I agree. After decades of soul searching I came to the conclusion we’re not meant to know everything about life. That’s not the game we’re playing.

In fact, not knowing the answer is exactly the game we’re playing.

We choose to not know the truth so life can exist as exploration, letting our intuition guide us.

Philosopher Alan Watts, in his famous talk ‘The Dream of Life’ explains this with a wonderful mind game. It’s a remarkable idea. Watts said:

“Let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.

And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfil all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it’s gonna be.”

And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.

That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren’t God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not.”

To repeat, “Of playing that you weren’t God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not.”

I couldn't put it better myself. Good luck, seeker.

Humanity
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About the Creator

Jamie Jackson

Between two skies and towards the night.

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  • Jamie Jackson (Author)9 months ago

    VOCAL WILL NOT LET ME CHANGE THE TYPO IN THE TITLE. THANKS VOCAL.

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