meaning of life

The important question is not what is the meaning of life? The important question is what makes a life meaningful or not. How do humans create "meaning"? Why is it that meaning is so important? Who said so?

We must therefore rephrase the usual questions. Instead of seeking the meaning of life as if it were something preexisting, we must study the natural history of mental acts and bodily responses that enable organisms such as ours to fabricate meaning for themselves. We speak of "finding" a life that is meaningful, but the meaning is something we create. Whether or not we believe there is a prior system of intentions built into reality, we need to ask questions of a different sort: How do we actually create meaning? What is the phenomenology of a meaningful life? What will give a meaning to my life? Is life worthwhile? Is it worth living? What makes a life significant? Does anything really matter? Can one learn how to live? If so, how does one do it?

Do we really know what we are requesting when we ask for a meaning of life? Possibly the greatest difficulty consists not in finding a solution but in elucidating the meaning of our questions. When Gertrude Stein was dying, her friend Alice B. Toklas is reported to have said, "Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?" Miss Stein replied: "Alice, Alice, what is the question?"

As another illustration, consider a passage in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The computer named Deep Thought announces that he has finally determined the meaning of life and that, by his calculation, the answer to the great question is forty-two. The humanoids who have been eagerly awaiting his findings, generation after generation for seven and a half million years, are thunderstruck. They had expected a different kind of answer to the "Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything." But Deep Thought explains that their problem arises from their confusion about the question. "So once you do know what the question is," he says, "you'll know what the answer means."

Before we can try to look for solutions, we must first determine which are the intelligible problems. Even if we say, as one troubled youth did, "To be or not to be: that is the question," we need to understand the nature of all such questioning.

- Irving Singer