Thread by @paraschopra

"What's the meaning of life?"

^^ Why does this question keep nagging the human soul, and why we're never satisfied by an answer?

(A thread)

1/ My obsession with the question goes far back in time.

One of the very initial blog posts in 2005 (when I was 18) was about the aim of life:

"Consider this, nobody lives after their death. So why waste ur whole life chasing an aim?"

paraschopra.com/blog/philosoph…

2/ Then two years later in 2007, I wrote a trio of posts.

The first one – How do I live my life? – was an attempt to do a long conversation with myself.

"I live my life in a way that should look cool to me if I were watching myself"

paraschopra.com/blog/personal/…

3/ Next, a month after, I tried to wish away the question in the post titled The Meaning of Life

"Think of the meaning of life in front of a mirror and you will know the answer.. Ha Ha.."

paraschopra.com/blog/philosoph…

4/ Dissatisfied, a month later, I posted another blog with an attempt to provide a generic answer to The Purpose of Life.

"I KNOW THE REAL PURPOSE OF LIFE: The sole purpose of life is to kill boredom"

paraschopra.com/blog/philosoph…

5/ That was pretty bold and edgy of me but, hey, I was 20!

6/ All this questioning in my teens led me to Nihilism. Quoting from a 2013 post titled Life as a question with no answers:

"The question of life is moot. Meaningful life is an oxymoron."

paraschopra.com/blog/personal/…

7/ I had identified myself as a Nihilist in 20s, but with 30s it dawned on me that identifying myself with a label wasn’t what I wanted to do.

Nihilism claimed to know the answer and that answer was meaninglessness.

But I knew in my gut that I really didn’t know the answer.

8/ Tired of asking the question, I’ve now started embracing the analogy of life as a game:

https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/979245153817837570

9/ It's fascinating how the question kept coming back, nagging me predictibly after every five years.

All this mental grinding over the last 15 years hasn’t erased the question from my head.

10/ I’ve been thinking why is that the question keeps nagging and what can I do to settle it for some time. I realized that there are two parts to the question:

First: why do we keep questioning what is the meaning of life?
Second: why don’t we ever get satisfied with an answer?

11/ WHY DO WE KEEP QUESTIONING LIFE?

One insight comes from evolutionary biology: our ancestors who were curious did better, survived more, and had more descendants than the ones who didn’t question things.

12/ Our drive for information foraging is evolutionarily advantageous. The entire bedrock of Science is this unceasing questioning about why something happened.

I made a video related to this topic earlier. Watch it here:

13/ WHY DON’T WE GET A SATISFACTORY ANSWER TO LIFE'S MEANING?

The answer to a ‘why’ question in the world necessarily includes a cause and an effect. Our thinking ability is shaped by our intuition about physics and that intuition says things have causes and effects.

14/ The cause-and-effect structure of our thinking is so fundamental that even babies perceive the world that way. researchgate.net/publication/19…

15/ This causal mode of thinking has served us very well in most domains where we’ve applied.

However, when we apply it to our life and ask a question such as ‘why am I alive’, or ‘what’s the meaning of life’, we don’t perceive a necessary cause or a necessary effect.

16/ Unlike other why questions which are about the external world that must have cause and effect, when it comes to our own actions, the sense of free agency is so strong that we feel there is nothing we *must* do.

17/ Unlike Newton’s theory of gravity where two masses must attract each other, there’s nothing I must do.

I can choose to lounge around. I can choose to change the world. Or I can choose to die.

18/ An answer to this question is fundamentally *unthinkable* because our thinking requires a cause-and-effect.

Einstein had trouble accepting the randomness in quantum mechanics because we feel things must have neccessary reasons.

See paraschopra.com/blog/book-summ…

19/ If we cannot bring ourselves to accept that the position of an electron could be arbitrary, how can we come to accept the felt arbitrariness of life?

We _strongly_ feel in our gut that there must be a hidden variable explaining this arbitrariness of life.

20/ Another difficulty accepting an answer to the question of life is that it’s trivial to negate the answer by acting or imagining to act opposite to what the answer suggests.

If a guru says life’s purpose is in helping others, why does eating ice cream feel so good?

21/ To reiterate, the answer to what’s the meaning of life is unthinkable because thinking implies cause-and-effect chains and in first person perspective, there is no necessary cause or effect.

We can’t find meaning in our life because we feel like free agents from inside.

22/ This confusion, like most philosophical confusions, arise from confused language use. Philosophers call it the category error.

For a further deep-dive on this, see my earlier thread:

https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/986840642440527872

23/ Either we can give up being free or we can give up questioning life.

BUT GIVING UP EITHER IS HARD!

So what is one supposed to do?

24/ Notice the category error in the question containing the word 'supposed'? The word 'supposed' is defined in context of a set goal that's contained *within* life.

Anything I say that you must do in life is inadmissible because you can simply act otherwise and prove me wrong.

25/ The only thing I can advice is that be suspicious of anyone who claims to have an answer. You can choose to live however you want to.

And if you are not sure how to live your life, keep drifting without guilt.

https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1114118003178786816

26/ That's it. Hope you enjoyed the thread.

Full essay is on my blog: invertedpassion.com/the-meaning-of…