The Search for Meaning

What is the meaning of life? Where do I belong? What does it mean to belong? These are the questions that govern my life; I don’t feel as though I belong anywhere. Osamu Dazai called himself ‘no longer human’, reflecting that sentiment in the work of the same name. I, too, have come to believe that I am ‘no longer human’. I do not understand human behaviour or aspects of morality. Shouldn’t morality be universal? Surely it should be based solely on the principles of empathy and knowledge. Eastern philosophy leads me to believe that each person should have their own personal ethical system, and only then should this be complemented by Western philosophy in the development of reason and a universal morality. But ultimately, I don’t understand morality because societies claim to be built upon it, and yet it still fails. Either it is outright contradictory, or they simply do not apply it. Morality cannot be understood without ethics. I don’t understand morality because society lacks ethics. That’s where we get off on the wrong foot. Without ethics, how do we come together? How do we realise that we are human? Without that in place, building communities is a battle. In principle, we are social animals and organise ourselves into small and large communities, but those small communities must know how to coexist with one another, not act like tiny islands. As it is, it’s already difficult to have a healthy society; there’s no ethics, no respect – we have ‘total war’.

Why are we talking about this?

Returning to the initial topic, the search for meaning is linked to community. I’ve come to believe that, in order to live in a community, you must first find yourself. How can you possibly know how to care for others if you haven’t found yourself first? I’ve lost friends because I lost sight of myself. If I don’t find myself, how can I know myself? If I don’t know myself, how do I know if I’m doing something wrong? How do I know that I’m a bad person? Therein lies my mistake—in the very foundation of my life. I haven’t found myself, my friends. ‘I’ve already found God; I just need to find myself,’ I wrote in one of my notebooks. The phrase is a contradiction in itself; the way to understand God is to see Him as the sum of everything that exists and everything that does not. In Taoist philosophy, there is no such thing as ‘God’; there is a ‘being’ that contains everything, and that entity or being flows throughout the universe and is ever-changing (‘I do not believe in God, and I am not an atheist’ – Albert Camus). One flows and finds oneself. And at the same time, I realise that I am part of a whole; I am not alone; I come from a universe that took thousands of years to form and was born from a single point. Then I find God, I find myself, and from there I find others.

The problem with today’s society is that people do not find themselves; they are not free. “Existence precedes essence,” as Sartre said. The difficulty lies in the fact that society believes the exact opposite: that we are born with a purpose, a destiny, a job, a single way of being, stereotypes and roles. And this can be seen in something as simple as gender: ‘If you’re a man, you don’t wear make-up or skirts or dresses’; ‘If you’re a woman, you can’t play football’; and so on. Ultimately, one is just clothing (a piece of fabric) and the other is a game or a sport. People are conditioned to such an extent that they aren’t free; they don’t know who they are because they’ve never built their own identity. If they don’t build it, they won’t find God or a community, and they’ll be left with a depressing, silent loneliness.

I suppose that’s where my problem lies; I was told who I was supposed to be, and I always felt repelled by that image of the muscular, alpha male. I wanted to find myself, but where to start? It’s a search that hasn’t been concluded. I can’t offer a final conclusion to this reflection because it isn’t finished. When I look for a group to belong to, it’s as if I weren’t meant to be there. Therein lies the line between what I’m not, what I am, and what I want to be; ‘I don’t fit in’ would be the right words. Nor can I find anything I’m passionate about; I always say, ‘I like maths, I’m going to devote myself to it’, but I’m not passionate about reading or researching specific mathematical topics very often. It’s strange.

I have nothing to fight for. I don’t know what gets me up every day; the very search for meaning and my identity is what keeps a glimmer of hope alive. Perhaps hope is a curse; perhaps it’s the key to living. “But in the end, one needs more courage to live than to kill oneself,” said Camus. Courage to keep fighting, to keep searching, to keep finding, to keep going…

Perhaps I’m not cut out for that.