The Meaning of Life: Embracing Human Experience

Sometimes meaning making, distances us from the experience of being alive. From fully having the human experience. Sometimes we’re so busy trying to decode and make sense of our sufferings and thoughts and why life is the way it is and translate what others mean that we miss the point. And the point is often there in the quiet but we’re like shit technology receiving a message that gets lost in distortion and noise and the result is this clumsy messy output with only a grain of truth to it. When we stop demanding that our life makes sense, we stop trying to bypass pain and stop overly intellectualising this search for truth. Finding 'meaning' isn't a destination we ever reach; the only attainable thing is witnessing our own static, that static is just another element in the human experience. And letting that be, and accepting that the signal (the feeling beneath all the static) is enough and ok just as it is. Because pain is not evidence that the human experience has gone wrong. It is part of the experience. Many of us believe joy, excitement, happiness.. these are all GOOD. Meanwhile fear, anger, uncertainty, boredom is BAD. enlightenment becomes this state of never experiencing the BAD. But if you were an alien observing humans, suffering would be extraordinary. We often watch movies of people suffering and overcoming becomes its drama, it makes us feel, it’s exciting not knowing what’s going to happen next and it’s inspiring when the characters over come. You’d watch it all and go WOW, I want to experience all of THAT! Not just the highs but the lows too…the suffering that shapes the characters. The mini underdog stories we constantly have ourselves in our own lives in many ways. But we argue incessantly with that! “If I understand the universe correctly, perhaps I won’t have to be frightened by it.” “If I become sufficiently conscious, perhaps I won’t suffer.” “If I find the meaning of life, perhaps uncertainty will disappear.” “If I become spiritually evolved enough, perhaps I won’t be angry, jealous, grieving, confused, horny, bored, irrational, attached or afraid.” and in essence, we may as well just fucking say: “I don’t want to be human anymore.” Because uncertainty, being blindly unconscious, being messy with our emotions and being ridiculously irrational IS the human experience. Life is meaningless. Life just simply is. And then there’s the trying to understand what is beyond us or outside of us… god, “heaven” , the universe… And again, we’re in such a disabled meat suit that we simply don’t have the faculties to fully comprehend that. Simply put: we’re far too stupid to understand something that is so much bigger than us. We’ve anthropomorphised the hell out of god to put something understandable and familiar to god. So the moment we believe we’ve channeled something from the great divine we’ve already failed… The universe transmits. We receive. And what comes out is inevitably distorted by the machinery doing the receiving. But Maybe the distortion isn’t a defect. Maybe that’s what being human is. because sometimes that’s art. Sometimes that’s poetry or music, sometimes it’s reassurance to a person grieving…sometimes it’s clarity to someone confused. The meaning of life is that there is no meaning. We’re simply here to experience all that is, for no great purpose at all. We can just simply be.

Explores the idea that life is inherently meaningless and that our drive for spiritual understanding is often a desire to escape the messy reality of being human. The author argues that suffering and irrationality are integral parts of the experience, and that even our 'distorted' attempts to interpret the divine are what create human art and connection.