The Easy Route

I found an article on Psyche.co today: "How to be a happy nihilist." In it, Wendy Syfret offers advice on how to embrace optimistic, or "sunny" nihilism. Which is all fine and good as far as it goes. But it strikes me that there is a simpler way.

Simply drop the idea that life must somehow be "meaningful" for it to be happy.

I don't remember when I first encountered the idea of the meaning of life outside of the clichéd image of someone climbing a mountain to find some wise guru at the top to whom they can put the question of life's meaning. I think that I may have been out of college by that point. I managed to live to adulthood without realizing that philosophy was even a thing, let alone that you could take classes in it.

And I wasn't miserable or unhappy throughout that time. At least, not for want of meaning. Life had its ups and downs, and I rode the roller coaster just like everyone else, but the idea that happiness in life was contingent on finding some poorly-described meaning in it had never occurred to me. And I suspect that there are plenty of people the world over who manage perfectly happy lives without any broader sense of meaning for no other reason than no-one has told them that it's not possible.

Today, when I talk philosophy with people (like this wonderfully thoughtful ex-philosopher now police officer I met a few weeks ago) and they tell me that I can't be happy without understanding the meaning of my life, I simply ask them: "Why?" With the exception of a few people who decree that meaning is an indispensable part of happiness, such that anyone who has not found meaning is simply deluding themselves as to being happy, it's rare to receive an answer to that.

And so I remind them that just like any other article of faith, not all people are going to hold it. (Although when discussions do start to legitimately turn on articles of faith, that's usually my cue to be elsewhere. Faith admits no need for evidence, and so people can explain themselves to one another, but debate is usually pointless.)

In the end, though, I enjoy reading article on people's understandings of meaning, precisely because it is otherwise such a nebulous and undefined term. And I am happy for people who have found a meaning of life. But for myself, learning to do without it was worthwhile.