Meaninglessness

Have you had experiences in your life that ended up leaving you with a sense of meaninglessness?

This session will be an opportunity to unpack and explore many various ways in which 'meaninglessness' can occur in our lives, including the very idea of 'the meaninglessness of life itself'.

But first of all, why frame this session's topic in the negative? Why not 'meaning' or 'meaningfulness'? There might be several reasons, including:

1.) 'Meaninglessness of life' seems to have become a more-important-than-ever issue in our contemporary times, and sociological, psychological and cultural problems as such are also philosophical problems

2.) Our commonly-held view that meaninglessness is something negative can nevertheless be challenged

3.) The idea that in order to understand meaninglessness we should first understand meaning and meaningfulness can be countered with the proposition that by first exploring meaninglessness, we might then have a better chance at understanding what meaningfulness can be.

We can arguably identify two broad orders or levels of meaninglessness. One, when we are unable to detect patterns in a situation (such as recurrences, cause and effect, or relationships between sign/symbol and meaning) a situation which we might then describe as chaotic, random, arbitrary, or - in the case of symbol to meaning - nonsense or gibberish. The second order would be when everything does make sense, but we're still left with the question, "So what! What does all of this mean?" We can consider this second level of meaninglessness as 'meta-meaninglessness', or 'existential meaninglessness'. The first order of meaninglessness tends to leave us with a "What?" question, the second with a "Why?"

Some (hopefully meaningful!) key questions:

• Is any 'sense of meaninglessness'** that might sometimes overwhelm us basically caused by our lack of understanding - is meaninglessness essentially an epistemological problem? Culturally-speaking, is humankind currently in a transition period in which religion might no longer sufficiently give us the meaning we need, yet science still has not been able to provide us with ultimate answers?

• Is meaninglessness fundamentally a teleological problem: "My life has no purpose"? "Life, the universe, even the phenomenon of existence itself, have no purpose"?

• Is meaninglessness ultimately a value problem: "Life is worthless, life is not worth living"? "What good are humans anyway for the planet"?

• Is meaninglessness an ontological problem: "No particular thing lasts forever, everything is transitory and everyone and everything will ultimately be totally forgotten" (cf. our theme Amnesia in September 2022)?

• Is meaninglessness an inevitable property/consequence of disorder (note this ontological irony!), what we may call a syntactical problem: "My life has become so chaotic and unstructured to the point of meaninglessness"?

• Do feelings of meaninglessness arise out of our experiences of suffering, cruelty, injustice and indifference - an ethical problem: "Life is nothing but unfairness, struggle and suffering..."?
How are suffering and meaninglessness related?
How are unfairness and meaninglessness related?
How are futility and meaninglessness related?
How are indifference and meaninglessness related?

How can we all - individually and collectively - turn meaninglessness into sources of meaning in our lives?

** Is the commonly-used expression "sense of meaninglessness" an oxymoron?
Is this expression moreover a sign that we instinctively try to derive meaning even out of meaninglessness?

Illustration: "Atlas-turned-Sisyphus", concept by Alan Woo, executed by ChatGPT