The Meaning of Life Read online

  Sport also gives us a corrective to the normal pressure to be emotionally guarded, empathetic and intelligently ambivalent. In ordinary life, we’re not meant to take sides too strongly. We’re always supposed to imagine what bit of the truth may lie with the opposition. But at least briefly, around sport, we can be wholly and wildly partisan. We can innocently long to eradicate the enemy. We don’t need to worry about causing offence or about missing a nuance to the argument. We have at last found something pure, good and mercifully simple to believe in.

  We can be at odds with almost everyone over issues from the proper direction for the economy to what we should do with the holidays. There is no end to conflict and divergent convictions. But in sport, a devotion to our side brings with it a powerful experience of agreement with large numbers of people we don’t know. We’re no longer fighting our individual corners: we all agree. We’re excited at the same moment; when a questionable decision is made by the judges or umpire, we’re outraged by the same injustice. We love some very unlikely strangers.

  In our excitement, differences in status are erased. We are all spectators and supporters of the same team. Our job description (always a painfully skewed reflection of who we really are) can be forgotten. The rest of life is suspended; the CFO cheers alongside the stay-at-home father; the timid individual’s favourite midfielder makes a glorious, fearless comeback; the corporate chieftain’s beloved team is crushed.

  The temper of modern life suggests that there is only one person who truly counts: you. Your career, your appearance, your spending power, your house, your car, perhaps your kids and your partner too. Then suddenly, around a big sporting event, you may find you care with extraordinary intensity about the fate of a group of your muscular country folk on a pitch or track far away, jumping remarkably high or passing a ball between one another with dexterity. It takes the pressure off us. It lightens the oppressive responsibility we otherwise feel to ensure that our own lives are stellar. We can find greatness in a mighty cause. We can be proud to belong in a very minor way to an inspiring collective enterprise. Through sport, we have the chance to transcend the clumsier, more mean-spirited, tentative and segregated aspects of our lives.

  viii. Philosophy

  There are some of us who regularly feel a powerful need to go away and think rather more than is typically allowed or taken to be normal. This business of thinking can seem to us like one of the most meaningful things we ever do. After too long in company, we crave to be alone with our own minds. Raw experience proves too overwhelming, dense, messy, confused or exciting, and, on a regular basis, we long to sort through it, far away from distractions. We stay up late, ruminate in the bath, wake up early, write down our thoughts, go for a walk, and feel perceptibly lightened and refreshed by the process of mastering emotions and the alchemy of converting feelings into ideas. Without anything grandiose being meant by the word, we are driven to philosophise, implicitly siding with Socrates’s dictum that the unanalysed life is not worth living, or at least is rather uncomfortable.

  We need to remove ourselves and think because, on certain days, we are sad, and yet can’t identify the cause of an upset that lingers powerfully somewhere in our minds, just out of reach of consciousness. The more we leave the sadness unattended, the more it starts to colour everything we are involved with. Our experiences become tasteless; a mute fog descends over consciousness. Or else we feel confusedly anxious. Our thoughts refuse to settle. We try to find relief by escaping from ourselves with our phone or a game. Our eyelid starts to twitch; we gnaw at a patch of hard skin on a finger. Our mind knows there are matters we should be focusing on, but they elude understanding and spread their nervous electricity across the range of our thoughts. We may feel irritable; we snap and fly into sudden rage, knowing it cannot truly be the socks on the floor or the unexpectedly squeaky front door that justify our fury, while hampered by pride or defensive denial from understanding more. Or, in a positive vein, we may feel a mysterious excitement because we hear of a highly original project masterminded by a friend or read of a new kind of enterprise or see a thought-provoking documentary. Something is calling out to us from within our excitement. We are being sensibly, but inarticulately, summoned in a new direction. The excitement doesn’t leave us alone, but nor does it say in plain terms what it wants.

  In such contexts, we retreat to think. We have a pen and paper handy on an armchair at home or we are on a train with an expansive view and two hours to talk with ourselves. We return to the contents of our minds and systematically attend to the garbled signals that we patiently submit to the beam of reason. Of our anxious feelings, we ask what steps we need to take, what others have to do, what needs to happen and when. Of our hurt, sad and angry feelings, we dare to dwell on our constant, surprising vulnerability. Perhaps it was a face we briefly saw in the line at the airport that seemed kindly and understanding and evoked some tender, vital things missing from our current relationship. Perhaps it was a quietly ungenerous message we received from a friend, in which we sensed a bitter and wounding rivalry. Or maybe it was a regret, on seeing a sunny landscape from a window, at how constrained and routine our lives have become.

  As we reflect, we throw off our customary and dangerous bravery, and let our sadness take its natural shape. We dwell at length on the wounds. We give space to our nostalgia. There may not be an immediate solution to the sorrows, but it helps immeasurably to know their contours and give ourselves a chance to square up to them. Our pains need a hearing. Then we give similar attention to our excitements: we stoop down to listen to their animated call. We imagine reforming our lives under their guidance. We take on board the positive, necessary anxiety that arises from admitting how many opportunities still remain to us and how much the status quo can and must be changed.

  The more we think, the more our fears, resentments and hopes become easier to name. We grow less scared of the contents of our minds. We feel calmer, less resentful and clearer about our direction. We recognise how much we depend – perhaps without knowing it – on the practice of philosophy: that is, on the pursuit of accurate, clear and manageable knowledge.

  III.

  Obstacles to Meaning

  i. Vague self-understanding

  We want our lives to be meaningful, but there is too often a gap between our intentions and our realities. Some of the obstacles to meaning are external (wars, financial turmoil, etc.). But there are several issues in our own minds that block access to a more meaningful existence.

  We may be aware of having meaningful experiences but lack the investigative rigour to identify their origins and make-up, and therefore fail to know how to recreate them and integrate them more reliably in our lives.

  We may, for example, have a particularly interesting evening with a friend. We’re amazed by the conversation, wish it could happen more often and yet are at a loss as to how to engineer a more regularly satisfying social life. Or we may go on a holiday with our family, which, for once, works well, but we don’t stop to examine why and the next time around, end up on a break marred by the usual litany of arguments and dissatisfactions. At work, a specific project may play to our strengths, but we’re unable to decode quite why and are later moved to another department where we never again exert ourselves with comparable creativity. At home, once in a while, we find that we have a tender, playful and cathartic conversation with our partner, but can’t understand in detail what might lie behind the heart-warming interlude.

  Our meaningful moments threaten to be like beautiful squares in a foreign city that we stumble into at night, but can never find our way back to in the light of day. We recognise their value without knowing how to rediscover them. We do not interpret them as the threads of a tapestry of meaning that we need to discover and hold on to across the labyrinth of our lives. We continue to encounter meaning a little too much by chance. We forage rather than systematically harvest.

  ii. Provincialism

  Another reason why we hold back fro
m the things that yield meaning is that they can seem abnormal. We know they are valuable; we are just afraid of seeming weird by pursuing them. We may really like getting up at 3am, having a long bath in the dark and thinking for hours about our childhoods. In our social lives, our real preference might be to see people for one-on-one conversations where the agenda would be abstract and announced beforehand. With our work, we know we do our best thinking in railway station cafés rather than in the cubicle where people expect us to be. On holiday, we have a yearning to visit the local sewage works and electricity plant rather than the beach or museum.

  But, haunted by the fear of being abnormal, we can end up following few of our authentic inclinations. The pity is that we probably take our cue about what is normal from a specific, and not particularly representative, group of people: those who just happen to be in the vicinity. The oppressive impact of a local clan is what used to make school especially dispiriting. 14-year-olds have very emphatic ideas about what counts as ‘normal’. In the provincial micro-society of school, it might have been normal to think that if someone had unfashionable shoes, they should be insulted at break time; that an enthusiasm for study was contemptible, or that being a footballer represented the summit of existence. As soon as we left school, we realised that what counted as normal there wasn’t normal at all. We learnt that our old classmates were, in fact, highly provincial; that is, cockily sure – but utterly wrong in thinking – that their narrow beliefs were universal markers of truth and value.

  The problem with this susceptibility to provincial patterns of thinking is that it may pursue us beyond the school gates. At work, people may take it for granted that a holiday must be taken somewhere sunny: if we were to announce that we were going to spend a week in the Netherlands to admire the grey cloud banks, we might be mocked and patronised. Or there might be a powerful consensus in our social circle that, on Sundays, it is a sign of virtue to have a long lunch in company and that anyone who prefers to spend time alone writing up their journal must be distinctly odd and suspect.

  But, in truth, many ideas of normality are neither universal nor incontestable. It would be wholly possible to assemble large groups of impressive people who would take quite contrary views. In the company of 17th-century Dutch landscape painters, admiring grey clouds would be a prime virtue. If we lived around Balzac, Baudelaire or Proust, our apparently eccentric preferences for lying in bed thinking on weekends would be taken for granted.

  Our pursuit of a meaningful life can become fatally derailed by ideas of what is normal that are not actually normal. We should not so much abandon the notion of fitting in as imaginatively reconfigure who we want to fit in with, and it might not be those in our immediate vicinity. We should dare to create our own imaginative communities to liberate us from the more inhibiting and asphyxiating assumptions of our neighbours.

  iii. Selflessness

  We are highly attuned to the notion that being selfish is one of the worst character traits we might possess, a way of behaving associated with greed, entitlement and cruelty. And yet some of the reasons we fail to have the lives we should springs from an excess of the opposite trait: an overweening modesty; an over-hasty deference to the wishes of others; a dangerous and counter-productive lack of selfishness.

  We are at risk because we fail to distinguish between good and bad versions of selfishness. The good, desirable kind involves the courage to give priority to ourselves and our concerns at particular points; the confidence to be forthright about our needs, not in order to harm or conclusively reject other people, but in order to serve them in a deeper, more sustained and committed way over the long term. Bad selfishness, on the other hand, operates with no greater end in view and with no higher motive in mind. We do not decline to help so as to marshal our resources to offer others a greater gift down the line; we just can’t be bothered.

  Unfortunately, afflicted by confusion about this distinction, we frequently fail to state our needs as clearly as we should, with disastrous results for those we’re meant to serve. In order to be a good parent, we may need to have an hour to ourselves every day. We may need to take a long time in a hot shower so as to mull over events. We may need to do something that seems a bit indulgent, like taking a life drawing class or a piano lesson. But because we sense how contrary to expectations these desires can seem, we opt to stay quiet about our requirements, and so grow increasingly ragged, angry and bitter with those who rely on us. A lack of selfishness can slowly turn us into highly disagreeable as well as ineffective people.

  To take another example, we may find that our mind is at its best immediately after dinner and yet know the family tradition of spending twenty minutes tidying up the kitchen together following a meal. We accept that it would look selfish to the others to slip out at this point. We would be mocked and cast aside, so we mop the floor and scrub the potato dish and don’t work out how to rearrange the cash flow in the company or practise a speech for the conference – initiatives that would, in the long term, have been of greater use to those we love than our resentful and agitated domestic efforts.

  Good selfishness grows out of an accurate understanding of what we need to do in order to maximise our utility for others. It stems from an unembarrassed sense of how we should develop our abilities, get our minds into the right frame, summon up our most useful powers and organise our thoughts and feelings so that they can eventually be helpful to the world. We recognise that we will, at select moments, have to back out of doing things that people would like us to, and have no compunction about politely explaining this – unlike the selfless, who will dutifully smile, then one day explode in vindictive, exhausted rage. We know, as kind egoists, that we may be confused with the mean-spirited, but our innate conviction in our sincerity lends us the calm to pursue our aims in our own way.

  The trick is to become better ambassadors of our intentions, learning persuasively to convey to those around us that we are not lazy or callous, but will simply better serve their needs by not doing the expected things for a while. We avoid becoming a nuisance to those around us by what is only ever superficially a good idea: always putting other people first.

  iv. Immortality

  We rightly think that fear is the enemy of the well-lived life. But there is a powerful way in which fear can play an opposite and more constructive role: it can be the psychological force that positively propels us towards a more meaningful existence.

  One of the big obstacles to meaning is the feeling that we have time to get around to the important things. We recognise where the sources of meaning lie, but lack urgency in focusing on them, because we will address them tomorrow, at the end of the month, or next year. We have a hazy supposition that time is unlimited.

  The horrific but inevitable fact of our own mortality is kept at bay for the most sympathetic of reasons: we can’t bear the brevity of our own existence. But in so doing, we fail to give our lives the meaningful direction they deserve. We give in to localised, small-scale obstructions: the worry that something is a touch dull; the fear of looking a bit of a fool; the pain of being rejected; the awkwardness of not fitting in; the annoyance of having to make yet another effort in the same old direction. We don’t persist with worthwhile things through the suffering they involve and, in the process, end up slowly ruining the time we have left.

  A decisive barrier to the more meaningful lives we seek is the half-formed, secret and deeply dangerous suspicion that we may be immortal.

  v. The art of storytelling

  At moments of sorrow and exhaustion, it is only too easy to look back over the years and feel that our lives have, in essence, been meaningless. We take stock of just how much has gone wrong; how many errors there have been, how many unfulfilled plans and frustrated dreams we’ve had. We may feel like the distraught, damned Macbeth who, on learning of his wife’s death, exclaims at a pitch of agony that man is a cursed creature who:

  …struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no
more. [Life] is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

  SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5

  No life can avoid an intermittently high degree of ‘sound and fury’. The question is whether it must also, ultimately, signify nothing. As Macbeth’s lines hint, this will depend on who is telling the story. In the hands of Shakespeare’s bracingly termed ‘idiot’, the story of a life may well turn into unintelligible and dispiriting gibberish. But with sufficient compassion and insight, we may be able to make something different and a great deal more meaningful and redemptive out of the same material.

  Only a small number of people ever self-consciously write their autobiographies. It is a task we associate with celebrities and the very old, but it is, in the background, a universal activity. We may not be publishing our stories, but we are writing them in our minds nevertheless. Every day finds us weaving a story about who we are, where we are going, and why events happened as they did.

  Many of us are strikingly harsh narrators of these life stories. We declare our achievements puny; we berate ourselves for our faults; we perceive only the negative sides of our characters. We constantly give the advantage to the other side. We may feel that we’re being objective, but it seems we are really rehearsing the case for an especially vicious imaginary prosecution.

  Yet there is nothing necessary about our methods or our verdicts. There could be ways of telling very different, far kinder and more balanced stories from the same sets of facts. Good narrators – ones who are fair-minded and judicious – know how to display a range of narrative skills that keep unfair, partisan and confidence-destroying lines of attack at bay. These good narrators accept that lives can be meaningful even when they involve a lot of failure and humiliation. Mistakes are not dead ends; they are sources of information that can be exploited and put to work as guides to more effective subsequent action. The sound and fury can be made to yield hugely significant insights.