When we were very young we thought we could plan our lives. We try not to ask these questions about meaning very often. We try not to wonder about purpose and chaos because the question is so large and so frightening. It is much easier to go about the daily tasks of eating and drinking, working and raising children, paying the bills or not being able to pay them, occasionally relaxing. It often seems to be so.
Life is mindless, purposeless, random, absurd.
We live out our days, trying to keep our heads above water, and then it all comes to an end and we are quickly forgotten. So let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow or the next day or surely the day after we will die. And yet we wish it were not so. There is in the depths of the human personality a stubborn and ineradicable conviction that our existence does have meaning and purpose no matter how problematic or obscure that purpose may be. We are caught between the seeming mindless arbitrary cruelty that we see all around us and this intractable conviction of purpose, which will not go away even when we are convinced that it is nothing more than self-deception.