The Question.
By: Naveen Kumar Chandra
Tags: Existentialism, Introspection, Meaning Of Life, Questions, Finding Yourself

I’ve always wondered, more so lately, may be it is due to my excessive reading habit but whatever may be the reason, I’ve always tried to understand is there really a meaning to anything. I am not just talking about what Camus or Sartre would call the “human condition”, and the absurdity of it, rather, I am talking about the reality of existence of the Universe itself. Even if I was to leave the existence of humans aside, the whole reality as it is, makes little sense, add to it our existence and what we in turn make out of this reality, you’ve got some terrible news, an absolutely incomprehensible state of being, not ours, but everything.

Let me give you an example, take for a moment a death, everyone must have seen a death in their family or extended family or friends or someone like that. A person whom they knew for years, perhaps decades, suddenly wiped out off the face of the Universe. He/she worked hard, had many struggles, taught themselves to eat, to speak, to walk, to run, to feel, to earn, to spend and one day, it’s all for nothing, gone. It doesn’t matter if the person was old or young, or that they have “lived” their lives or not, what matters is the fact that one day, it’ll all be for nothing, what sense does it make? True, some might say, but what about all the relationships, all the friends, all the achievements, all the moments of happiness but then if that is what it is all about then we are no more than robots, just sent here to live out our Pre programmed lives, do a set of pre assigned tasks. Some might say that this programming is what destiny is, if that’s the case and if everything is anyways fixed and would happen as it’s supposed to be, then there is no need of any conscious effort. If you say what if this conscious effort was itself part of the program (the Cartesian example), it must be then noted that it makes everything even more meaningless and if at all it’s not the case, it still doesn’t answer the question I raised to begin with and it all still stays meaningless. To come, do a random set of things and to go, this is not something meaningful, this is exactly the opposite of any meaning whatsoever. No matter if the set of things is what the person is made to feel was the “purpose” of their lives, the set would still remain random. Some might say that we are but playing our role in the larger plan of things, in that case, what exactly is the plan? Maybe you’d say no one knows as no one is smart enough to know, in that case it remains meaningless. If you are to say that maybe it is to fulfil our destiny and go, then yet again, we are in fact robots, nothing more. If you say that we are wrong in looking at ourselves and trying to find meaning of everything but we must look at everything and then try to find meaning of our existence, I would say, again, it makes little sense. Because, even if one was to do that, it is inevitable that we’d end up where we started. My place in the Universe is of a guy, in a developing nation, in the civil services, trying to do his job, okay, what does this prove? If at all I was to look at my existence in relation to others, I’d ask a few questions, why me? Why was I supposed to be doing this and not that? If it doesn’t matter then why not and if it does then how? If I am supposed to be better, then I guess all who were in my position ever were supposed to better but many failed terribly, if that was part of the plan, then again, why were those who failed were chosen to fail? If it was they who picked it, and it is always us, which opens a whole new Pandora’s box. The issue thus remains unsolved, the question remains?