Mumbling about: the meaning of life is what you make it

Promoting the anti-existential crisis.

Jessica Fox @HelloJessicaFox

did I ever tell you guys about the time I talked to a psychiatrist and he said I would probably be fine if I just stopped reading philosophy so I did and it helped

I was attacked by a tweet at the weekend. But a good attack, though, like when my cat gets too excited and the murder mittens come out to play.

I market this newsletter as being for existential crisis-havers because I’m one of them. Particularly between around October 2021 and March of this year, I would have a monthly existential crisis occupying my time, eating away at my thoughts. Sometimes I would bring it up with the class when at night school, making light of it and expecting others to agree, only for my therapist teacher to look at me with baffled concern. Turns out not everyone is battling a monthly existential crisis.

Topics would range from: ‘Why is the cost of living crisis a thing? We made the economy up!’ to the classic: ‘Why are we even here?’ Looking back at my diary between this period, there’s an overwhelming, grandiose sense of despair.

Like so many other walking cliches before me, I turned to psychology and philosophy to soothe me, and I was already coming to my own conclusions on the meaning of life (spoiler alert: there isn’t one) when I saw that tweet and felt personally victimised.

Life does not have meaning. We are recycled stardust on a hunk of spinning rock hurtling through time and space for no other reason than, simply, why not? And who cares? There is no point agonising over it all, about your reason for being here, about the strange little rules we’ve put on our own species.

I listened to this brilliant episode of Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen and enjoyed the idea of picking and choosing the aspects of life you want to subscribe to, and of simply letting go of the rest.

Life is messy and meaningless, but because of that we are free to ascribe meaning to it if we wish. We will never know everything. Time is non-linear. We will never not know pain. We will never not know happiness. And that’s the beauty of it all.

In Lisa Olivera’s most recent newsletter, she talks about making peace with the idea that we cannot run away from pain; we cannot expect change whilst not embracing change in the every day:

“What I’ve learned after spending so much time running from pain by way of trying to fix it, or overcome it, or get past it, or move beyond it, is that there is no fixing it. There is no overcoming it. There is no getting past or moving beyond it. Sure, maybe in a moment or in a particular experience. Sure, maybe for a while, in one season or chapter of life. But not permanently. Nothing is permanent, including the momentary erasing or moving away of our pain. To be human is to move through slowing ebbs, downward turns, dark spots and difficulty. To be human is to experience hardship, loss, grief, sadness, and sorrow. No matter what. There is no amount of running from it that actually keeps it at bay.”

She also echoes that idea I mentioned of choosing how you want to relate to life, which is particularly apt for creatives:

“Creativity is also held in the way we make sense of ourselves and the world — in the way we brainstorm and facilitate our lives — in the way we view a sunrise and experience a meal. Creativity isn’t just about what we make that others might be able to see, or what our practice of creativity makes us. For me, it is so much more about how we choose to engage with the world, with our own aliveness, with death and mundanity and the absurdity of being a human being. It is about accessing our choice to express the way we relate to life in all the ways that bring us closer to ourselves and each other.”

When it often feels like we don’t have a choice - over laws and governance and society (side-eyeing the Tories here) - it might be helpful to know that you do have a choice. You can choose how you interact with your life, with your values, with your views. You can choose to let in and discard, to move with the flow or stand rooted against it.

So yes, engage with psychology and philosophy, but don’t agonise over life’s eccentricities believing that there must be a meaning to it all. There isn’t, except the meaning you make of it.