Q&A: How Does a Secular Person Live His Life Without Meaning?
How Does a Secular Person Live His Life Without Meaning?
Question
A. In your opinion, does a secular person's life have real meaning? If everything is just matter, and there is no soul and no World to Come, then what is the meaning?
A lot of people answer, for example, that their goal and meaning is to leave a mark on the world. But what is the meaning of leaving a mark on the world? After a person dies and has no continuation, what difference does it make to him that people remember him?
And if the goal is to enjoy life, then if a person reaches a point where he will no longer enjoy it, why not commit suicide?
B. Yonatan Netanyahu's letter is well known, in which he says that his life has no meaning.
A few quotes from the letter:
I am alive—but in a broken and ruined world. I study—and learn nothing. Why am I like this and not someone else? I am sorry for myself, that I am not like everyone else. More than once I have thought about this: I am born, I live, and even create—and in the end I die. I will turn to dust, to be trampled under the feet of others, who will also die in order to continue an endless cycle of life and death; and if I exist for the sake of death—why do I live at all? Why was I born? Surely it would have been better never to have been born at all.
I am being eaten up from within. I live without purpose, in pain and crying out. I am in a state of despair.
“If so, then to fall asleep? For what purpose? So that I can get up tomorrow and go through the whole process again. Do I even need sleep? After all, I am not tired at all. This is a moment of emptiness, a moment in which there is nothing. An eternal moment…
And likewise, in Professor Omer Moav's conversation with Feiglin, Moav argues that his life has no meaning, but he manages with that. How do you think it is possible to live like that? Maybe most of the time he just ignores it?
Answer
There is a philosophical question here and a psychological one. The question of whether life has meaning depends on the meaning of the concept of “meaning” in this context. See my column 159 on this.
As for the psychology, you should ask a psychologist. The fact is that Omer Moav lives with it. You ask me whether he is lying? I can see with my own eyes that he lives with it.
You can look in Irvin Yalom's book, Existential Psychotherapy, in the last section on “the meaning of life,” where he divides this term into several types. There is meaning in the religious sense (everything is written from above, everything has some higher purpose, and so on) as opposed to individual meaning, which can be anything—art, career, family, etc.