Life is Meaningless, Unless...

UNLESS you can continually find some kind of meaning in the suffering. At least that’s how I feel about it.

Life is but only earthquakes and tornados, clouds, storms and glimpses of sunrays. Think of the animals, for instance, who weather life’s constant ebs and flows-the ebs between dying and flows of surviving, suffering and coasting. The deer who endure the brutal winter storms and starve for months on end have a few brilliant weeks or months where the sweet berries and foliage are in abundance and filling their deprived bellies.

The rest of their lives, they’re simply coasting in a perfunctory fashion, munching on the bland, monotonous grasses and sticks of the earth, simply quelling their ever-consuming hunger and rarely ever pleasing their deprived tastebuds of the blissful sweetness of life’s limited offerings.

Humans, in my opinion, are no different. We simply coast along life’s enigmatic maze until we either encounter misery or happiness plateaus, and less frequently, Joy. Even in a world as comfortable and overly optimistic as ours today, thriving, physically and mentally, is still the rarest occurrence. We may be thriving in the overflowing abundance of materialism but that quite obviously isn’t filling the void that’s still caused by the emptiness that we feel in knowing that we’re only distracting ourselves from realizing that we’re constantly suffering, or coasting, with only brief moments of bliss or reprieve. It’s like an animal in a cage- sure, as long as they’re getting food and water, they’re not really suffering-but yet they still are. They’re still simply coasting by, day by day, indulging in food and running on their wheel distracting themselves from the pain that they feel knowing that they’re not truly free and that there’s little, if any, purpose of them being here, stuck in their cage.

So, how do we find purpose within the confines of our little “earth cage”, if you will-that is the question I’m asking. Some are okay with not knowing the answer to these questions, hell they don’t even ask them. And good for them, they’ll suffer all the less. But for those of us who are tormented by these thoughts, what do we do about it?

I have been lopping in tiresome circles in my head for many years thinking about these things, and I have come to two conclusions: One, there’s no point in being here, life is primarily suffering, and if there’s no reason for the suffering then there’s no reason to stick around. Why would any mouse want to live on inside their little mousey cage and endure this painful trap of life, for a little sugary yogurt drop here and there, until they someday drop dead or die slowly from the garbage that they’ve been fed in their little confined cells their entire lives?

Why as humans would we want to stick around living out our lives for the few grand moments, milestones and twinkies that we indulge in all to suffer the majority of our lives watching loved ones die, slaving over our material things and dying slow, painful deaths caused by the diseases of loneliness, excess and most of all, coping mechanisms. I mean, that’s all we’re doing right, coping? We indulge in television, sling down a few beers, maybe shoot up some heroine, stuff our faces full of Mcdonalds and drowned our minds out with TikTok, all to escape the dread of life they we’re all so diligently trying to disguise as “boredom”. Also, what about all the suffering caused by war, crime and natural disasters? It’s horrendous. Despite what your religious beliefs are, we’re all still mostly engaging in these same exact meaningless behaviors, we’re still suffering or coasting, whether or not “Jesus loves us.” And it is because of suffering that joy even exists at all. Without pain, pleasure wouldn’t be pleasurable, it would be normal, boring, expected.

It seems like that’s a good enough reason to not want to be here, right?

But before we get further, what I’m actually trying to get at is the fact that maybe, just maybe, there is a reason to endure the suffering. What I’m finding as I age, dumb as I still am, is that meaning is found through suffering only. Without suffering, we have no relatability, we have no compassion and we have no reason to desire selflessness. As a parent, you suffer, a lot. You suffer because you give of yourself to exhausting levels, you suffer because you lose yourself a bit sometimes as the world begins to revolve around the child, and you suffer most of all when your child suffers. But becoming a parent and suffering is probably one of the most meaningful things you can do with your existence because for once in your life, you ACTUALLY care more about someone else than yourself.

Whether or not you ever become a parent though is a mute point. The point is, you will suffer in this life, so will everyone, but the best way to find meaning in the meaningless is to be selfless in a selfish world. Because you suffered, help others who are suffering. Because you’re in pain, try to blunt other’s pain. Because you dread life, try to be a reason people dread it less.

Beauty is one way that I believe you can truly endure suffering in this life. Beauty is art, art is beauty and only we humans have the ability to appreciate it. Art is beautiful because we can relate to it, and humans are harmonious creatures, social creatures. When you find something to relate to what another human created, you feel a connection and that connection is beautiful. It is those around us that give life meaning, even if it is meaningless.

Create art, express yourself through sight and sound, and be that band aid to the bleeder because you know what it feels like to bleed. Without suffering, you can’t truly have compassion on those who are suffering. You’ll just blame them, tell yourself that they deserved to suffer because they did something “wrong” in life and deserved it. But that’s not reality. Reality is suffering and we’re all going to suffer, some more than others and there IS NO REASON for suffering. It just is. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do good because of suffering. We can’t stop suffering from existing in the world, it’ll never happen, but we can quell it, though we will still suffer in our own lives. Focusing on others instead of yourself is the only way to stop being selfish and stop dwelling on your own misery. Let your misery out in the form of art and then what was your pain now became medicine to someone who felt lost and alone. Manifesting selflessness in the world, love, it brings you feelings of joy and if you try to do it everyday, you’ll feel hints of joy everyday and that’s more than life has to offer us on a daily basis if we just sit around waiting for it.

Suffering has no meaning, but you can be the REASON people coast along in life. You can be a light in a tunnel that we know will never see the sun.

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

Yours Sincerely, Krystal Blake