Life is meaningless and it is a good thing

Continuing my serises on my insights from the spring retreat.

Ralston and Shakespear agree that life is fundamentally meaningless. I.e. there is no inherent meaning to find and live by. I've been long looking for meaning so it should be a blow to me, but it is actually very liberating.

If there is no meaning then I am free to live my life any way I want. There is no absolute measure of lives, there is no way to live a good or a bad life. There is nothing I must strive for, nothing I "should" achieve. In short, there is no external source of how my life should be. Moreover, all the fretting we do in life, trying to achieve this and that, taking all struggles so seriously - all that can be let go and seen as just a play we put on, instead of according it the seriousness and importance we normally do. Oh, the (self-generated) pressure that dissolves!

I can still make my life meaningful for me. If I can spend it any way I want then I can well spend it in a way I find good. Only there will be noone (including myself) to judge how well I've done.

(I can resist quoting Ralston and Brandon on "Life is a bitch and then you die." It feels somehow appropriate here 😅.)

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From Macbeth’s “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,