Does It Make Sense to Say Life Makes No Sense?

Does it make any sense to claim that life has no sense? Science keeps testing its theories about living things, proving some and tossing out others. A lot of what we once filed away as inert and mindless turns out to be nothing of the kind. Animals are animate in ways that still surprise us, carrying abilities and instincts we never bothered to imagine. They are not built like us, and more than that, they think, signal to each other, and read the world on their own terms. Even plants respond when something acts on them. So where does that leave the rest of us?

Maybe we shut down certain capacities simply because we've decided we don't have them. Who are you, really, underneath all of it? The Bible says we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Why is that so easy to brush off? Perhaps there is a reason behind everything that happens, and we just assume the reasoning is beyond us.

No two of us are the same. Each person carries a particular mix of strengths, talents, and soft spots. So why the constant competition, when together we could reach so much further? Why do we keep measuring ourselves against someone else's yardstick, someone else's trophies?

Back when I was sorting out my career, which felt like the biggest fork in the road I'd face, I never stopped to notice or honor what made me different. The advice I got always circled back to the same question: what will people think? My own individuality got buried in that. I managed to do a fair amount, yet no applause came from society, and my own family had little idea what I was even up to.

So here is what the meaning of life has become for me: figure out your own path, and give yourself room to wander off it now and then. Go a little easy on yourself too, because the world you're wandering through is quick to criticize and quicker to play hypocrite. There are forces that act like brakes on the vehicle we're driving, and they need pushing back against. The habit of fault-finding, of running other people down to prop oneself up, drags everyone backward.

Plenty of maneuvering and scheming exists to keep people away from whatever they were meant to become. Your garden-variety critic is building himself up, never you. That corrodes any chance of working together and tends to funnel power and money toward a small handful. Their creed runs something like this: there isn't enough for everyone, so I'll grab mine before you grab it first. Picture the kind of life that creed produces. It bends toward substance abuse, toward relationships that undermine rather than nourish, toward collecting objects instead of people. You can't trust them, and since they operate that way, they assume no one else can be trusted either. That makes for a wobbly throne to sit on. They chase the very things that bring no lasting happiness, the things that eventually turn on them. Think of where Scrooge wound up in A Christmas Carol.

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