Life can Suck, but it isn’t necessarily Meaningless
[Blogger's name withheld for reasons I cannot go in to] argues that life is unimportant, and this fact means that this fact is unimportant, so we might as well “seize the day.”
My objection is that if there is a day to seize, and one worth seizing, then this must mean that life has some meaning. On the cosmic scale life may seem unimportant, but as I said over at his post, satisfaction and fulfillment are intrinsically valuable to the recipient; they are not relatively valuable. If you are fulfilled and satisfied, then your life is important. It is important to you, and that is what matters.
We might argue that fulfillment is hard to come by. Sometimes it seems the things we pine for are the most unobtainable; we ascribe such importance to love (of the romantic variety) only to find that it is a delusion. Sometimes it seems that life is inherently unfair; things haven’t been structured to please us, they have just been structured and nothing more. There are innumerable examples. But this seems like a different issue. And we might even say that the fact that this is so lamentable means that we are important.
I suspect that the perception that life is meaningless comes from the belief that a god of some sort is needed to justify our lives, and most people who espouse nihilism of whatever variety (myself included, often) do not believe in god/s. But we are autonomous beings; what would give a god the right to justify our lives? And moreover, what justifies whichever god’s life? I cannot think of good answers to these questions.
We may say that this point just further shows that life cannot have meaning. But here I will reiterate that if there is such a thing as a day to seize, then this quite necessarily means that life has meaning.
After realising the flaws of existence outlined a few paragraphs above, should we conclude that while life isn’t inherently meaningless, it just sort of sucks? Often I think not. As autonomous beings we can reverentially respond to the vastness of the cosmos and the beautiful brutality of the biological mechanisms which landed us here. Things may well have taken a turn for something else, and the universe would not be able to know itself through us*. We live in a privileged position.
*To paraquote Carl Sagan.
