This question rips mercilessly into the heart of one of the gravest problems that threatens to destroy the human race: lack of deep thought regarding the big questions of life, existence and meaning. Many write them off as impossible and unworthy of their attention and efforts, but this is a mistake of the highest degree of seriousness. My purpose in writing this is to convince the common man that the act of engaging in sincere thought about life’s grandest concepts and questions is a greater, nobler and more worthwhile one than any he has yet done. This essay will not be so much a formal argument as it is a thorough expression of my deepest sentiments regarding the idea of thinking deeply, although I will do my very best to structure it so it can be followed easily and provide logically coherent arguments for my position. Now, it would be helpful to clarify what exactly that might be: I firmly assert that all intellectually capable people should practice thinking deeply about life, existence, meaning and other such topics; however, I will primarily focus on these three. The main reason for my position is that avoidance of this practice will result in wasting one’s life. But let’s clarify what I mean by “waste”. After all, a waste to you may not be a waste me. When I refer to the idea of wasting one’s life, I mean not using it in the best possible way it could be used, given the individual’s particular life situation. My standard of good will be logical or objective meaning/significance. Therefore, the best kind of life would be the most logically or objectively meaningful/significant kind in any given life situation or set of circumstances. The fundamental premise that this whole essay rests on is that human life is not only inherently valuable, but it is the most valuable thing in the world. I will not defend this premise, nor my standard of good in this essay so you’ll have to accept them or else disregard the rest of this paper. My primary reasons for regularly engaging in deep thought about life’s big questions are as follows: The key to living the best possible life is to know the truth about life, existence and meaning; prioritizing pleasure, comfort or enjoyment centered lifestyles strongly discourages one from living the best kind of life and existence possible in their particular situation; and it is reasonably manageable through the use of will power, logic and reasoning, to succeed in the prerequisite mission of truth seeking, to the ultimate goal of living the best kind of existence.
Starting with my first reason for thinking deeply about life, meaning and existence, knowing the truth about these things is the key to using life in the best way — which I regard as the only right way to live. As a quick side note, I’d like to elaborate for a moment about truth. When I say “truth”, I mean the best supported conclusion based on the available evidence, on the basis of proper logic and solid reasoning. I do not mean a personal or subjective view that happens to please a particular party, which is what truth is now being disfigured into by the post-modernists. That aside, my first point on this matter is that knowing the truth about life, existence and meaning allows one to identify that which is most logically and objectively meaningful/significant, which in turn allows one to live the best kind of life. For example, imagine an Olympic sized gymnasium filled one layer deep with hundreds of thousands of objects of varying prices (which are visibly displayed on only a small fraction of visible items), but only one thousand of the objects are visible to you. Your mission is to pick the most expensive object in the gymnasium. In this analogy, the gymnasium represents reality, the objects different things to seek after, and the prices different degrees of logical and objective meaning/significance. For a human, at any given moment, only a tiny fraction of all things in reality are available to them, and they would only know a tiny fraction of the values of all the available things to them at that moment. If you were to select the most expensive thing you could see in the gymnasium, what are the chances you’d pick the most expensive thing? They’d be essentially negligible. Even if you could manage to pick the most expensive item by chance, you’d have no idea that you did so, since you haven’t seen the rest of the items in the gymnasium. However, if somehow all the objects became visible to you (including their values), you’d be able to identify the most expensive thing efficiently. Such is the nature of truth: it reveals and illuminates the value and significance of things and allows you to clearly see them for what they really are. Analogously, the truth about life/existence/meaning is represented by whatever allows you to see all the objects, and their values, clearly. So, the truth about life/meaning/existence is the only thing that allows you to identify that which is truly the best in life/reality, which enables you to seek after the truly best thing(s) in life, and thus live the best kind of life you can in your particular set of life circumstances. If you have the truth about life/meaning/existence, you’ve got the key to living the best kind of life: a life lived pursuing or engaging in the best thing or set of things in life/reality. Consequently, it allows one to rule out all other things and dismiss them as lesser, thereby allowing one to maximize the amount of life spent pursuing the right thing(s) and minimize the amount of life wasted on lesser things. How pathetic would it be to spend your entire life (or any significant portion of it) pursuing or engaging in something that turns out to have little or no true objective or logical value/meaning/significance? You would never know it though, unless you had the truth, which means that you’d never know the true value of anything you engage in or pursue, in that case either. But if whatever you are currently pursuing or engaging possesses no real value beyond immediate satisfaction, all that life spent on it will have been wasted. Sadly, this is the fate of the vast majority of people. To put all this in a simple syllogism, I’ve laid it out in these four points:
1. The best way to use a finite resource is to maximize the greatest gain from it, and to do otherwise is wasteful
2. Life is a finite resource
3. Only the truth about life/meaning/existence allows one to identify the greatest gain from life/reality
4. We should prioritize finding the truth about life/meaning/existence above almost all other things, to maximize the amount of life lived in the best way and minimize the amount of it wasted
A further elaboration of how truth relates to wasting one’s life seems called for at this point: we need the truth about life, existence and meaning because it enhances our perspective. We all make choices and decisions according to our perspectives, so the closer they resemble the truth, the wiser our decisions will be, thus contributing to a life lived in the best way. Inversely, the less our perspectives resemble the truth the poorer and worse our decisions become, resulting in a poorly lived and wasteful life. Since the way our lives play out depend mostly on what we decide to do, the truth about life, existence and meaning is crucial to living the best kind of life and existence we can. If one does not think deeply about life, existence or meaning, they will almost certainly never come upon the truth of them and thus never find the best thing in life/reality, unless they came upon it by chance, in which case they wouldn’t know they did and may disregard it for other more outwardly attractive things. Therefore, we must think deeply about life, meaning and existence in order to understand the truth about them, so that we can live the best lives and existences we can in our given situations, while wasting as little of our lives as possible.
Instead of engaging in such thought, the common man prioritizes things centered around pleasure, comfort, or enjoyment. However, this does not lead to the most objectively and logically significant/meaningful life, but rather prevents one from achieving this. This is because they do not adequately provide fundamental truths about life, existence, reality or meaning. Consider romantic, family and friend relationships, a great source of pleasure and comfort that many prioritize above almost everything else in their lives. These can very well teach you things about the nature of humanity and human connection, which answer questions like “How does one properly relate to another person?”, “How shouldn’t one treat another person in whom they are in relationship with?”, “Can humans achieve perfection?”, “What is the nature of man?”, and “What is the value of human relationships?”. However, human relationships in themselves cannot teach you anything that answers the big questions of life: “Why and for what purpose do humans exist?”, “What is the purpose of life?”, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, “What is the value and significance of humanity?”, “What is most meaningful in reality?”, “What makes something meaningful?”, “How should one spend their life?” and so on. Only these are the questions whose answers can allow one to live the best kind of life they could, and conventional sources of pleasure, comfort and enjoyment that people prioritize over all else yield poor and unimpressive answers to them, if at all. Some more examples of such things would be material goods (money, food, clothing…etc.) and forms of entertainment (movies, music, vacation trips…etc.). To be clear, I am not saying that these things cannot provide the answers to life’s grandest questions, but I am saying that they usually do not and even if they do, they by themselves are not enough to do the job properly. For example, a certain song, book, or movie can certainly provide answers to these questions, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. In order to know if these answers are valid, you’d need external evidence and strong derivative arguments to validate them. My next point about prioritizing pleasure, comfort and enjoyment centered things is that this prevents one from obtaining the truth about life, existence and meaning. Consider this: when faced with the choice to engage in seriously deep exploration of life’s grandest questions and concepts, going traveling around the world to exotic places and eating wonderfully amazing foods, and having sex with different partners of your choice every day, which would you choose? Those of us who like to think too highly of ourselves might suggest the first option, but the rest of us who are more grounded in reality would probably choose that one last. Whichever you choose, you must realize that the steps required to achieve each alternative requires immense time and dedication, which is time and dedication you will never get back and cannot simultaneously spend on other things. So, in prioritizing pleasure/comfort/enjoyment centered things, this prevents us from engaging in deep thought about life, which in turn prevents us from finding the truth about life, and thus living the best kind of lives we can in our given situations. In addition, since engaging in deep thought about most things is often difficult, stressful, unenjoyable and frustrating, if we prioritize pleasure, comfort or enjoyment, we will instinctually avoid anything related to deep thought about life, like the plague. Thus, in prioritizing pleasure, comfort or enjoyment over engaging in deep thought about life, meaning or existence, we prevent ourselves from knowing the truth and thus living life and conducting our existences as we ought to.
Now that I’ve covered the reasoning for engaging in deep thought about life, meaning and existence, how does one practically go about that? Surely it is an impossible thing to do efficiently in our daily lives, no? No, actually it is very possible to do practically in your day-to-day life. The difficult part is knowing where to start. It is helpful to have an idea of what exactly you want to understand. In this case it would be fulfillment, meaning, truth about life, and other such things. Now comes the Socratic method, which is basically a practice of asking questions about something with the purpose of achieving valuable insight on the particular subject in question. So, if you apply the Socratic method to the topics I’ve just mentioned, you can produce a very solid rudimentary foundation of metaphysical questions from which to start the journey of truth seeking: “Why does life exist and does it have a purpose?”, “Does the world or humanity exist for a purpose? If so, what is it?”, “What defines meaning?”, “What makes something fulfilling?”, “What does fulfillment really mean?”, “What is the relationship, between meaning and fulfillment? Do they have any relation to life and existence?”, “Does my life have any purpose or meaning/significance beyond what I can contribute to society?”, “What are the implications of each possible answer to these questions?” and “What can and cannot provide the answers to them?”. After you’ve attempted to answer these questions, you can then ask yourself further epistemological questions, to evaluate the validity of your answers: “Is that necessarily true?”, “Why did I give that answer/Why do I think that’s true? Does the evidence support this? Is there evidence I’ve yet to see, which may radically change my answer? What would that look like?”, “What other possible answers are there? Are there any better answers? Why or why not?”. As you evaluate your initial answers by trying to answer these questions, you’ll need to employ a heavier use of strong logic and reasoning, which you can develop and cultivate by attempting to answer these epistemological questions, so long as you don’t make logical fallacies — which is very likely to occur if you rush the process. The main goal to have in mind is finding the truth. As long as this is your primary focus, you’ll consistently ask the right questions and keep the most important one in the forefront of your mind: “What is the truth about this?”. This may seem very time intensive, so much so that you cannot afford to do this, but I think that is a poor excuse, because this is more important than most things people tend to spend the majority of their time on, and also because you can do this in small daily increments in whatever free time you manage to be left with throughout the week. Once you’ve refined your answers to the epistemological questions and thus the metaphysical questions, you can begin to take action according to your answers. This is because the answers to these sorts of questions carry implications that we live according to. For example, if to the question “Why does life exist and does it have a purpose?” you answer “It exists as a random cosmic byproduct, and is bound to happen given the amount of galaxies and solar systems, therefore there is no real purpose”, then the implication is that you’re perfectly justified in doing whatever you want. If no real purpose exists for life, then spending yours entirely on gambling or drugs is just as good as using it to serve the poor and oppressed. Another implication of this is that all moral systems are just man-made constructs with no objective grounding. On this view, there is no intrinsic moral value to any particular action or lifestyle, so again, you can justify doing whatever you’d like. If you truly believe the aforementioned answer to the first metaphysical question I suggested, you would live a very self-centered life doing only what happens to please you at any given moment — regardless of what it is — and would justify anything that is frowned upon by others, by citing its lack of real moral value. So, from one answer, to this metaphysical question, alone, you can justify some very serious life decisions and avoid any sort of accountability. This is the power of philosophy and it is to be taken with utmost respect and highest regard. This line of thinking may seem familiar to you, as it is the cultural norm of all first world societies today, which everyone you know, including yourself, most likely lives by. My point is that you can very easily and will take action on your answers to the metaphysical questions of life, so it’s not like the act of trying to answer them is a pointless dance that does not affect you. Quite the opposite; it is the ruling principle that makes or breaks the series of choices which constitute your life. Given a decent effort and a substantial thrust of dedication, one can practically engage in deep thought on a regular basis, using the Socratic Method, with regard to metaphysical and epistemological questions of life: their answers then immediately translate to a particular worldview and philosophy upon which they instinctively live their life — as a computer code directly translates to a corresponding computer program or simulation.
I hope by now this essay has somewhat changed your perspective on the idea of deep thought about life’s grandest and greatest questions and ideas. To maximize the greatest gain out of life, engagement in such thinking is a necessary precondition, because only through this can the Truth about life and reality be realized, which is the foundation of any progress of real value and significance. To do otherwise would be a striving in the wrong direction and ultimately a waste of life, because the nature of time is structured so that one cannot simultaneously seek the Truth about life and reality, while doing however they please and living for pleasure, comfort or enjoyment. And lastly, one can make great strides in the direction of true, meaningful progress, if they ask the right questions and think critically (employing maximal correct use of one’s rational faculties), using the Socratic method, which would then naturally shift one’s lifestyle toward the kind that would yield the most objective meaning and significance, in their particular set of life circumstances. As I see it, there exists no excuse for the common man to avoid this practice, other than ones resembling these: “That’s too challenging”, “I don’t feel like it”, “I’d rather do something else more enjoyable”, “I’m fine with wasting my life”, “I already know everything I need to, to live a good life”, “I’m afraid of what I’ll find”. An honest and sensible evaluation of these reasons demonstrates their powerlessness to suppress the obligation for the sincere quest for Truth. To write this kind of expedition off as simply impossible and unworthy of attention and genuine effort, is a foolish deed beyond comparison. The act of engaging in sincere thought about life’s grandest concepts and questions is the key to realizing true meaning and value, so how could it not be the most worthy one to set forth upon, for all men? Before you go, I will once more leave you with my central message, as a parting thought for later pondering: I firmly assert that all intellectually capable people should practice thinking deeply about life, existence, meaning and other such topics.
After all…have you really got anything better to do?
With all my heart, I genuinely hope you’ve gained something of true value—and dare I suggest meaning—from reading this.
