Man lives on food, water and air but not for them. One universal law of life, in a world with limited resources, is the constant struggle of living organisms for these, in order to leave behind maximum copies of themselves in the form of their progeny. This simple rule of nature has carved our bodies and minds over millions of years, as new species evolve, better adapted to their environments. It operates silently at the level of our genes, by selecting those genes from the pool which code for such behaviour as will maximise their survival.

But we do not fall in love in order to produce a large brood, nor do we look after our children only because they are the means of propagation of our genes. We do things that seem far removed from this Malthusian world of struggle for survival. And it appears we liveforthem. We sing and dance with our friends, we invent wildly improbable supernatural beings and equally preposterous means to appease them, we pierce our bodies to put on trinkets, we toil in our gardens to beautify our surroundings, we invent intricate systems of sounds and body-movements and derive rapturous joy listening and watching people who have mastered these, we zealously guard little leisure wrenched from the gruelling task of earning livelihood and spend it holding hands of our beloveds, we fritter hard-earned money to travel to far-off lands to watch sun sink behind an interminable ocean, we pave mountains, we carve stones, we paint caves.

Are all these activities in pursuit of happiness? If by happiness we mean sum-total of pleasurable stimuli during a sensory experience, much of our lives are spent in ventures which are far from pleasant when being performed. An act of creation is the most tormenting experience of man: be it painting, sculpture, writing, music, or scientific invention. People spend excruciating lives in these pursuits. We only learn of those who succeed. Even they admit that the process of achieving their objective is an unmitigated misery.

Writing a book is horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

-George Orwell, Why I Write

These human endeavours at least provide for an illusion of immortality. One feels they are leaving behind a part of themselves for the posterity. What about people who live and die in strange, hostile lands to spread the message of their imaginary God. People spend their precious youths in climbing remote, inhospitable mountains or charting the seas of the world.

People with exquisite intellect whittle away their most productive years in inventing esoteric streams of abstract knowledge which has no apparent utility for mankind. What is this gigantic human industry for? If it is not for the immediate pleasure and apparently not to maximize individual survival, what then drives it? What does man seek in this relentless labour?

It seems this unflagging strife is in pursuance ofmeaningin life. Meaning, not in the sense of Cosmic truth of existence, but meaning in the sense of a goal, a value, that makes every moment of life worth living. Meaning gives a narrative to our past and a direction to our future. It gives us a feeling that our life is not a mere collection of random occurrences but each moment is a component of the whole which we can strive to carve. It is a known fact that life without meaning, though not lacking in pleasure, is rarely felt to be happy. While a life devoid of much pleasures but seen to be meaningful is considered rewarding.

People find this meaning in various activities: in arts, science, music, travel, charity; in being a dutiful parent or a loving spouse; in building empires or in simply being an honest, sincere citizen.

Science presents another interesting view of life.

Human life is inconsequential in the realm of cosmos, though inseparably woven in its fabric. Origin of human life was a cosmic phenomenon, like any other. In this infinite vastness of universe, we inhabit a speck of dust called Earth which is itself an insignificant planet revolving around a moderately sized star. There are billions such stars and planetary systems in our galaxy and billions such galaxies in our universe. It would not make any difference to universe if all of a sudden human life was to be snubbed from it. Planets would go on revolving around their stars, stars will go on exploding into supernovae or collapse into black holes, universe will go on expanding and as this expansion slows, perhaps one day it will vanish into a void from which it had risen.

Universe grinds according to certain simple laws. These laws are blind. They have no purpose. Mans search for meaning in his ephemeral life, seen in the context of the meaninglessness of existence is intensely tragic, if not outright absurd. Steven Weinberg, a Noble laureate in physics, thought that the more universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Scientific explanations, stark and trenchant as they are, appear to sap life of its vitality. But when approached with a longing only for truth, they expose a vista of unparalleled simplicity about origin of universe and life on earth. In a few words they give us the law which explains the origin of the most exquisite living machine.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable!

-Shakespeare

This relentless search, a by-product of our thinking mind itself a fruit of evolution, is as real as the supreme brain that stirred it, however fruitless it may be.

It is this endless quest, which makes human life shine with a singular beauty.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Meaning in it all - The Times of India Blog