The meaning of life

I’m admittedly a little late posting this, but thank gawd January’s over. In case it slipped you by, January is officially rubbish. It’s too dark for a start. And everyone’s absorbed in self-improvement; trying to be more frugal and healthy and grown-up. Rubbish.

All this self-reflection’s a bad idea in my book. You go from evaluating your place in life one moment, to pondering the very meaning of life the next but one, the very notion of which fills me with horror.

I’m all for a brief bit of purpose, a project to engage you as you go about your day. But the notion that there’s one central reason for our very being is terrible, largely because it means that to do anything else with your day, anything at all, constitutes shirking off from the human race.

I doesn’t matter how admirable your intentions were for the day ahead. You could have been creating unquestionably beautiful works of art, or helping sick kids walk for the first time, or building wells in the third world or perhaps working in the accounts department of an organisation that does all these things, believing yourself, in your own small way, to be making the world a slightly better place. Or you could even have just been trying to feed your family and keep them safe.

If you woke up and suddenly the human race had discovered the meaning of life, none of this would matter; you’d have to clear your diary and crack on with mankind’s new collective mission. Our priority is suddenly clear, and if you ain’t contributing, someone else will have to work twice as hard to cover your ass. Shame on you. You’re like some chakra sapping benefit fraud.

And we love to compare our own contributions to society with those of others. We’re always bitching that obese, cigarette-addicted, extreme-sports fanatics are an unfair drain on the NHS, the RNLI and whatever other resources we feel we’re not getting as much use out of as they. We all feel that we work harder than those in comparable positions of employment. Imagine how much worse it’d be if every person on the planet had some unified responsibility.

Suddenly your worth in the world can be directly measured against that of your fellow man, quantified on some arbitrary axis, a comparison for which you’ve had no time to prepare. Seriously, how were you to know whether you’d be expected to create fine art, communicate with squid, or reach the outer reaches of the galaxy in a spaceship made of sugar?

And this nonsense wouldn’t just be like a job where you’re free to do what you want once you’ve put in your eight hours of toil – it’d be hanging over your head every waking bloody moment.

Horrible, horrible, horrible.

But what if we discovered the meaning of life, our purpose in this world, the reason for our very being – and we’d already accomplished it? Imagine our job was to create global travel, or harness the power of electricity, or walk upright? Or better still, it was something that we had no real day-to-day control over, like growing wings, or gills, or prehensile ears.

Imagine that we all woke up and opened the paper, and turned on the telly, and the announcements were everywhere: everyone get picking stuff up with your ears. It’s your purpose, people, chop chop. Would you suddenly feel all happy and enlightened for knowing?

No. Although it’d bring a spot of originality to everyone’s new years resolutions: ‘In the next twelve months I will establish quantifiably measurable first steps towards achieving synergy with machines for the ongoing survival of my race come the impending entrophy of our existing environment’. But no. Everyone just tries to lose a bit of weight, so they can reassure themselves they’re not in the portion of society that’s constantly being a terrible drain on the NHS and that.

Boring.

And that’s the real reason why January is rubbish. Because it could just be so much more interesting.