The Case For Life

Perennial Problems, Projects & Philosophies - Part 4

“Is life worthwhile?”

This question is paradoxical in the sense that it is either so obvious as to hardly merit acknowledgement or could fill volumes in philosophical debate.

Ultimately, the case to be made isn’t strictly logical. Logic is a rare artifice of human culture; the emergence of life preceded it by eons. To extend the question in its most extreme, why there is life at all is among the most mysterious and unanswerable questions of them all.

To claim that life is logical would be quite the case of “cart before the horse” yet despite this confounding state of affairs, there appears to be a kind of intelligence intrinsic to nature and the cosmos.

Returning to the question whether or not life is worthwhile is typically only asked by those in some kind of distress. 

This is the nature of mind.

It’s almost as if to ask the question is the fruiting body of some kind of pain. 

Getting what we don’t want. Not getting what we want. This is about as perennial as the setting sun.

Life, in its unconditional acceptance of all phenomena, allows and reflects reality like a mirror.

The irony is that those in the midst of happiness take it as a given and likely wouldn’t think to ask the question.

As Thich Nhat Hanh remarks in one of his teachings, have you expressed gratitude for your non-toothache today?

It is only in the midst of suffering that we squirm and resist and question life itself.

Something to color this discussion even further is considering the topic of nonhuman suicide, grief and bereavement.

As I remarked in my last piece, Camus emerged in the wake of a war-torn Europe in the midst of global conflict. Surely, historical context must play a part.

John Vervaeke, in episode 36 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, elaborates the perennial problems as a dysfunctional relationship in processing self, other and world resulting in anxiety, alienation and absurdity.

For example, one line of disempowered thinking goes like this: “If nothing I do matters in ten thousand years, why bother doing anything at all?”

Upon closer scrutiny, this is an example of misframing. Like a kind of symmetrical irrelevance, since you have no control or influence over events ten thousand years in some imagined future, it should be equally irrelevant to you here and now.

I’m reminded of an utterance by American Buddhist teacher Traktung Khepa: “All beings desire happiness but are ignorant of its causes.”

In tautological fashion, life is worthwhile by the mere fact that you exist. And in a sense, depending on your perspective, it was through no choice of your own, but that of your parents.

And once we are cognizant, it is for each individual to assert their own reasons for living.

To see our own life as a happening in a vastly improbable stream of coincidences is a kind of miracle – to be born to your specific parents, in the particularity of your culture, in an unbroken chain of evolution from the beginning of life to this very moment. The sheer improbability of your reading these very words seems to me about as breathtaking as beholding the awesome vista of long dead starlight in a clear night sky some billions of light-years away.

Photo by Jackson Hendry on Unsplash

At a potluck ceremony last winter, the presiding elder shared some words that linger with me that echo Vervaeke’s – the root cause of our suffering is disconnection: disconnection with ourselves, each other, and the environment.

And so, if one were to ask if life was worthwhile, I would ask a question in response – how connected are you to yourself, to others, to the world? 

Get connected, and see if the question disappears of its own accord.