Is Life Meaningless?

The viral video “Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time” begins on Earth in 2019. As time passes at exponentially increasing speeds (doubling every five seconds), the splendor of humanity’s potential becomes more and more apparent: future centuries and millennia—taking up no more than three seconds in the video—bring forth colonies on Mars and ever-growing metropolis-like cities on Earth. If you blink, you might miss the passage of a 100,000 years, during which the Sahara becomes a tropical paradise, new island chains rise out of the sea, and once-distant constellations streak across the sky in full view, their hazy lavender nebulae visible in the clear twilight. An animation depicting a supervolcanic eruption looks so realistic that it seems like it’s from a movie about the end of the world (it is), and the terrifying sight of pumice, ash, and lava penetrating the air and razing everything in their path sparks within you a sense of awe and respect for the destructive power of nature.

That’s until you realize that, by the time life on Earth ceases to exist three minutes in, you still have 26 minutes of video left.

Videos like this never fail to make me question the purpose of my actions—indeed, of my life. I think I speak for the majority of students when I say that I devote much of my time to building a better future for myself as well as humanity because I dream of changing the world. But “A Journey to the End of Time” discredits all of the aspirations I’ve been working toward for my entire life by pointing out a very simple, tragic truth: pretty soon, no one’s going to care. (whether “pretty soon” means 10 years or 10,000 centuries). Given this fact, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to work for a better tomorrow when tomorrow, in the context of the universe’s ultimate lifespan, will only last a fraction of a second.

This funnels into the question of whether life really is meaningless. As an atheist, I don’t believe life began with an intention. We are here right now because some innumerable amount of years ago, a chance mixture of proteins and sugars and ultraviolet light happened to produce the first life-form, one of which was able to reproduce and serve as the origin for all other life-forms on Earth. No primordial being determined what the objective of life is, but that doesn’t mean that life is meaningless.

This is because many people conflate meaning with purpose. Though the two terms are often used interchangeably in the English language (and technically have the same definition), meaning signifies the value that something has, while purpose is a much more abstract (and often imagined) idea, best defined as the perceived value that something brings to something else. Meaning usually works on the individual level (improving one’s own character), while purpose works on the larger, collective level (making a scientific breakthrough). For instance, I want to change the world, because I believe that my purpose is to help as many people as possible. For some people, that might be achieved by attaining fame and wealth and using them to help humanity; for others, that might mean bringing new innovations to the worlds of science, mathematics, or humanities. But in many cases, this is contingent on fortuitous circumstances such as inherited privilege or chance opportunity. So even if I were to have an inventive mind and unique ideas, I won’t necessarily fulfill my purpose without a bit of luck.

The reason why “A Journey to the End of Time” triggers a small existential crisis within many of its viewers is that it quite bluntly demonstrates that life has no purpose. The overwhelming sense that one has not served their purpose in life is often the catalyst for adult midlife crises. But you don’t need purpose to have meaning. Friedrich Nietzsche often discussed the “potential self”—the person we could be but aren’t, because we succumb to our trivial short-term desires or procrastination. Nietzsche firmly believed that the very meaning of life itself lies in the perpetual chase toward becoming our potential selves.

That doesn’t mean that working toward a purposeful aim benefiting the collective, like making a lasting impact on the world, isn’t meaningful. Purpose pushes the boundaries of meaning and allows us to withstand the crushing knowledge of the triviality of our existence. Without a greater aim, we are left with shallow and temporary self-gratification, which leads to a life of disorderly chaos—quite the opposite of meaning. Humans pursue their goals with a unique ferocity; like the sense of aimlessness we get when the school year finishes, the pursuit ends when we finally achieve these goals, and we find ourselves scrambling for yet another one.

Failure empowers your drive to attain goals (how could they be goals if we were to obtain them without some obstacles?), but it’s self-evident that you should strive not to struggle more than is absolutely necessary. To achieve true meaning in your life, you must act in a way that is beneficial for not only your current self, but also your future selves across time. I often think of the temporal iterations of myself—the versions of me in a few hours, days, or years from now—as classmates working with me on a school project. We’re all aiming for a perfect score, but for everyone to devote their greatest effort, we must split the work evenly. I can’t dump 90 percent of the work on tomorrow’s Claire, because tomorrow I’ll have to worry about my history homework and my math test on Thursday. Plus, it would just be mean to her, and she’d probably hate me the next day when she shows up to school running on two hours of sleep. To the sleepy reader who procrastinated last night: you did that to yourself. One of the most important steps to deriving meaning from your experiences is to always be kind to your future self. Never leave today’s responsibilities for tomorrow’s time.

So yes, it’s true that life will shine in the universe for a pitifully brief percentage of time, and yes, it’s true that the entirety of human existence will most likely be a blip in the lifespan of the universe. Meaning still shines through it all, and so does the hallmark of a life well-lived. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” Strive to be the best person you know how to be, and don’t waste time worrying about what purpose your work serves in the long run. The rest of the pieces will fall into place well before the last asteroid hits.