Semyon Frank - The meaning of life. The meaninglessness of life. Quotes. My meaningless life

Lack of objective meaning

Today I will work as Captain Obvious and remind you that at the individual level, life has no objective meaning. After all, what do we call the meaning of any action? – most often, the goal that we hope to achieve with the help of this action. Objective the meaning, naturally, can be checked: the test question “so what?”

So I leave the house, clear the snow from the car, start the engine, press the pedals - so what? And I come to work! That is, these actions have a meaning: to get to work. It is not difficult to verify the achievement of this goal; it is completely objective. I can ignore the fact that using the car itself gives me pleasure and decide that the point of these actions is to get me to some end point of the journey. (Although Muscovites are well aware that this goal is easier, cheaper and faster to achieve in the metro; so, in essence, it’s still a matter of my personal pleasure.)

If we try to objectively consider the more global sequence of actions usually called “life,” we will discover something unpleasant: logical analysis irrefutably shows that the end point of this journey is death. He lived and lived, he proved theorems, he wrote poetry, he discovered continents, he admired the sunset... so what? - and died!

Since the statement “the objective meaning of life is death” looks like an oxymoron, materialists have to agree that life has no objective meaning - although all the religions of the world, in general, follow exactly this path: they propose that the meaning of life is preparation for death. To get to heaven, you need a certain sequence of actions during your life, period.

This elegant answer has only one logical problem: the existence of heaven cannot be objectively proven. As a result, this “objective” answer turns into a completely subjective one: it can satisfy only those for whom the existence of heaven makes sense. Simply put, those who believe in him. It turns out that individual life does not have any objective, provable meaning that could logically answer the question “So what?”: objectively there is nothing at the end of this journey; all that is there is it subjectively. Fortunately, to discover the subjective meaning of life, your own, you do not have to wait until death. But.

Subjective meaning of life

Subjective- this means accessible only to the subject of the action himself. Biased, unprovable, undetectable by logical methods, to the question “so what?” not responding. This meaning is the pleasure of fulfilling one's own desires.

It’s like in my example with a car: in fact, going to work in this way serves my pleasure, and not just achievement ultimate goal, because the shortest way achieve your goal - take the subway. It’s the same with religions: the shortest way to get to heaven is to die sinless, in infancy. The meaning of a long life is not only achieving a result, but also enjoying the process. Subjective meaning, of course (about the objective one, we remember that it simply does not exist).

But here it is important not to oversimplify the very concept of pleasure. Pleasure is the satisfaction of a need, and depending on the level of human development, his needs are different. Some people get enough pleasure from satisfying everyday needs, and for such people the question of the meaning of life most often does not bother them at all. The very emergence of the question about the meaning of life, and even more so the crisis of meaninglessness, testifies to the emerging need for self-actualization, which does not receive its satisfaction. The pleasure of “serving humanity” may well be the meaning of life if this is a person’s own desire. And in no case can it if it is simply an obligation imposed by this most selfish humanity. But a person usually knows his duties by heart (whether he fulfills them is another question), but often he is not aware of his desires at all.

Why can a person not be aware of his own desires? - because he has cut himself off from himself, looks down on himself, from a dissociated position, every time he asks himself “so what?”: a question indicating a critical, objective perception. Subjective perception, that is, direct living of one’s own life, is lost. It is clear that there is no meaning in such a life.

Fulfilling your own desires

The meaning of life is to live. Live your life directly and fully own life. Being aware of your desires.

In relation to, say, the simplest desires like “eat an apple,” the absurdity of the question “so what?” is obvious: a person ate an apple, satisfied his desire, got pleasure from it, what else do you need? But in relation to more complex desires, this critical question sometimes seems to require an answer. This illusion is carefully cultivated in a person by family and school, which are rarely interested in desires - but vigilantly monitor the fulfillment of duties.

A person who has lost the meaning of life takes a critical position towards himself (hello, Inner Critic!): following family, school and society in general, he constantly asks himself: “So what?” - thereby devaluing your own, subjective value of your desires and your life. Because, as we have established, life has no objective meaning, and a chain of questions like “So what?” inevitably leads to death as the only objective outcome. Paradoxically, people who have lost the meaning of life often try to find it among the responsibilities offered by society such as “become successful” or “achieve wealth.” That is, they are trying to verify the subjective meaning by objective criteria, which is meaningless by definition.

Looking for the meaning of life in fulfilling duties is an absurd task precisely because duties are objective, and meaning is subjective.

In Greek, the word "meaning" has a common root with the word "love." Loss of meaning in life is a loss of contact with your inner love, a loss of connection with your soul. And the more dissociated internal position, the more often the questions “so what?” – the greater the loss of contact. People who devalue love with the question “so what?” are usually not loved by anyone - and, worse than that, they don’t love themselves either. Contact with your inner love is lost...

Conscious and unconscious

What to do? - usually asks a person who is convinced that the fulfillment public duties cannot in any way compose his own, personal meaning of life. And there is only one answer: to restore connection with your own soul and your deepest desires.

If things have already reached a crisis of meaninglessness, then, apparently, the process has gone quite far, and it will not be possible to get to the deepest desires right away: they are immersed somewhere in the unconscious, where it is difficult to find them. But any human ability can be improved by training - including the ability to discern and satisfy one's own desires. Be aware of them. Don’t “do like everyone else”, don’t entrust the search for your meaning to God or the state (“the meaning of a citizen’s life is to become a worthy member of society”), don’t limit yourself to fulfilling someone else’s desires - mother, wife or friend - but look for your own, and have the courage to approve them, and take responsibility for their implementation.

In addition to the difficulty of accessing own desires The difficulty here may also lie in the fact that the issue of responsibility is also a difficult issue, and often serves as the theme of an existential crisis, which I will consider next - related to freedom.

Exercise

Write down ten of your desires: exactly your own, those that resonate in your body with anticipation of pleasure. Read them out loud, adding after each phrase:
1. Yes, this is important.
2. Yes, in fact this is the meaning of my life.

If you have internal agreement with what was said, then great, you won’t face a crisis of meaninglessness. Now you can rank the meanings of your life to highlight the main and secondary ones, and look for opportunities to realize them.

If you fail to agree that your desires are important, then the exercise gives you the opportunity to get to know your Inner Critic, find out where it came from and what it wants. Becoming aware of both sides of this inner conflict can help you consciously untangle it. In most cases, this will require the help of a psychologist, but you can start on your own.

If the list includes self-destructive desires - such as the one that resonated with sweet anticipation in the body “the desire to smash your head against the wall” - then do not delay in visiting a psychotherapist. There is a high probability that an attempt to unravel on your own will only deepen the gap between consciousness and the unconscious.

Depression: how to help a person who is disappointed in life?

When we hear that someone has long-term depression, we most often associate this with autumn weather or bad mood. But in fact, this problem has deeper roots. Sometimes it even requires treatment for depression with medications. But do medications help, and why does such a problem arise in the first place?

What is depression?

The term “depression” itself is a scientific term. Before its appearance, this human condition was called completely differently. Most often they said that he had melancholy, which would pass with time. But in many cases, people experiencing an attack of depression feel a meaningless existence; they do not want to live. Unfortunately, this phenomenon often ends tragically. If a person does not see meaning in his life, then why continue to exist?

Symptoms of depression include the following:

• melancholy and burdened pessimism;
• apathy, which leads to indifference and decreased activity;
• loss of interest not only in work and sex, but even in religion;
• guilt;
• the appearance of insomnia and loss of appetite.

A person understands that his life is completely meaningless, his goals and aspirations have disappeared. For him, it doesn’t matter at all what tomorrow will bring him, since he sees no meaning in today’s existence.

It turns out that not only certain people who are completely indifferent to religion do not know what their purpose in life is, but even some Christians. Eric Evalds, a Christian psychologist from Finland, believes that depression is a stage of overcoming grief. This does not only mean death loved one, but the loss of even dreams and feelings. Is there a cure for depression, when a person has lost interest in life due to feelings of shame or low self-esteem? After all, there is no way to get rid of this condition with the help of a pill.

What does the Bible say about depression?

In fact, the word “depression” never appears in the Bible. And this is not surprising, because Holy Bible is not a medical textbook. But the Bible says a lot about human behavior that completely coincides with the symptoms of depression. And there is also a way out, how to get rid of it. As soon as a person asks the question, what is my purpose in life, and this will be the first step in overcoming depression.

The Bible uses pre-scientific terminology. But there are often places where a person not only prays, but expresses a cry from the soul: “My God! Why have you forsaken me? This expression appears repeatedly in the Psalter. Doesn't this indicate that this person is depressed? What if you read the book of Job, the songs that King David composed? Is it possible to forget the bitter tears of the Apostle Peter when he denied Christ? Was it worth living after this?

Among all the symptoms of depression, guilt should come first. For wrong actions or words often later lead to regret and a feeling of shame. Therefore, one of the most effective methods that help find a way out of depression is to review your inner man. You should not look for guilt in other people, you need to check your thoughts, words and actions. It is possible that when a person realizes his guilt, he will be able to cope with depression much faster. And this means that you just need to repent before God.

In this article I will try to cover the topic the meaninglessness of life, and at the same time answer the question of What is the meaning of life is concluded. Paradoxical? The whole point is that man is a relative phenomenon. And life as such is absolute. Let's try to cover the topic of meaninglessness and the meaning of life, both in relative and absolute terms.
Why is human life actually meaningless? Because it passes. Everything is fleeting, fleeting, transitory. We live now and experience myriads of “important” events and conditions. And all this, after a hundred years, will become nothing. Billions of people lived before us. Everything they suffered and enjoyed was gone forever. Who remembers them? Only a few are known, but even those we know only by hearsay. Perhaps for this reason a person craves fame. Thanks to this illusion, he prolongs his life. However, on the planetary and cosmic level, even centuries are just a brief moment. Against the background of eternity - nothing at all. In what meaning of life, if it inevitably goes into oblivion? Sadly? That's in vain! Let's move on.

In order not to beat around the bush, I will pose a direct question. Does life have an objective meaning? Or meaninglessness– the only truth we have to put up with? The answer to both questions, from my point of view, is positive.

All we know is ours about reality. Every thought, concept, idea has meaning. Understanding occurs when we comprehend the meaning of an idea. What, exactly, is meaning anyway? This is the very essence of thought. Meaning– this is the value of the variable, which is our thought. Can we call a thought real? After all, a person is not able to hold it. The very nature of thinking reflects the fleeting nature of life. As soon as a thought comes, it is no longer there. And all we know is only our thoughts about the world. Meaning of life exists at the level of thought, and at the same level it dissolves and manifests itself in meaninglessness.

People tend to believe that the more seriously they take life, the closer this perception is to reality. In fact, this seriousness expressed cosmic sadness our sad personality - like a childish grimace, which we, in our naivety, take seriously as something real, important and trustworthy. The child is crying and he is serious. He doesn't realize how baseless his idea is. Our adult children's games make us worry and take what is happening seriously. This invaluable experience is necessary in order to eventually see that we are free from it and were never truly bound by it.

What is the meaning of human life? After all, we are people, and regarding us, perhaps the right question should sound different. What is a person needed for? And if the world is as limited as it sees it, then man is a random phenomenon, and then there is no meaning. We were born by our parents. However, we were lucky, and the parents were not so selfish as to consider the child their creation, which was created solely for their purposes. After all, they themselves were born and raised in the same way, and allow us to become independent. IN social society As a person grows up, he begins to realize that now he himself can decide how and for what to live. And this experience of independence hints to us at the meaninglessness of life, because meaning can only exist when we live not for ourselves, but for the sake of something beyond our little personality.

If man was created by God, then , meaning of life connected with the Creator's purpose. In this case, the meaning that is embedded in our lives is the reason why we were created. And since all the best within us manifests itself as our soul develops, perhaps the purpose of our existence is manifested in its fruits. Perhaps love, which we place at the head of all experiences without any vulgar shades, is that cherished answer. In any case, from this angle, the meaning of life is in the development of consciousness. .

However, if we talk about life as such, on an absolute level it is neither meaningful nor painful. meaninglessness. All this is just the work of the mind. Life as such is directly related to this. The closer we come to an awareness of reality, the deeper the understanding that there is neither good nor bad in either meaning or its absence. There is no real duality in this. All this is the work of our mind here and now.

Pointlessness - the same illusion as meaning, because without meaning it cannot exist. If meaninglessness really existed, we would simply have nothing to talk about. Is the donut hole real? Can we say that a donut hole is such a heavy, doomed state of cosmic sadness? Can we say that it is equivalent to nirvana? Can we say that she is at least something? Or maybe this is a life preserver? When we talk about meaninglessness, all we really mean is dissolving meaning. It still exists, although it dissolves in our minds, so for now there is something to talk about. But as soon as it dissolves, catharsis, freedom and relief sets in!

Pointlessness- this is simply the destruction of our attachment, devaluation, or parting with what made our life meaningful at one time or another. It’s hard for us while the attachment is crumbling. During this time, we experience sadness, loss, and emptiness where the objects of our affection once were. But when attachment is already destroyed, we gain freedom. When we lose, we experience the loss, but when we let go of the meaning completely, the pain goes away. We free ourselves from the burden of meaning and from the weight of its dissolution, which seemed to us to be meaninglessness. When attachment is broken, relief comes. Against the backdrop of eternity, all good things pass. All bad things pass! We - eternal wanderers, eternal spectators, eternal players. And even if you do not believe in this, and life ends after the death of the body, worries about this do not make any sense. Will longing bring happiness closer?

Excerpt from Victor Pelevin’s novel “T”:

“Lin Tzu, in response to a question about the nature of Buddha, said that this is a hole in a latrine. Soloviev believed that this was the most accurate explanation that could be given. Imagine, he said, a dirty and filthy outhouse. Is there anything pure in it? Eat. It's a hole in its center. Nothing can stain it. Everything will just fall down through it. The hole has no edges, no boundaries, no shape - only the toilet seat has all this. And at the same time, the entire temple of uncleanness exists solely thanks to this hole. This hole is the most important thing in the latrine, and at the same time something that has nothing to do with it at all. Furthermore, what makes a hole a hole is not its own nature, but what is built around it by people: the outhouse. But the hole simply does not have its own nature - at least until the moment when the lama, sitting on the toilet seat, begins to divide it into three kayas.”

The example is rough. But quite bright and largely accurate. The more we search meaning of life, the further we are from real awareness of the meaning of what is happening here and now. We ourselves give meaning to what happens. And when the feeling meaninglessness will be experienced quite intensely and deeply, we can intuitively choose what and how to make meaningful, “important”, and what to devalue and leave forgotten in the past. This flexibility is a reward for lived experience.

That life, as it actually is, is meaningless, that it does not in the least satisfy the conditions under which it could be recognized as having meaning - this is the truth of which everything convinces us: and personal experience, and direct observations of life, and historical knowledge of the fate of humanity, and natural scientific knowledge of the world structure and world evolution.

It is meaningless, first of all - and this, from the point of view of personal spiritual needs, is the most important thing - the personal life of each of us. The first, so to speak, minimum condition for the possibility of achieving the meaning of life is Liberty, only being free can we act “meaningfully”, strive for a reasonable goal, seek complete satisfaction; everything necessary is subordinated to the blind forces of necessity, acts blindly, like a stone attracted by the earth as it falls. But we are connected on all sides, shackled by the forces of necessity. We are bodily and therefore subject to all the blind, mechanical laws of world matter; stumbling, we fall like a stone, and if by chance this happens on the rails of a train or in front of a car running into us, then the elementary laws of physics immediately stop our life, and with it all our hopes, aspirations, plans for the reasonable implementation of life. An insignificant bacillus of tuberculosis or another disease can end the life of a genius, stop the greatest thought and the most sublime aspiration. We are also subject to the blind laws and forces of organic life: due to their irresistible action, the duration of our life, even in its normal course, is too short for the full discovery and implementation of the spiritual forces inherent in us; before we have time to learn from the experience of life and the previously accumulated stock of knowledge to live wisely and correctly fulfill our calling, our body has already become decrepit and we are approaching the grave; hence the inevitable, even with a long life, tragic feeling of premature and unexpected death - “is it already over? and I was just about to live for real, correct the mistakes of the past, make up for wasted time and wasted energy! – and the difficulty of believing in one’s own aging. And in addition, we are burdened from within with a heavy burden of blind spontaneous biological forces that interfere with our intelligent life. We inherit from our parents passions and vices that torment us and on which our strength is fruitlessly wasted; in the person of our own animal nature, we are doomed to torture and hard labor, chained to a wheelbarrow, senselessly suffering punishment for the sins of our fathers or, in general, for the sins to which nature itself condemned us. Our best and most reasonable aspirations are either dashed by external obstacles or weakened by our own blind passions. And besides, blind nature has arranged us in such a way that we are doomed to illusions, doomed to wander and get into dead ends, and we discover the illusoryness and fallacy of our aspirations only when they have caused us irreparable harm and our best forces have already gone to them. One wastes himself on revelry and pleasures and, when physical and spiritual health is already hopelessly lost, he becomes bitterly convinced of the vulgarity and meaninglessness of all pleasures, of the insatiability of life’s melancholy by them; the other ascetically abstains from all the immediate joys of life, tempering and preserving himself for a great calling or holy deed, so that later, when life is already drawing to an end, he becomes convinced that he does not have this calling at all and that this deed is not at all holy, and in powerless repentance regrets the fruitlessly missed joys of life. Who remains alone, afraid to burden himself with the burdens of family, suffers from the cold of lonely old age and mourns the already unattainable comfort of family and the caress of love; who, succumbing to the temptation of family, found himself burdened with burdens family worries, immersed in the petty vanity of family squabbles and unrest, fruitlessly repents that he voluntarily sold his freedom for imaginary benefits, gave himself into the slavery of forced labor and did not realize his true calling. All our passions and strongest inclinations deceptively present themselves as something absolutely important and precious for us, promising us joy and peace if we achieve their satisfaction, and then, in hindsight, when it is too late to correct the mistake, they reveal their illusoryness and falsity its claim to exhaust the deepest aspiration of our being and give, through its satisfaction, fullness and strength to our being. Hence the inevitable melancholic, secretly deeply and hopelessly tragic consciousness for all people, expressed by the French proverb: “si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait” - the consciousness of disappointed hopes, the unattainability of true happiness on earth. Goethe, nicknamed “the darling of fate,” who lived an exceptionally long, happy and fruitful life, the owner of the rarest gift - the ability to combine creative energy, immeasurable hard work and powerful self-restraining willpower with thirst and the ability to experience all life’s pleasures, to revel in all the joys of life - this chosen one of humanity at the end of his life he admitted that in 80 years of his life he had known only a few days of complete happiness and satisfaction; and he experienced the inevitable tragedy of human life, he said that the essence of life is recognized only by those who eat their bread in tears and spend sleepless, painful nights in melancholy and grief, and that fate consoles us with only one tireless refrain: “endure hardships.” (Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren!). If this is the life wisdom of the lucky man of humanity, then what conclusion should be drawn by all the other, less fortunate and gifted people, with all their weakness, with all the severity of their lot in life, with all the contradictions tearing them apart from within and the spiritual weaknesses clouding their paths?

We are all slaves of blind fate, its blind forces outside of us and in us. And a slave, as we already know and as is clear by itself, cannot have a meaningful life. The ancient Greeks, who so vividly felt the harmony and cosmic order, the harmony of world life, at the same time left us eternal, unforgettable examples of tragic consciousness that human dreams and hopes have no place in this harmony. The popular consciousness believed that the gods were jealous of human happiness and always took measures to punish and humiliate the lucky one in order to compensate for random human luck with bitter blows of fate; and, on the other hand, it believed that even the blessed gods are subject, as to a higher principle, to an inexorable blind fate. The more purified religious consciousness of their sages taught that, according to the laws of world harmony, no one should seize too much for himself, excessively outgrow the general level, that a person should know his humble place and that even individuality man is a sinful illusion, punishable; Only in the voluntary recognition of himself as a service dependent link of the world whole, only in the humble acceptance of his slavish dependence on the cosmos and his cosmic insignificance does a person submit to the divine will, fulfill his only purpose and can hope not to ruin himself. The result of both views is the same. And therefore the already naive Homer says that

...of the creatures that breathe and crawl in the dust,

Truly in the whole universe there is no more unhappy person

and all the Greek poets agree with him in this. “Both the earth and the sea are full of disasters for man,” says Hesiod. “Man’s life is weak, his worries are fruitless, in his short life sorrow follows sorrow” (Simonides). Man in this world as a whole is only a “breath and a shadow” - or even less - “ dream shadow"(Pindar). And all ancient philosophy, from Anaximander, Heraclitus and Empedocles to Plato, Marcus Aurelius and Plotinus, diverging in everything else from the teachings of the poets and fighting against them, in this pessimism, in this bitter recognition of the hopeless vanity, weakness and meaninglessness of man’s earthly life, converges with Greek poetry. All the living wisdom of the rest of humanity coincides with it - the Bible and the Mahabharata, the Babylonian epic and grave inscriptions ancient egypt. “Vanity of vanities,” said Ecclesiastes, vanity of vanities – all is vanity! What benefit does man have from all his labors with which he works under the sun?.. The fate of the sons of men and the fate of animals is the same fate; as they die, so these die, and they all have one breath, and man has no advantage over cattle: because everything is vanity!.. And I blessed the dead, who died long ago, more than the living, who live to this day; and more blessed than both is he who has not yet existed, who has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun. And I turned, and saw under the sun that it is not to the swift that the race is won, nor to the brave victory, nor to the wise bread, nor to the wise riches, nor to the skillful will favor, but time and chance for them all” (Eccl. 1, 1–2; III, 19; IV, 2–3;

But let us even assume that the wisdom of all times and peoples is wrong. Let us assume that it is truly possible happy life that all our desires will be satisfied, that the cup of life will be full for us with only sweet wine, not poisoned by any bitterness. And yet life, even the most sweet and serene, in itself cannot satisfy us; the nagging question “why? For what?" even in happiness it gives rise to insatiable melancholy in us. for the sake of the process of life itself does not satisfy, but only temporarily lulls us to sleep. The inevitable death, which equally ends both the happiest and the most unfortunate life, makes them equally meaningless. Our empirical life is a fragment: for itself, without connection with a certain whole, it can have just as little meaning as a fragment of a page torn out of a book. If it can have meaning, then only in connection with the common life of humanity and the whole world. And we have already seen that a meaningful life must inevitably be a service to something other than itself, as a self-contained personal life, that only in the fulfillment of a calling, in the implementation of some super-personal and self-sufficient value, can a person find himself as a reasonable a creature that requires an intelligent, meaningful life. The closest whole with which we are connected and of which we form a part is the life of a people or humanity; Without the homeland and connection with its destiny, without cultural creativity, creative unity with the past of humanity and its future, without love for people and solidarity in their common destiny, we cannot realize ourselves, find a truly meaningful life. Like a leaf or a branch of a tree, we feed on the juices of the whole, flourish with its life, and dry up and fall into dust if there is no life in the whole itself. In order for individual life to have meaning, it is therefore necessary for universal life to have meaning, for the history of mankind to be a coherent and meaningful process in which some great common and undeniably valuable goal is achieved. But even here, with an impartial and honest consideration of the empirical course of things, we are faced with a new disappointment, a new obstacle to the possibility of finding the meaning of life.

For, just as each individual personal life of a person is meaningless, the general life of humanity is also meaningless. The history of humanity, if we are looking for the meaning that is immanent to it and inherent in itself, deceives our expectations just as much as our personal life. It is, on the one hand, a set of meaningless accidents, a long string of collective, national and international events that do not follow rationally from one another, do not lead to any goal, but happen as a result of a spontaneous collision and crossing of collective human passions; and, on the other hand, since history is still the consistent implementation of human ideals, it is at the same time the history of their collapses, the steady exposure of their illusoryness and inconsistency, an endlessly long and painful object lesson in which humanity learns to see the futility of its hopes for a reasonable and good order of their collective life. Faith in progress, in the tireless and continuous improvement of humanity, in its steady, without stops and falls, ascent to the heights of goodness and reason - this faith, which has inspired many people over the past two centuries, has now been exposed in its inconsistency with such obviousness , that we can only be surprised at the naivety of the generations that shared it. Humanity in its empirical historical life does not move “forward” at all; since we imagine basing our lives on serving the public good, the implementation of a perfect social order, embodiment in collective life and human relations principles of truth, goodness and reason, we must admit with courageous sobriety that world history is not at all an approach to this goal, that humanity is no closer to it now than a century, two or twenty centuries ago. Even preserving the values ​​already achieved turns out to be impossible for him. Where is Hellenic wisdom and beauty now, the mere memory of which fills our souls with sad tenderness? Which of today's sages, if he does not delude himself with conceit, can reach with his thought those spiritual heights at which the thought of Plato or Plotinus freely soared? Are we now close to that pacification and legal ordering of the entire cultural world under a single authority, which the world already achieved during the golden age of the Roman Empire with its pax Romana? Can we hope for a revival in the world of those unattainable examples of deep and clear religious faith that were manifested by Christian martyrs and confessors of the first centuries of our era? Where is now the wealth of individuality, the flourishing fullness and diversity of life of the Middle Ages, which the arrogant vulgarity of the wretched enlightenment called the era of barbarism and which, as pipe dream, attracts sensitive souls hungry in the desert modern civilization? Truly, one must very firmly believe in the absolute value of external technical improvements - airplanes and wireless telegraphs, long-range guns and asphyxiating gases, starched collars and water closets - in order to share faith in the continuous improvement of life. And the very progress of empirical science is indisputable for last centuries and in many ways beneficent - isn’t he more than redeemed by that spiritual blindness, that disregard for absolute values, that vulgarity of philistine self-satisfaction, which have made such depressing progress in recent centuries and seem to tirelessly continue to progress in European world? And don’t we see that a cultured, enlightened Europe, illuminated by scientific reason and purified by humanitarian moral ideas, has reached an inhuman and senseless world war and is standing on the threshold of anarchy, savagery and new barbarism? And is it really a terrible historical catastrophe that occurred in Russia and immediately trampled into the mud, giving into the hands of the unbridled mob both what we revered in it as “Holy Rus'”, and what we hoped for and were proud of in our dreams of “ great Russia”, is not a decisive exposure of the falsity of the “theory of progress”? We have learned to understand - and in this respect, direct life impressions coincide with the main achievements of objective historical science over the last hundred years - that continuous progress does not exist, that humanity lives in a succession of ups and downs, and that all its great achievements in all areas of life - state and social, scientific and artistic, religious and moral - have their end and are replaced by periods of stagnation and decline, when humanity has to learn anew and rise again from the depths. “Everything great on earth scatters like smoke - today the lot has fallen to Three, tomorrow it will fall to others.” Under the influence of this consciousness, one of the most subtle, sensitive and comprehensively educated historical thinkers of our time, Oswald Spengler, teaches that “world history is a fundamentally meaningless succession of the birth, flourishing, decline and death of individual cultures.”

And when we, not satisfied with this conclusion, look for some kind of coherence and consistency behind this meaningless change of surges and fading of the spiritual waves of historical life, when we try to unravel the rhythm of world history and through it its meaning, then the only thing we achieve is clarification of its meaning as a universal religious education through a series of bitter disappointments, exposing the vanity of all earthly human hopes and dreams. The history of mankind is the history of the consistent collapse of its hopes, the experimental exposure of its delusions. All human ideals, all dreams of building life on one or another individual moral principle are weighed by life itself, are found to be too easy and are rejected by life as worthless. Just as individual human life in its empirical implementation has only one meaning - to teach us that life wisdom that happiness is impossible, that all our dreams were illusory and that the process of life, as such, is meaningless - so all-human life is a difficult experimental school, necessary to cleanse us from the illusions of all-human happiness, to expose the vanity and deceitfulness of all our hopes for the embodiment in this world of the kingdom of goodness and truth, all our human plans for ideal social self-organization.

And how could it be otherwise? When we think about history, about the common fate of mankind, we somehow forget that the history of mankind is only a fragment and a dependent part space history, world life as a whole. That captivity - from the outside and from the inside - by random, blind, cosmic forces alien to our cherished aspirations, which we saw as the fatal state of an individual human life - this captivity is inherent to the same, if not greater extent, in universal human life. On all sides, humanity is surrounded by blind forces and fatal, blind necessities of cosmic nature. The mere fact that human life, individual and collective, boils down to such a huge extent in that same struggle for existence, in the continuous, suicidal fight for food that dominates the entire animal world, that, despite all technical improvements, the reproduction of the human race is becoming relatively smaller on earth fertile soil, coal, iron and everything that people need, and the struggle for the possession of them is becoming more and more fierce - this alone is sufficient evidence of how natural conditions space life fetter human life and infect it with their meaninglessness. And in our breasts - and especially in the soul of humanity as a collective whole, in the hearts of the masses - live passions and drives that are as blind and murderous as all other cosmic forces; and if an individual can easily fall into self-deception, considering himself free from the blindness of cosmic forces, then precisely masses and all kinds of historical groups show us in their lives such striking examples of subordination to blind instincts and crude elemental passions that in relation to them this self-deception is impossible or much less excusable. Let us imagine, at least for a moment, with complete realistic clarity, the situation of humanity, which corresponds to true reality, since we take life in its empirical composition. In some corner of the world space, a lump of world dirt, called the globe; on its surface swarm, circling and flying with it, billions and billions of living boogers generated from it, including bipeds who call themselves people; senselessly circling in cosmic space, senselessly being born and dying a moment later according to the laws of cosmic nature, they at the same time, driven by the same blind forces, fight among themselves, tirelessly strive for something, fuss about something, arrange among themselves what -the order of life. And these insignificant creatures of nature dream of the meaning of their common life, want to achieve happiness, reason and truth. What monstrous blindness, what pitiful self-deception!

To understand this, we don’t even have to go as far as the prevailing natural scientific concept of the world requires; we don’t have to imagine the world at all as a dead chaos, as a mechanism of lifeless physical and chemical forces. This view, which to many still seems to be the highest achievement of precise scientific knowledge, is only evidence of the narrowness, soullessness and scientific stupidity to which all “progressive” humanity has reached. The ancient Greeks knew better than us that the world is not a dead machine, but a living being, that it is full of living and animate forces. Fortunately, the spiritual crisis that humanity is currently experiencing has already opened the eyes of many of the most insightful natural scientists of our time and made them understand the wretchedness and falsity of a purely mechanical natural-scientific worldview. From all sides - in the latest criticism of the mechanical physics of Galileo and Newton, in the latest physical-mechanical discoveries that decompose inert matter into charges of forces, in the criticism of Darwinian teachings about evolution, in the insight into the vitalistic anti-mechanistic principles of organic life - signs are being revived and re-opened to the human gaze everywhere. , indicating that the world is not a dead chaos of inert material particles, but something much more complex and living. The reproach that the Russian poet sent to modern people:

They don't see or hear

They live in this world as if in the dark,

For them, even the sun, you know, does not breathe

And there is no life in the sea waves, -

This reproach is now repeated by many representatives of scientific knowledge. The world is not a dead machine or a chaos of inert matter, “not a cast, not a soulless face”; the world is a great living being and at the same time a unity of many living forces.

And yet the world is not a seeing and intelligent being. He is a blind giant who writhes in agony, is tormented by his own passions, gnaws at himself in pain and finds no outlet for his strength. And since man is part of it, there is only his insignificant part and creation, an insignificant cell or molecule of his body, and since the soul of man itself is only a particle of this cosmic soul, subordinate to its forces and overwhelmed by them, man is still hopelessly chained, captured captured by the mighty blind forces of the cosmos and, together with it, doomed to writhe in senseless torment, to be born senselessly, to strive somewhere and to die fruitlessly in the blind process of the tireless cycle of world life. And we have already seen that the ancient Greeks, admiring the beauty and living harmony of the cosmic whole, with bitterness and hopeless despair recognized the hopelessness, futility and meaninglessness of human life in it.

Wherever we cast our gaze, from whatever side we look at life - since we try to honestly comprehend the empirical, objectively given essence of life - everywhere and through everything we are convinced of its fatal meaninglessness. We have seen the conditions for the attainability of the meaning of life: the existence of God as an absolute Good, eternal Life And eternal light Truth, and the divinity of man, the opportunity for him to join this true, divine life, to establish on it, to completely fill his own life with it. But the world is not and its life is not divine life; the opposite statement of pantheism can only abstractly seduce someone, but in living experience we are too clearly aware of the discrepancy between both: death reigns in the world, it is subject to the all-destroying stream of time, it is full of darkness and blindness. And if this is the world, do we have the right to at least infer from it the existence of God? All attempts of human thought to reach the recognition of God in this way have been and continue to be futile. No matter how much we admire the harmony and grandeur of the universe, the beauty and complexity of living beings in it, no matter how much we tremble before the immensity of its depth - both contemplating the starry sky and realizing our own soul - but the presence of suffering, evil, blindness and corruption it contradicts his divinity and does not allow us to discern in him, as he is and is directly given to us, decisive evidence of the presence of an omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipotent Creator. As one insightful modern German religious thinker (Max Scheler) says: “if we were to infer from knowledge of the world the existence of God, then the presence in the world of at least one worm writhing in pain would be a decisive contraindication.” Considering the world as it is, we inevitably come to a dilemma in the question of its first cause or the action of God in it. One of two things: either there is no God at all and the world is a creation of a senseless blind force, or God, as an all-good and all-knowing being, exists, but then he is not omnipotent and is not the Creator and sole Provider of the world. The first conclusion is made by the currently dominant worldview, the second, deeper one, for purely religious reasons, was affirmed by the Gnostics and in modern times was again made by a number of thinkers who sought God on a purely intellectual path. But in both cases - and if there is no God, and if He is not able to help us and save us from the world's evil and meaninglessness - our life is equally meaningless. But as we have seen, even the existence of God is not enough to find meaning in our lives: for this we need the possibility of our human participation in the light and life of the Divine, we need eternity, perfect enlightenment and peace of satisfaction in our own, human life. And this condition - regardless of the difficulties in all other respects - is absolutely impossible, since man is a part and creation of the world, cosmic nature with all its blindness, imperfection and corruption. In order to believe in the achievability of the meaning of life, we seem to be forced to deny this indisputable fact of captivity and permeation of man by the forces of nature, we must go against the evidence of an irrevocable fact. Doesn't this mean that a positive solution to the question of the meaning of life, the real acquisition of this meaning is impossible and that we are doomed to only powerlessly dream about it, clearly seeing the absolute impracticability of our dream?

The meaninglessness of life was not revealed yesterday; as we have already seen, ancient wisdom affirmed it, perhaps with greater strength and clarity than is available to modern man who has lost a holistic perception of life and therefore tends to become intoxicated with illusions. And all of humanity has long had a religious consciousness, believed in God and the possibility of human salvation, and thereby affirmed the feasibility of the meaning of life. Is it just simple inconsistency, inability or fear of drawing the final conclusion from indisputable facts? Such a judgment would be a hasty and frivolous conclusion on our part. We must, on the contrary, think more deeply about the matter ourselves, more fully evaluate the motives guiding religious consciousness humanity, and now ask yourself the question: is an inference from the empirical nature of the world and life a sufficient and only criterion for resolving the question of the meaning of life?

While the lives of very, very many people on the planet have no meaning. It does not for the reason that people themselves do not comprehend their lives. These people do not understand why they live and this does not bother them at all.

Why are some people not interested in their meaning in life? They don’t care at all why they live, why they live, why on earth do they live? Well, they live and live, what else do you need? Here's the question.

Please note that I am now wondering not about the meaning of life, but about the fact that few people need this meaning.

They will tell me that there is no point in searching for the meaning of life when you still can’t find it. They will tell me that for thousands of years people have been trying to answer this question, but they have never been able to do it.

That's exactly what they tell me.

“Why do you think the answer has not been found? - I ask. “What makes you think that those people who were looking for the meaning of their existence did not find it?”

Take me, for example, I found it for myself. And they immediately ask me to talk about the meaning of my life. But I am rude and I answer in a harsh tone that this is none of your business. What do you care about my meaning in life? You are looking for yours, not looking at mine and discussing whether it suits you or not. That's what I tell them.

They look at me with surprise. Many people do not understand that the meaning of life is not only not the same for everyone, but they thought that it was the same for everyone, but, in addition, among other things, it dies along with the one for whom it was intended.

I'd like to think that I'm not entirely right. I really want to believe that every person thinks about the meaning of his life. Only he doesn’t want to admit it. And I would believe it. I would believe that every person thinks about the meaning of his life, or at least most people think about it. But what prevents me from believing this is what I see and what I encounter every day. This is meaninglessness in people's minds.

What kind of woman can be raised if from childhood you instill in her the idea that the main thing for her is to become a mother and wife. People, come to your senses! What a wife, and what a mother.

But okay. At least girls are taught this. Things are much worse with boys. Much worse. They are not taught anything at all. And when unmarried boys tell their parents that their girls are expecting a child from them, the parents insist on abortion.

Are you saying that not all parents insist on this? Who cares if it’s not all. It was not enough for everyone to insist on this. Of course, not all parents, but there are those who insist. Or do you think that there are not so many of them? I assure you that there are plenty of them.

And here’s another noteworthy thing about the situation with abortion: it is mothers who most insist that the girl of their unmarried son have an abortion. They thus take care of their son.

I don’t want to comment at length on this and similar situations now. I will say one thing: this is a crime. Who does it? It is caused by the senselessness of his mother and wife. After all, the girl was taught nothing more than to become a good mother and wife. One thing is bad, the son is a drug addict, and the husband is an alcoholic and talks to the TV. Here you go: we got what we wanted: we became a good mother and wife.

At fifty, senseless men leave their families and start new ones. At fifty. But she doesn’t understand how this could happen, because she gave all of herself to him and to her children, for whom the only thing upsetting about this is that the inheritance will now have to be shared with new brothers and sisters.

And the mother is forced to file for child support because, in the literal sense of the word, she has nothing to eat. She lived all her life dependent on her husband. And the children just clench their teeth in anger and swear at their parents, no matter what. So the girl has become a good mother and wife.

An isolated example, please? Far from unique? You just don't know life well. And don’t risk neglecting what I’m saying now, but I’m saying that human senselessness is to blame for everything.

Neither vodka, nor drugs, but it is senselessness that pushes people to this.

Teachers, I am turning to you now. Why is there no subject in schools that teaches how to find meaning in your life? Do not answer. I know without you. It does not exist for the reason that all our schools, all of them, without any exception, are meaningless. Our schools are meaningless, and therefore the children in them start smoking and drinking.

And our children study poorly for the reason that all this is meaningless, what they teach there. The teachers themselves do not see the point in their activities, so what else should we ask and from whom? From the Minister of Education?

Reforms - you say? These are not reforms. And then they say that some kind of reforms are being carried out at school today. All this is for the chickens' laugh. These are metamorphoses, not reforms. Real metamorphoses.

They tell me that this is how it needs to be for now. It is necessary, they say, to cultivate a certain new consciousness, and then these new people will create something grandiose.

They will create shish with butter for you. Look at the USA and you will see exactly what they can create.

The meaninglessness of fathers and mothers forces them to look for meaning in their children and then a very terrible thing happens. Children cease to belong to themselves, but become the property of their mothers and fathers.

And that’s what’s remarkable. Well, it would be a complicated matter. Which? Search and find the meaning of your life. But no. Just try, mention it to someone in whom you clearly see absolute meaninglessness. By doing so, you will not just ruin his or her mood, but you will cause serious irritation, turning into anger, into rage.

A person doesn’t like it when people say that to him. You tell him anything, but don’t accuse him of a meaningless existence. If he admits this, he will have to agree with many of the crazy things he has done.

- But why? Why don't people look for the meaning of their lives? - I ask.

- People have no time. There’s no time, there’s a lot to do: the dishes haven’t been washed, we need to go fishing, it’s spring now, we’ll have to plant potatoes so soon,” they answer me, and continue, “what’s the point of what you’re saying?” Life? Let's do it sometime later. First, potatoes, a yacht, a house, my boy’s girl has to have an abortion, dad is about to get fit, it wouldn’t be bad to go to Egypt for a couple of weeks. Then - about the meaning. You go, but leave your business card. We will definitely contact you. There's no time for you now. Now I need to think about something else. Now I’m thinking about what kind of car I should buy this year - this is the answer I hear from them.

If you really want to achieve great things, then start by looking for the meaning of your life. I'm not saying that you will find it right away. But it does not matter. You can permanently search for the meaning of life and at the same time start something else. Let it be a yacht, and palaces, and thoughts about your son’s pregnant girls, and cars, and money, but... with one condition, that at the same time, you think about the meaning of your life.

At some point, you will definitely find what you are looking for, and it will change you. You will gain the confidence that you don't have, but that you need if you have set big goals for yourself. True confidence gives only the meaning of life and nothing else. Everything else that seems like confidence to you is, in reality, nothing more than recklessness.

The meaning of your life will not save you from problems, but it will give you the opportunity to solve problems in the only correct way. Can you imagine what it’s like to know the only correct way to solve a problem. And here I will tell you that abortion can be the only right decision, and divorce, and a yacht and palaces and everything else, if this right decision is prompted by the meaning of your life.

And you don’t need to tell me or anyone that your actions are already dictated by the meaning of your life. Tell it to yourself. Better yet, let your actions themselves speak to the fact that it is through them that your life is comprehended. But this will only happen if you have found the meaning of your life. It is not difficult. Give it a try. I am sure that in thirty years, no more, you will find what you are looking for. Good luck to you.

You ask, for whom am I writing all this? You are insightful. I'm really not writing this for everyone. I am writing this for . And everything I write, I write only for them.

I wish you health, love and creative success. Best regards, © 2011

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