You’ve heard it a million times: what makes life meaningful and valuable is its ephemeral finiteness. Supposedly, life is more valuable when it is in short supply, right? This is what the most basic law of economics and human interaction, the law of scarcity, states. Scarcity dictates that the rarer something is, the more valuable it is. For example, if gold were in infinite supply, then it would be worthless. The same with life: if it were infinite, then it would be worthless, right? I call bullshit…
The law of scarcity refers to quantity, not duration. If all gold in the world would expire in a couple of years from now, then it would be almost worthless, and it would keep losing its value the closer it got to its expiration date. Nobody would want to invest in it. You wouldn’t want to create any electronics with it, you wouldn’t want to invest your wealth in it, and you wouldn’t do any research on it. What would be the point? Its application would be meaningless. Sure, you’d do with it what you could for the time being, but would people feel desperate to get their hands on it? Not really.
Gold is valuable because it is in finite supply but with potentially infinite duration.
In the same spirit, a human life is not priceless just because it is finite; on the contrary. We know this because we value the life of a child more than the value of a 90-year old. Ask your life insurance agent why. It’s because of the potential life-years ahead of a younger person that define their life’s value. And it’s OK. The longer the life ahead, the more its value, because it potentially holds more experiences, more relationships, more knowledge, more love, more joy. This is why, after a certain age, people tend to “give up”, since there’s no point in investing in your self-improvement. They just retire and wait to die as comfortably as possible.
I remember watching the Lord of the Rings… I felt more shock and sorrow when elves died died in battle than when humans did. Why? Because elves were ageless, and they could potentially live forever. Humans had finite life-years ahead of them. That made, in my eyes, human lives less valuable. An elf on the same battlefield as a human carried with him thousands of years of experiences, memories, relationships, achievements and knowledge. And he had thousands (if not infinite) more years ahead. So which was more tragic; the death of a human, or the death of an elf?
If life were to be meaningful, it would have lasted.
The great tragedy of human existence is the knowledge of death. This is why we rush to accomplish as much as we can in the limited time we have alive, and the even more limited time we have being young. Life is not short; youth is. And the knowledge of death is why we give up when we feel there’s not enough time ahead to achieve anything meaningful and new. We rush, and we rationalize this tragic reality with notions of meaning in death: “Death is necessary because it paves the way for new life. Death is necessary because it gives value to life. Death is necessary because it gives purpose.” No, it isn’t.
There is no meaning or necessity in death. Death doesn’t give you purpose, nor value, nor is it a prerequisite for new life. What is the point of new life when it too will fade into the nothingness from which it came? What is the point of life, if it is not durable?
If there were a meaning in death, there would be a meaning in life too. And there is no meaning in life that escapes death. And asserting that there is a meaning in death suggests that there is causality in the universe, or a creation of the universe by some consciousness. Is that what we are doing?
Some say that death is necessary because it gives the opportunity for new life to emerge in a world with finite resources. However, the suggestion of a “necessity for death” infers that we were created by an intelligent design with intelligent purpose, so if a “creator” could consider this scarcity in resources, then why couldn’t it instead create more accessible resources in an apparently infinite universe?
And the notion that the meaning of life is its perpetuation is a circular reasoning fallacy; there is no meaning in perpetuating meaninglessness.
Since arguing from necessity suggests causality, when discussing the meaning of life, we inevitably entertain the possibility of the simulation theory or intelligent design, or whatever. We talk about life “being designed” by nature as if we acknowledge some sort of “intelligent design” of existence. It is as if we accept an obvious causality in the emergence of life. But we are conflicted about it, because if all life requires causality, then so does the cause of life itself, and on and on.
This is why we don’t believe in gods and demons, right? The greatest argument for the emergence of existence out of nothing is the infinite regression paradox. This paradox states that, if life requires to be created, then so does the creator, and so does the creator of the creator, and so on. This existential question regresses infinitely, without ever arriving at an initial creator to satisfy the question of “where did we come from?” So it’s easier to assume that the universe popped out of nothing, and will end in nothing. It is, therefore, easier to disregard anything that suggests causality of life as mere pareidolia, an illusion of purposeful creation, because causality is impossible, right?
But what if causality is possible when a creator is timeless and unbound by linear time, and therefore requires no causality for its existence? If we accept that a universe can emerge out of nothing, then we can accept that a creating force can exist out of nothing, without infinite creators of creators. Here we are, the human species with its ability to create (supposedly) sentient artificial intelligence. Does that intelligence theorize that it came from nothing, or that it in reality came from a creating force that emerged out of nothing? This is why both religions and the big bang theory are both self-defeating. They may both be wrong and correct at the same time.
But if there is a creating force, then what is the purpose of life? Why isn’t purpose evident, as life’s causality arguable is? If it is obvious that we were perhaps created with cause, it is also obvious that there is no meaning in our lives for us; otherwise it would have been evident for all to see. If we were created, then there is a cause and meaning in our lives, but not for us. We live as pawns in a game that someone else plays, and of which someone else writes the rules.
What’s tragic is that we instinctively feel a desperate need for purpose and meaning in our lives. We delude ourselves with meaningless purposes and purposeless meaning, like '“having a family” or “helping others” or “creating art” or “making a difference”, when we all know that the species will not survive the universe. Deep down, we all know there is no real meaning to life, which is why we kid ourselves with false meaning, or we engage in coping behaviors, like the escapism of work, fame, success, media consumption, food, drugs, and all kinds of indulgences that serve as our everyday “meaning and purpose”.
This sounds quite sad and depressing; and it is. Life has no meaning for us, but what if it did for something else? What if our lives have no meaning for us, but they are a way to enrich an intelligence, or consciousness, of sorts? If there is causation for existence, then there is purpose in our lives for whatever “created” our plane of existence. The only thing that makes sense is that this elaborate life exists as a simulation for something that is timeless, and therefore doesn’t need causation itself. But what if our level of existence, frugal and frail as it is, is an expression of that consciousness, an experience, a journey, and a path of self-growth for something that cannot experience time unless it manifests it this way? What if that timeless thing experiences finite causal spacetime in countless simulations running within it? What if our finite timeline exists within a timeless existential plane, like a dusty music record awaiting in your physical music library (do people still have those?). What if our lives are part of a time-bound simulation within a timeless master reality? What if we are part of that master reality’s experience? What if our lives are a manifestation of that timeless reality?
What if your life is not finite after all, but is instead a tiny part of something vastly superior?…