The Last Existential Taboo: What If Life Has No Meaning?

Sam Harris Says the Search for Meaning Is an Illusion. Is He Right?

It’s hard to find someone who presents a clear-eyed argument against life having any meaning or purpose. So when Sam Harris recently launched into an anti-life-purpose diatribe on his podcast, I was ecstatic. It was like how Republicans must have felt when they first heard Donald Trump say the Iraq War was an unmitigated disaster. The taboo subject had been breached. And once it was in motion, the argument was a plane that landed itself.

I lost my religion decades ago. I was happy to call myself agnostic for years till I had my encounter with the New Atheists. Sam Harris in particular convinced me to go ahead and take on the label atheist. It would be fitting if he were the one to convince me to finally embrace the notion that life has no meaning or purpose.

Up till this moment, I still maintain that it’s important for life to have a sense of meaning. Sam disagrees. I’m currently mulling over the arguments he rattled off on his podcast, transcribed below.

For the sake of clarity and skim-ability, I’ve heavily edited Sam Harris’s arguments. I will be skimming and re-skimming them myself as I continue to wrestle with what is perhaps the ultimate taboo topic: the case against life having any meaning or purpose.

Meaning Is an Anthropomorphic Lens

Without people, you would never be tempted to ask about the meaning of life.

Let’s say people become extinct. There’s just a world filled with non-human animals. Now look at that creation. Look at the wolves and the owls and the cockroaches. You would never be tempted to wonder, well, what’s the meaning of this? Why did this happen?

It’s interesting to consider how it happened and what’s actually happening. But purpose is a very anthropomorphic lens to look at all of this through. There’s just the fact that the cosmos exists and you are part of it.

Meaning Is an Illusion and a Failure of Attention

The emotional question—the feeling that there’s a problem here, emotionally, that has to be solved, on the other side of which your happiness and tranquility will be found—that’s an illusion and that’s the cramp introduced by the question itself.

If you’re asking, “What is the meaning of life?” that’s a failure of your attention to actually contact the mode of feeling good enough in the present moment. Your problem is you just don’t feel as good as you might feel if you paid closer attention to what it’s like to be you in each moment.

When you are really working out hard, or you’re having sex, or you’re appreciating art, or you’ve taken the right drugs, then the question of the meaning of life is forgotten. If, in that moment, you ask yourself, “What is the meaning of life?” the question won’t matter. Instead, you’ll be asking questions like, “Why can’t I feel like this more of the time?” or, “How do I maintain this experience?”

If There Was an Answer to the Meaning of Life Question, It Wouldn’t Be Satisfying

Why ask why in the face of the mystery of life’s meaning? Just imagine if an answer were given to you. Would it really resolve that mystery?

If a voice boomed out of the heavens saying, “Life exists because I wanted it to,” or “Because this is what I thought was beautiful,” does that really answer anything? It just throws up more questions. Then you want to ask that maniac in the sky, what about smallpox?

An actual answer is not going to scratch the itch that anyone thinks it’s going to scratch.

What to Tell a Child About Meaning

If a child were to ask about the meaning of life, I would say: I don’t know, but the mystery isn’t a problem, and the mystery can be the source of a very fun exploration of the world. That’s everything, whether you’re going to explore the mountains or you’re going to explore a jungle, or you’re going to explore science. Your curiosity is not something you’re ever going to get rid of. So curiosity is not a problem.