One morning, you wake up from a five and a half hour long slumber, having slept for too long to call it a horrible sleep but too little to call it a decent sleep. You notice your dry throat, your stuffy eyelids, your room's ambience, and an uncomfortable weight inside your chest, and as you stare at the dreadfully familiar ceiling above your bed, the weight inside your chest becomes more and more intense. It squishes, presses, twists your heart's flesh, but it doesn't hurt, no, it aches, so it would be embarrassing to scream but perhaps more appropriate to grunt, or sigh. Your heart settles on a sigh: "What is the point of all this?"

Well, indeed, what is the point of all this? What's the meaning of life? Surely, the philosophy fellas, having spent the last few millennia talking about this in bars, coffee shops, universities, and Greek temples, must have come up with something satisfactory!

Let us consult the great venerable Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy first. We find the entry titled "The Meaning of Life", scroll down to the table of contents, and we see that the first section is titled… "The Meaning of 'Meaning'", at which point we remember why no one likes philosophy majors.

Why the hell do they have to make it so complicated? The unfortunate answer to that question is: because it is that complicated. For a variety of reasons, most people who are not familiar with philosophy tend to expect philosophy to be a lot simpler than it is. People get really impatient with reading a few pages about the literal meaning of life, while being unsurprised that it takes several months to learn only the basics of linear algebra. It's as if they expect, you know, the meaning of life, to be easier than freshman math. Or perhaps they think "it's all just opinions anyway", a thought that originates from a severe misunderstanding of how philosophy is done by "real" philosophers.

In any case, we should slow down a little bit, keeping in mind that we're taking a jab at arguably the most grand, important, universal topic in human history. Indeed, if we pause and ponder about "the meaning of life", we notice that asking what the meaning of "meaning" in this context is actually really important. We clearly aren't talking about the definition of life, for starters. But if not, are we talking about the importance of life? Or perhaps the goal of life? Might we be talking about, say, what does or should motivate an individual to continue living? Or are we measuring some objective value to a given life? Some might even take it to broadly mean how one should live life. Are any of these conceptions of meaning identical to each other, or have common elements? What about the difference between meaning in life and meaning of life? Come to think of it, what exactly are we talking about when we talk about life? Is it my life, a particular life, the concept of life at large, an arbitrary life, or something else? All of these questions are non-trivial, yet addressing them differently can cause our original question to yield wildly different answers. They are like tiny dials of a sensitive machine– although we don't have to understand exactly what each one does to configure our machine in a specific way, we must still be aware of their presence, always being wary, always being respectful to the underlying complexity.

Okay then. Fine. We understand that things are complicated, we understand we must be patient, and we understand we have a long journey ahead of us. So where exactly do we start? One way we can approach this is by carefully and systematically dissecting the "meaning of life" from the top-down. This approach would be very good for rigorously building up our understanding of philosophy, but also, it would be kind of boring.

So instead, we're gonna opt for a bottom-up "start somewhere concrete" approach. In the next few articles of this series, we will touch on how one specific philosopher or philosophical tradition addresses a specific conception or aspect of the meaning of life. The first one to enter the stage is the notorious (anti-) nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche. Here is a little preview:

​​For the new year—I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year—what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

– Nietzsche's new year resolution, from section 276 of The Joyous Science. Unrelatedly, also my favorite excerpt from anything ever.