The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

by Robert Pantano

A kōan is a riddle or dialectic meditation device used in Zen Buddhist practice that is intentionally designed to, at least on the surface, be unclear and obscure. Its point is not to provide a conclusion or answer to the question presented, but rather, to disregard the relevance of the answer—to detach itself from the functions of conclusion and singular resolution.

Like a hammer cannot screw in a screw, and a nail cannot cut a board of wood, the human mind cannot make sense of the mindless. A hammer can perhaps smash a screw in, and a nail can perhaps split a board of wood, just like the mind can perhaps consider life, but none of these items or tools fully suit the jobs that they are carrying out here, and thus, will fall short in properly completing them. A kōan embodies this notion.

kōan harmonizes with the obscurity of life and disregards the need for conclusive answers.

Zen Buddhism, in general, is founded on this synchronization with the obscure and abstract. To put it in a more specific context, Zen is a subset of Buddhism that is not concerned with concrete ideas and concepts, and so, it is not really much of a belief system at all. Rather,

it involves living in accordance with one’s limitations to articulate and understand things in any absolute sense and living ...

It’s as if we are all swimming or floating down a river in which there are rocks that protrude out of the river’s surface. These rocks represent various things and ideas that might be appealing or seem reasonable to grab a hold of and stop ourselves from going further downriver. However, if we stop to hold onto a rock, we stop moving. The water continues to flow beneath us, but we remain stuck and rigid.

Zen suggests that in this, we will begin to experience an increasing pain and suffering that arises from being attached to something and disconnected from the fluid movement of activity happening around us.

Zen and the lesson of the kōans suggest that we should flow with life, ask questions, contemplate them, but not become tricked by any singular idea or answer that might tempt us into a final resolution.

We are stuck inside the body, captives to it, subject to its faulty and fragile mechanisms that do and will break, keeping us bound in space according to its condition—until it finally turns itself off, and us with it.

We can only think through the mind, and we can only think in the way our mind thinks. We are given one lens through which to see the world, with one type of software running on one type of hardware to process all that we intake and experience.

is a demonstration of humanity’s overzealous ego and anthropocentrism to think that so long as no other humans tell them what to do, they are free.

“Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis,” wrote the philosopher Emil Cioran.

The closest thing to absolute existential freedom, it seems, is freedom from freedom itself—freedom from the constraints that the concept of freedom imposes.

You are not the master of your mind. You are not the servant. You are both and neither. You are your thoughts and the lineage of every bit of history that they touched to get to you. You are the words you are reading and the mind that is automatically processing them. You are the mind that will forget them in some amount of time. You are everything you’ve heard and perceived. You are everything you’ve never heard or perceived. You are everything you’ve ever hated. You are everything you’ve ever loved. You are what’s inside and what’s outside your mind and your body. And you are none of the above. If you exist, you cannot be free. If there is no you, you cannot be contained by anything.

for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfilment.

In the Stoic view, we exist in a reality that does not care about our opinion of it. We cannot ask it nicely to remove the chaos, suffering, hardship, and uncertainty, nor can we will ourselves onto it with force in order to do so.

Stoicism claims that there are two domains of life: the external—the things outside of our mind, which we cannot control—and the internal—our mental reactions and interpretations of the external, which we can control.

No matter what task we undertake, we will do it wastefully if we assume that anything beyond the task itself will provide anything better than the experience of focus and presence in the task.

Stoicism argues that the sign of a truly successful person is someone who can be ok without the things he or she typically desires or depends on for comfort.

Wealth, materialistic abundance, fame, and power have no value in a happy life if the person who possesses them has not yet learned to live properly without them.

“The wise man,” Seneca wrote, “is neither raised up by prosperity nor cast down by adversity; for always he has striven to rely predominantly on himself, and to derive all joy from himself.”

Stoicism also claims that we are but a tiny feature of the entire body of nature, and everything that happens to us is a matter of relevance and necessity to everything beyond us. In this, we must strive for an acceptance and indifference to everything that happens, and instead, focus our attention on controlling our reactions to the things that happen.

A key principle of Stoicism is understanding that if the only thing we can completely control in life is our internal domain, and we cannot truly control anything external, then one should try to maintain an awareness that the things we are concerned about could and very likely might happen, that life will contain moments of tragedy and sharp turns, and that we should be prepared for these moments both mentally and practically in any way we can.

many of these sorts of catastrophic moments can’t be predicted nor controlled, and thus, after a point, worrying is pointless.

counter this unnecessary anxiety and bring our attention and enjoyment back to the present, we can remind ourselves that in the future, things might not be ok, but if that is the case, then they must, by comparison, be ok now. And if we are worried that things will only get worse, then, if this comes true, things are as good as they’ll ever be right now. And how foolish it would be to ruin what might be ok now out of concern for things potentially not being so later,

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.”

But if we are fortunate enough to worry about something that is potentially not survivable happening to us as opposed to trying to survive something that already has, it is perhaps worth trying to be ok while we still are.

It’s not that we have a short time to live but that we waste most of it. Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Seneca, is recognized as one of the forefathers of Stoic philosophy.

“Men are thrifty in guarding their private property, but as soon as it comes to wasting time, they are most extravagant with the one commodity for which it’s respectable to be greedy,” wrote Seneca

No one ever knows how much time they have inside their mind, and once it’s gone, you can’t work for, buy, or fight for it back. And yet, we seem to continue to treat our time like it’s more or less infinite,

one must first fully confront the conditions of one’s relationship with its finitude and accept one’s fate as an observer or sort of passenger to it—that we are slipping in every moment toward the end of all moments, and, at any moment, it could all be cut short. And you can’t do anything about it.

To have learned nothing in concrete terms but feel as if I have learned everything in abstract terms is a profound and vital aesthetic experience.

This is perhaps one of, if not the greatest contemporary issue of humankind—finding motivation and a sense of meaning in a period of time in which existence has revealed itself to be, or at least appears to be, meaningless.

The point is that, like the yeast cells, we are, in essence, merely passengers in this thing, and we don’t know what we are working toward or why or if it is even any good for us or about us at all.

Carl Jung in his concept of individuation, which suggests that there is a ring of layers that comprises our self: our outward, social personas, our conscious layers, our unconscious layers, and then a core, true self at the center of it all, which when one goes through the process of uncovering and integrating every layer into consciousness, a sense of completeness, harmony, and vitality is experienced in the form of a truer self.

The mass of despairing individuals are not disillusioned because life is inherently meaningless, but because they willingly let themselves be pulled from their own individual meaning,

In Schopenhauer’s mind, he was completing Kant’s system of transcendental idealism.

Schopenhauer essentially suggested that the world as we know and experience it is exclusively a representation created by our mind through our senses and forms of cognition. Consequently, we cannot access the true nature of external objects outside our mental, phenomenological experience of them.

Schopenhauer would go on to argue that not only can we not know nor access the varying objects of the world as they really are outside of our conscious experience, but there is, in fact, no plurality of objects beyond our experience at all. Rather, beyond our experience...

an unconscious, restless force striving toward survival, nourishment, and reproduction. He would term this force the Will.

conclusion that reality is made up of two sides: the plurality of things as they are represented to a conscious apparatus, and the singular, unified force of the Will—hence the name of his masterwork, The World as Will and Representation.

Schopenhauer’s work was largely a response to Kant and the Western philosophical tradition, but his work also contains distinct notes of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.

Since the Will has no aim or purpose other than its perpetual continuation, then the Will can never be satisfied. And since we are expressions of it, neither can we.

asceticism: the deprivation of nearly all desire, self-indulgence, and material comfort. In this latter method, Schopenhauer felt that by denying the Will from being fed, so to speak, one would turn the Will against itself and overcome

Happiness in life, for Schopenhauer, is not a matter of joys and pleasures, but rather, the reduction of and freedom from pain as much as possible. “The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy,” he wrote.

Alternatively, considering the view of Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who notably followed in Schopenhauer’s footsteps, the endless cycle of desire and dissatisfaction caused by the Will is actually a good thing that we can use as fuel toward the process of self-overcoming and growth, from which we can then distill life’s meaning.

Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Saxony, Prussia, which is now part of eastern Germany.

Nietzsche’s father suffered horribly and then died at the age of just thirty-five. The following year, Nietzsche’s younger brother, Ludwig, also died. This dichotomy of his religious foundation and early exposure to the irreconcilable, reasonless pain and suffering experienced by good, underserving people, would likely lay some of the foundation for what would ultimately become the basis of Nietzsche’s later work.