Asking About Life's Meaning Is Essentially a Symptom—Turning Fear of Life into an Unsolvable Cosmic Question
Translated by AI. Read the Chinese original ↗
Contents 5 sections
—God said: “Carry across all those trapped in nothingness.”
—I replied: “I can only bring them back to themselves.”
I. Many Voices
Type “the meaning of life” into a search box, and three thousand years of human wisdom rush toward you the moment you press Enter.
Existentialism argues from freedom and absurdity; utilitarianism weighs human benefits and harms.
Confucianism establishes principles and order to settle human life; Daoism rises beyond worldly affairs to move with nature.
Buddhism contemplates impermanence, dependent arising, and emptiness; gods promise heavenly lands and eternal salvation.
Psychology dissects the unconscious and self-actualization; evolution anchors everything noble and poetic in survival and reproduction.
Scroll farther, and highly liked sayings flash in competition:
Nietzsche asks you to gaze into the abyss. Russell speaks tenderly of love and compassion. Dostoevsky urges you to love life more than its meaning. Romain Rolland finds salvation in loving life after seeing its truth.
Insights revered for centuries lie before your eyes, yours to choose.
Beyond the philosophers’ grand narratives, ordinary people’s folk philosophies are simple and moving.
A young worker, just back from overtime in a shared flat, collapses on the sofa and opens steaming takeaway: “A couple of games, then a proper meal. Today won’t have been wasted.”
A middle-aged man kneads dough in morning light: “The sky won’t fall. Eat on time. Rice, oil, and salt are reassuring. Set up the stall, pack it away—that’s a day.”
A square-dancing auntie says: “Meaning? What meaning? Forget the airy stuff. Move and sweat. Illness and worries come from having nothing to do.”
An old man fishing by the river lights a cigarette and squints: “Why hurry? Whether a fish bites is its business. Sitting here watching the water is already a gain.”
A physicist sighs: the galaxy turns without feeling; plants grow and wither in order. Heaven and Earth never promised humans anything. Life is a temporary lodging, ending in nothingness. Simply live as you please.
II. Symptoms
Yet I am often puzzled: if answers are so abundant, why do people keep asking without end?
Surely, after exhausting this thought and experience, one should sleep peacefully with certainty.
In reality, a few days later the question returns: “If life is only experience, what is suffering?”
Known principles pile up like mountains and seas, yet the days remain murky.
Because we looked in the wrong direction from the beginning. What matters is never how brilliant these answers are, but what the person suddenly asking this question is experiencing and enduring right now.
Someone newly in love does not ask about meaning. A student sprinting toward university entrance exams does not ask. A cook making hot dishes for a table of friends has no time for nothingness and final ends.
Those breathing freely do not constantly sense the air. The well-fed do not ponder hunger’s philosophy.
Things stay silent in wholeness, revealing their nature only where they break.
“What is life’s meaning?” is essentially not a philosophical proposition, but a human symptom.
When someone cries “It hurts,” a caring person does not sit down and explain, “Pain is a sensation transmitted by the nervous system to the brain.” Correct, certainly. Useless, too.
Yet we repeatedly worsen the symptom with the wrong prescription:
A seeker of truth longs for grand logic. You urge them to watch a sunset or eat good food, offering warm everyday comfort. They find it shallow and laughable.
An exhausted worker needs rest and understanding. You preach lofty moral commandments. They find them hypocritical and cold.
Someone grieving a loved one needs only a hand to catch their tears. Deconstruct life and death with cold physical laws, and you wound them again.
Each wound lies somewhere different. How could one prescription fit everyone?
The question looks identical; the symptoms behind it vary enormously.
Treat the actual condition. Receiving another’s pain matters more than selling your own truth.
To me, asking life’s meaning broadly involves four symptoms:
- Some are lost about “where should I go?” They ask about purpose.
- Some wonder “is living this way worthwhile?” They weigh value.
- Some grieve “why did these things happen to me?” They seek explanation.
- Some toss before dawn, asking “why should I wake tomorrow?” They crave a reason to keep living.
III. Refuge
We instinctively turn concrete life problems into unsolvable cosmic questions.
Disliking current work and life could mean concrete choices: resign, change careers, endure temporarily. Instead we elevate it to “what value is there in repeating life day after day?”
Losing an intimate relationship is a process of sorrow and mourning. We habitually turn it into “if all returns to dust, why should love happen?”
Elevating daily necessities into philosophical dilemmas is often just a respectable way to flee today’s mess.
Grand nothingness is a comfortable mental refuge. If the problem concerns all humanity’s destiny, my failure to move becomes reasonable contemplation rather than cowardice.
Beneath the search for ultimate meaning hides a secret laziness: we desperately want someone to bear the cost of our choices for us.
IV. Regression
Avoiding our own choices is already densely inscribed in daily life.
By day, people gather in bright restaurants. Facing even a trivial menu, they say “whatever” or “anything is fine.”
It looks accommodating. Inside is everyday evasion, a miniature surrender of will: if I do not choose, I need not bear the cost and regret of choosing badly.
A relationship reaches its end. One person’s heart has cooled; they want out, but refuse to say “let’s break up.”
Ending it means bearing the blame of abandonment, facing tears and questions.
So begins a long, chilly ritual of abdication. Instant replies become next-day replies; warm sentences become perfunctory single words. Plans to meet are repeatedly postponed by work, tiredness, or plausible accidents.
They neither approach nor push away, only watch coldly as the other suffers suspicion and pain, doubting themselves.
They inflict every silent torment, patiently waiting and luring the other toward complete collapse.
When the exhausted person finally says through tears, “Let’s leave it,” they breathe a long inward sigh of relief.
They may even play the victim, ending hypocritically: “Fine. You suggested it. If you want to go, I’ll let you.”
They hide their will behind the other’s despair, completing a total moral escape.
Elsewhere, surrendering the self is equally common:
Choosing university courses, jobs, or partners: many complain painfully while obediently leaving everything to elders. Handing over life’s steering wheel buys immunity from blame for a later crash. If the rest of life is dull, a ready target remains: “You chose for me.” Resenting others is lighter work than facing one’s own weakness.
Drawing fortune sticks, consulting horoscopes, or receiving four MBTI letters and dutifully playing that factory setting forever—lodging decision-making in vague fate or a persona. “This is my destiny” is the most respectable cover for refusing choice and change.
Letting short-video algorithms feed the senses endlessly, mortgaging attention to code, using unconscious swipes to evade active exploration and inward examination.
In fandoms, staying up to control comments and vote, storing all self-worth in a distant idol’s body, making their rankings your own honor or disgrace; using someone else’s brilliance to conceal the barren ruins of your reality.
Even strict routines, tiny-habit check-ins, schedules precise to the minute—apparently extreme discipline—can be exquisite evasion. Execute mechanically like an assembly-line gear, tick boxes, and outsource will to external order. You have delegated “how should I live?” to a timetable designed by someone else.
When night falls, anxiety over agency suppressed by day takes a fiercer, hidden form in sexual desire: willingly being hurt and objectified.
In private contracts of dominance and submission—BDSM—how many long to surrender all sovereignty, wear collars, seek pain, be bound and disciplined, even play a dog or cat at a master’s knees?
Not merely a bodily preference, but a staged death and escape from being human.
Being human is tiring: resisting nothingness while answering for every breath. Becoming an animal seems to release the weight of morality, decisions, and selfhood.
In the pain and numbness of being controlled, they find brief respite: no longer their own master, they need no longer answer for their life.
Humanity has traveled the long road from worm to human, yet much within us remains worm.
The ape is humanity’s old shadow. Humanity may be the same to the not-yet-arrived overman.
Before the wilderness of freedom and responsibility, most lack the courage to transcend upward, continually planning a reasonable regression toward animals.
An animal only needs to live. A human must choose how to live.
Humans learned to stand upright long ago. Standing upright in spirit comes much later.
Questioning heaven, seeking gods, kneeling to partners, enslaving ourselves: different forms, strikingly identical cores. We pay in dignity and pain to avoid becoming a person—myself.
V. Returning to Oneself
The most frightening thing is not life’s lack of a standard answer.
It is this: if there truly is no standard answer, only I can take responsibility for this life.
Asking the universe for meaning is asking for a disclaimer, hoping someone unseen stamps a guarantee: your suffering will not be wasted, your road cannot be wrong.
But heaven and earth are silent. Life signs no guarantee.
The music ends, the audience leaves. Who can say the earlier trembling was all unreal? Autumn wind sweeps the earth; cicadas among the plants return to soil. Yet mountains and rivers witnessed the whole summer of their song.
An ending means reaching a boundary. It cannot negate the weight of the journey.
The Book of Changes says:
“When seeking fails, seek within yourself.”
“As heaven moves vigorously, the noble person ceaselessly strives to strengthen themselves.”
When you pray to heaven, the first to hear is yourself.
The world offers no ultimate prescription. It simply lies vast and silent.
When your gaze returns from oceans of words and a screen’s cold light, what truly deserves care is what the sleepless body in the dark fears and longs for.
When pain is claimed and a path walked, “meaning” quietly dissolves into breathing. No answer is needed anymore.