THE MEANING OF LIFE

#philosophy #meaningoflife #observation #consciousness

Ever feel we see too much? Not in the prophetic sense, but in that horrible, inconvenient way where everything is noticed but nothing is useful. A smear on glass, the twitch in someone’s eye when they lie, a sigh that means more than a scream. We’ve trained our perception like a dog that no longer waits for treats, just growls quietly at the door. People think silence is peace, but it’s often surveillance. We don’t mean to analyse, we just do. It’s not a gift, it’s a curse dressed in spectacles and social withdrawal.

You really shouldn’t have eaten that apple.

Anyway, somewhere in between the tick and the tock of a clock, a peculiar sensation like catching your own reflection blinking when you didn’t. A brief snap in the continuity of consciousness, where you suddenly realise you’re not the star of the show, you’re not even in the cast. You’re an uncredited extra in a production you didn’t audition for. And just as you begin rehearsing your dramatic exit from existence, someone walks by, blissfully unaware, humming a tune, living an entire reality as vivid and real as yours. This phenomenon, sonder, is less an epiphany and more an existential slap delivered by a passing thought, dressed in a hoodie and AirPods.

Each person is an entire symphony you’ll never hear, living behind apartment windows lit like stage cues to shows you’ll never see. And we all do it, exist like secret universes bumping into one another, briefly colliding like particles at a social gathering neither particle remembers attending.

Yet, if everyone’s reality is a bespoke narrative stitched from consciousness, then what is consciousness itself? Is it merely a trait of the squishy organ housed inside our skulls, or is it, as some philosophers like George Berkeley insisted, not a product of matter at all, but the other way around? Berkeley argued that all reality is perception, and anything unobserved doesn’t exist unless being watched by the omnipresent, omniscient, omnibored eye of God.

“Everything feels heavy” she said.

“Like gravity?” he asked.

“No, I mean emotionally” she said.

“Oh,” he said, “like a stroke?”

Science, ever the killjoy to theology’s fireworks, chimed in with quantum mechanics. The Double Slit Experiment demonstrated that particles behave like waves until observed, after which, they promptly panic and collapse into a specific state, not unlike someone caught trying to dance alone in a public lift. Niels Bohr and John Wheeler leaned in hard on this idea, suggesting that observation doesn’t just change reality, it defines it. As Wheeler put it: “No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”

This is where things begin to wobble like a trifle in an earthquake. If observation creates reality, what happens in the cosmic greenroom when no one’s watching? Einstein scoffed, asking whether the moon disappears when we look away. Which is the kind of question that gets you kicked out of pubs or given a research grant, depending on your accent.

Add to this a dash of nonlocality, thanks to John Clauser’s entangled photon experiment, particles can communicate faster than light, like gossip in a workplace smokeroom, and as effective, like using hammers instead of screwdrivers. But the next time you feel alone, like the universe doesn’t know you even exist, remember, you do. It’s the universe that sits inside a box with Schrödinger’s cat, only it has Facebook, and more friends than you.

None of this licenses my previous headline that “consciousness creates reality”; in laboratories, measurement is an interaction, not a mind beam, and entanglement coordinates outcomes without transmitting messages faster than light. Still, taken as parable rather than proof, quantum theory feels like a nudge, participation matters, boundaries appear where inquiries are made, description is not detachable from the describer.

Ten to the power of eighty btw, is how many friends it has… ten followed by eighty zeros. Why does it matter? For the same reason they put little windows on aeroplanes. What is the meaning of life?

For most of recorded thought, the answers clustered around three great strategies. One said meaning is given from above: in the Abrahamic traditions it is to love God and neighbour, to do justice and walk humbly; in Islam to submit to the divine and cultivate mercy; in Hindu thought to fulfil one’s dharma and progress toward moksha; in Buddhism to end suffering by seeing through craving; in Daoism to align with the Dao’s effortless flow. Another strategy said meaning is found in flourishing: Aristotle’s eudaimonia is a life of virtue practiced over time, the Stoics insisted it’s living in accordance with reason and nature, while Epicurus offered ataraxia-tranquil pleasure without excess – as the humane target. A third strategy, modern and combustible, pushed the burden onto us. Nietzsche told us to create values, Sartre that existence precedes essence so we’re condemned and liberated to choose, Camus that the world is absurd and the task is lucid revolt, keep pushing the boulder and sing on the slope. Viktor Frankl added that meaning often arrives when we take responsibility for a task, a person, or a stance toward suffering, it’s discovered in devotion, not received as a prize. Across these routes the pattern is stable, either meaning comes pre-installed, or we write it ourselves, or we do both in uneasy duet.

Like a coastline through fog, let me just place something on the table…

The meaning of life is to sustain the existence of reality by means of observation.

At first glance, looking over this game of table tennis, that sounds like metaphysical inflation, but it’s closer to a stance than a slogan. Observers help bring the universe into definite form, I’m not claiming we conjure galaxies from nothing, only that reality becomes articulate, stable, navigable, thick with consequence, where attention lands. Without anyone to witness it, reality might exist, but it wouldn’t “happen” in any meaningful sense.

Time illustrates this best. The universe has been unfolding since the Big Bang, but the passage of time is relative – moths, humans, and trees all perceive it differently. If no life had ever existed to mark change, then the vast stretch from the Big Bang to the present would, in a non-timey-wimey version of the word ‘instant’. Time only becomes real when there is something alive to experience it. Without observers, reality would remain a blur of potential, timeless and undefined. By perceiving it, we give it shape, continuity, and meaning.

It’s not “why are we here” anymore than it is “why is here with me”. And for the same reason they put an aeroplane around a series of windows, we’re still missing the point that has been sat there for some time now.

We are not simply in reality, we are reality, given form. The particles that make up stars, oceans, and galaxies are the same ones that make up our bodies and minds. When we observe the universe, reality is not being looked at from the outside – it is observing itself.

Meaning, then, is not something handed down from outside reality. It is born within reality’s own reflection, as it looks at itself through us. To search for meaning is to participate in the very act of reality becoming aware of its own existence. Like staring at the mirror and looking for a meaningful substance to your own reflection.

What is the meaning of life? Well, to keep the lights on, and to be the reason to turn them on in the first place.

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