My Life Has No Meaning, But It Has Joy
After years of questioning the meaning of life, I have come to accept this attitude: life has no meaning. And for a considerable, foreseeable time to come, I do not intend to change this attitude.
I once read a dialogue between a scientist and a theist; unfortunately I have forgotten the scientist's name. When the question of the meaning of life came up, the scientist laughed—he felt that discussing this was less worthwhile than discussing where the next meal was coming from.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell said that as a child, thinking about the meaning of life left him deeply depressed, glum all day, feeling life was utterly meaningless, both endless and boring. It was only later, when Russell encountered mathematics and found it truly fascinating to study, that he became happy.
Of course, Russell was in fact a genius with very broad interests; he also made considerable achievements in literature, history, and philosophy, and even won the Nobel Prize in Literature. During World War II he enjoyed taking part in social activities; because of his anti-war stance, Russell later issued the Russell-Einstein Manifesto together with Einstein, and Einstein's favorite reading throughout his life was Russell's books. Besides scholarship, Russell also tirelessly carried on one love affair after another, marrying four times in his life; it is hard to imagine such a man was once so depressed.
The venerable Ji Xianlin, looking back on his life in his eighties and nineties, said he felt a human life is truly meaningless. Not only fame, wealth, and position are meaningless; even his own mountain of writings is meaningless; social standing, reputation in academia, and the academic ideas he left behind are all meaningless; everything is, in the end, just emptiness.
When I was in middle school I too was pondering the meaning of life, which led my teacher to introduce me to the hall of philosophy. For to find the answer to this question, one must study philosophy—though religious people would have other views; my respected teacher was not a religious person. I remember that at the time I often found my teacher in the corridor outside the classroom to talk, discussing questions that few people at that age think about. My teacher rarely answered me directly; instead, based on my questions, he brought stack after stack of books from his home and piled them on my desk for me to read.
As a science and engineering student, thinking about these questions was a bit off-task. But at the time I was genuinely troubled: on the one hand my grades were excellent, on the other I was distressed by various psychological problems arising from study pressure and growing up; I needed to find my own way out.
Some years ago I endowed my own life with many "meanings," setting up many life goals for myself to pursue. But gradually I became disgusted with myself, and finally felt these "meanings" were all nonsense, nothing but a kind of self-hypnosis. For a while I read a great many anthropological works, and from them I found that the various peoples of the world pursue quite different meanings in life; some peoples' meanings and value standards seem, to other peoples, ridiculous and absurd, yet they take them all very seriously.
The meaning of life is a highly subjective and deeply personal question. Some people think this kind of life is meaningful, others that that kind is. In my hometown, most people would feel a life of wealth is meaningful; if you press further and ask why a wealthy life is meaningful, no one can really say. While I was growing up, many people instilled in me ideas about the meaning of life and life values; looking back now, they are all stale, conventionally acquired ideas that even they themselves had never thought through. I am not someone who readily accepts ideas I have not carefully thought through and verified myself.
In one anthropological work I read about a method the Samoans use to raise their children, recorded by an anthropologist. It is said that when Samoan children are very young, adults often deliberately excite them and then quickly let them fall back down; Samoans raised this way grow into calm, composed adults with a high happiness index. The Samoans are wise on the question of raising children, letting people become accustomed from an early age to this "elation–letdown" pattern of life, so that when they grow up they are not vexed by life's twists and turns, and their mindset is naturally detached and calm.
If we repeatedly think about the meaning of life and repeatedly pursue the realization of life's value, we may eventually experience countless cycles of elation to letdown, and gradually come to understand that life actually has no ultimate value or meaning at all.
When I went to Zhoukoudian, Beijing, to see the Peking Man site, I stood before the statue of Peking Man, who lived 500,000 years ago—gazing into the distance, lost in thought. I wondered: 500,000 years ago, what was this ancestor of ours thinking? Did he ever ponder the question of the meaning of life? Did he realize his life's meaning? Judging by us today, what meaning did his life have? To all these questions there is no ultimate, correct answer.
Mr. Russell said that the result of his thinking on the meaning of life was that he gave up thinking about it and immersed himself instead in things he was interested in, forgetting his worries in joy. Confucius also said: "Those who know it are not as good as those who love it; those who love it are not as good as those who take delight in it." A person comes into this world for a brief life; if bound hand and foot by some inexplicable meaning of life of unknown origin, how cramped a life to live. I would rather choose things I am willing to "take delight in" than choose things that are merely "meaningful."
Chinese parents always love lecturing their children on grand principles while neglecting their children's interests and hobbies. Grown-up Chinese adults also love talking about grand topics like the meaning of life, yet few actually live happily, because few of us have interests of our own.
As a child I was very interested in music and medicine. My father told me that actors and performers had, from ancient times to the present, been among the lowest of the lowly trades, the most hopeless of people—and with that he crudely snuffed out my love of learning music. It was only after I grew up and became independent that I picked up this hobby again and began to study the guqin. Today in Beijing there are very few parents who forbid their children from learning music, but most of the so-called interest classes I see are attended by students kidnapped by their parents into taking so-called interest courses—they have no interest at all in what they study. We parents, not understanding what interest really is, now have only this crude understanding of it.
I myself have a say on the question of interest; my independent, distinct personality helped me here. After my father stopped me from learning music, I for a while loved literature, so I set up a literary society of my own and, behind my father's and teachers' backs, secretly read a great many so-called "improper" extracurricular books—the literary classics of China and the West, ancient and modern. In junior high my reading exceeded that of my Chinese teacher, which he himself admitted to me face to face. By high school my writing was already quite good. The life interest I experienced was entirely spontaneous, the kind parents cannot stop even if they want to; it is the thing Confucius spoke of, in which one becomes so immersed that "for three months one does not even notice the taste of meat"—not the kind of "interest" where you sign up for a class and the parents drag you off to it.
I am very grateful to several of my high-school teachers; they did not snuff out my interests and gave me the greatest freedom. At the time my respected teacher gave me a key to his office and told me that if I did not want to go to lectures I could skip class and study on my own in his office, reading whatever books I wanted. Later I indeed rarely attended lectures, spending most of my time immersed in my own reading, and when I felt lost while reading I would consult my teacher. So much so that later, at university, I found the professors' practice of calling roll and checking attendance very hard to adjust to.
This year I am thirty-seven. Apart from the constraints I suffered in primary school under my father's watchful eye, I have hardly been constrained at all in this life. I know many people around me think me quite strange; even my wife says she has given up trying to understand my ideas. My thoughts, words, and writings seem to them far from reality. If reality is as they describe it, then I have never lived in "reality" in my whole life, and I believe I never will live in the "reality" the masses imagine. For me, anything I cannot love irresistibly, I will not do even if beaten to death. A person I cannot genuinely like, I likewise cannot bring myself to sit with and converse happily.
In the rest of my life, I do not think I will, as in my youth, do so much useless work searching for the so-called meaning of life; I will only put my energy into things I am interested in. Because I no longer need others—not even myself—to endorse my life; I no longer need a meaning of life to prop up my spiritual existence. Life is short, time so precious, and the things I am interested in I could not finish in a lifetime; why go out of my way to套 myself in a straitjacket of a life's meaning?