The Meaning of Life
The Objective Burden of Human Choice
What is the meaning of life?
Not mere happiness. Not a feeling. And not some ready-made plan handed down from above.
In this episode I take apart a famous answer—Richard Taylor’s idea that life has no meaning from without, so we simply invent one from within. Comforting. Elegant. And wrong.
Starting from Sisyphus, a glow-worm in a New Zealand cave, Fleming’s penicillin, Neo’s “because I choose to,” and Gandalf, the argument runs: subjective meaninglessness and objective insignificance are two entirely different things. Meaning isn’t something we feel. It’s something that works—and that we, unlike the worm, can consciously shape.
Based on the German blog entry “Der Sinn des Lebens” by “Der Sexismusbeauftragte informiert“