“Is life meaningless ?”
I will take the liberty and place myself in your shoes and assert that what you mean by life here is the social manifestation of existence, man’s reaction when encountering the world.
Well, yes, life is meaningless.
It is meaningless in the sense that it is disarmingly absurd, it’s existence wholely is unbelievable.
Why is this ? I don’t know, it just is. This is hard to comprehend actually, just think of it: when you are inside its mechanism, immersed in the thicket of its daily routine, you can clearly see and discover laws, establish reasonable rules. What is beyond understanding appears only when you climb up to the sources of existence, when you sit on the margin and look at it in its ensemble.
If we were to picture ourselves as pigs living in the sty, than how meaningless would our efforts appear when someone from outside the sty came and looked at us… Life is absurd, don’t ask me why, take my word for it. Everyday life builds its rules on false premises, which can only lead to a string of absurd acts. Thinking of it is sad, living in such a life is really exasperating… Man’s reflecting at his own existence is Hamlet in front of Yorick’s skull. When pondering upon your life you can only be struck by its futility - anything else is shallowness. Gazing into the abyss of his being, stunned by the poise with which he has been able to play a game of masques all his life, one is left with nothing to utter, except maybe an inward "Alas… ", expressing the entire sadness of playing an absurd game.
Yes, life is absurd, as long you limit yourself to it. The only modality through which one may ever give some meaning to it is by yanking himself out of the row of routines and diving into an ideatic pool, which means that one must set the goals somewhere beyond the ordinary, day-by-day-world. That is to say that, if the pig set his sights on getting to the other side of the sty, even if he got there, he would still find himself in the sty, meaning he hasn’t accomplishedmuch. Therefore, his want must be somewhere outside the sty - a transcendental purpose.
You need be a philosopher in order to do this. Philosophy is not an abstruse concept, it is accessible to everyone and it expresses the human being at its highest. Every philosopher that I know off that ever dreamed of an ultimate finality to life couldn’t remain rooted in a formalism that excludes ascension towards a superior sphere of knowledge. After all, this is what philosophy is: making a stay in the normal flow of existence and letting the thoughts shape existence and the will to guide it.
Absurdity is an illness, a lethargy, an emasculation, a shortage, a void, an absence. To indulge in it is to assent to the pointlessness of life alltogether, thus becoming an accomplice to it. Denying it is to fool yourself. The only way is to surpass it - through art, religion, aesthetics, drugs, it is not my place to judge, as long as the end is as far in the distance as possible…