Tomorrow

The Meaning of Life

I'm about to get philosophical here. Feel free to skip on past if you aren't in the mood for anything profound.

Years ago I discovered what, for me, is the meaning of life. It is not anything as lofty or poetic as living to do the will of some omnipotent deity or to go to paradise after you die. It is not as ideological as living for the betterment of humanity or to build an enduring legacy. It is very simple, very basic, and true of all of us but I will try my best to make it sound poetic and grandiose.

I have often said that we must strive to find the meaning of life because existence demands a toll from us in blood, sweat, and tears, stress and anxiety, sorrow and pain, and therefore we must ask the value of that which we suffer so dearly to maintain. It must be valuable enough to justify all the distress, fear, anxiety, and dissapointment we suffer in order to continue inhaling and exhaling day after day and year after year, struggling to acquire the commodities of existence. I have said this and because of these statements I have exhausted myself in search of some grand prize when all along the answer lay within me. All I had to do was imagine killing myself and think of the very reasons that I resist the notion, the same reasons that we all resist self destruction. Curiosity. Hope. We all want to see tomorrow out of sheer curiosity and hope for a better tomorrow. We are gamblers betting that the next hand will be the jackpot. It is the mystery of what tomorrow may bring that motivates us to keep moving forward. Why do we live? The answer is simple. To see another day. To see tomorrow.

When you imagine terminating your existence, perishing of some terminal illness, dying in a freak accident, or being murdered in a dark alley, you think about how you will miss your friends or your family and how you won't see your kids grow up or your grandkids be born or the results of all your efforts or how the world will change and move on without you. You lament the inevitable cessation of your life because tomorrow might be better than today. Religion games the system by giving you hope that there might be other tomorrows in the afterlife, or that you might still have a window through which to continue to view life here on earth. Many religions convince the gullible that they will look down upon their loved ones from the heavens and won't miss a moment of the action. But where there is no curiosity the will to live is defeated. Certainty is the cause of all suicide.

That seems like an extreme statement, but look at it objectively. From religious martyrs to the clinically depressed to the hero who lays down his life for his country, without certainty they would find themselves unable to defeat the will to live which, as I have stated, is little more than curiosity about and hope for tomorrow. The suicide believes that tomorrow will be the same or worse than today. They are certain their pain will endure forever. That they will never find happiness. There is no curiosity or hope. There is certainty that life is hopeless.

The religious martyr is certain of heaven. They are certain that they will enter paradise, spend eternity with God, get 72 virgins, or wings and a harp, or whatever nonsense they've been indoctrinated to believe. The hero who faces death without fear is certain their story will be told. They are certain their legend will endure or that they too will go to heaven. Perhaps they are certain that without their sacrifice the war would be lost and their loved ones would suffer. Or simply that their sacrifice might contribute in some small way to a future victory. True, many heroes die in battle without martyring themselves and they are no less heroes, but I am not talking about those who expect to survive and die fighting for their last breath. I am talking about those who willing throw themselves on the grenade, certain their sacrifice will not be in vain.

I, like all of you, wake up every day hoping for a better day and often fearful the day will be worse, but as long as there is hope the day will be better, that the future will be brighter, I keep going. I want to write the next book and see if this will be the one that wins awards and becomes a bestseller. I want to see if I ever attain that spark of entrepeneurial genius that will make me independently wealthy. I want to see if my son and my daughters will grow up to be happy, healthy, and successful. I want to see the culmination of all of my efforts. I want to live to see new scientific discoveries and the advancement of technology. I want to see how far society progresses, if we solve global warming, world hunger, world peace, renewable energy. I want to hear the new music trends, see the new fashion trends. Hell, I want to see who wins the next big prize-fight. I want to see tomorrow, and that's the reason I suffer and struggle through vexations and dissapointments and boredom and pain to see the sun rise each morning. That's why we all live, for that one simple reason, to see tomorrow.