What’s the point?

I sometimes go onto TikTok because it gives me an insight into how other people think, and I don’t get that same insight from other media. Most TikTok users are twenty to forty-year-olds but some of their concerns are timeless and ageless. So today a youngish man asked the following question: what’s the point of life? He gets up and goes to work. He eats, sleeps, rinses and repeats. It’s an old question and you may feel you’re done with it. But each new generation asks it afresh because there’s no easy answer they can take off the shelf, so it deserves a response. Whether that response counts as an answer is a different matter.

Let’s start with things that do have a point. We all agree that going to the dentist has a point because it makes our toothache go away. So we are willing to accept a point for a part of life but not the whole. It comes down to the use of the word point in English. When we seek a point to an activity we seek something external to it. Freedom from pain is external to going to the dentist. It occurs afterwards and outside the surgery, so we accept it as a point.

But life has nothing external to it. It’s impossible to experience anything outside our consciousness. So life can never have a point in the way the dentist had a point. Some try to get around this by talking about the good effect our life has on somebody elses life. But that’s kicking the can down the road. What’s the point of that other persons life?

We can interpret What’s the point of life? as a lament rather than a question: a lament that there’s nothing more to life than the content of our consciousness. The vital thing to grasp here is not that life is pointless. Rather we have set up the meaning of the word point in such a way that life cannot have a point. The whole thing is a trick of language. Point is a noise. It is squiggles on a piece of paper or pixels on a screen. If we had no language we wouldn’t be able to play these silly games with ourselves. Babies and animals are free of this stuff. Children are freer than adults.