The Unbearable Pointlessness of Being

There are more than seven billion people in the world. Every morning, we wake up, feed ourselves (well, not necessarily, but if you're reading this you have access to a computer and I assume therefore you can afford to feed yourself), dress, rush around making money and giving it to various government departments (the tax man, the vehicle licensing folk, the local council, etc.) or service providers, then we feed ourselves again, watch pointless TV, and go to sleep. The next day, we wake up and repeat the cycle. Endlessly, this goes on. Basically, we're nothing but hamsters who get up each morning, run on the same wheel all day, and then go to bed. Why?

Some of us have families; some of us have a partner; some of us have house mates. Most of us have people with whom we interact on a daily basis and have some kind of emotional attachment to. One would hope that these people have some kind of reciprocal emotional attachment. I suppose the point of earning money is to put food in our mouths, and those of our dependants, and to put a roof over our head.

But I still come back to this: why?

I'm aware that, as a bipolar sufferer, I feel the futility of existence more acutely than others, but riddle me this: what makes me (or you or, for that matter, anyone else in the world) so special? What do I have to contribute to the world that is any different or more special than what anyone has to contribute?

We feel a biological imperative to propagate our kind, but there are so many of us that, if half of us didn't breed, the planet would actually be better off. Yet we seem to view the reason for our existence as finding a partner and making a flock of little greenhouse gas producers to carry on running on our hamster wheel when we die.

Some people choose to contribute to the world through studying something. Some of those people do actually contribute – Einstein, et al. – but most are just running on their little hamster wheel. Very few people make discoveries that change the course of history or alter the fate of the world. Even fewer change things for the better. (No, I don't consider people who make more efficient weapons as having changed things for the better, despite my objections to the size and unsustainability of the human population.)

Some people choose to devote their lives to humanitarian work. Some of those people make a positive change in their community; some simply teach the people that they're “helping” to be dependant on someone else to solve their problems.

So what's the point? The Christians will tell you that we're here to worship God. Maybe they're right. However, they also believe that if we don't worship God, all of creation will do it for us, so it seems a bit redundant.

Perhaps we're here to make money. Really? Is that the point of being here? Are we all pumping infinite amounts of toxic crap into the environment to accumulate a vast amount of stuff that we just leave behind when we die? Are we here to become better people? Well, in light of the “life's a bitch and then you die” thing, becoming a better person is an ultimately futile pursuit: you become the best you can be and then you die and all your effort is wasted.

We look to other people for our examples – asking what would Thomas Jefferson/Andy Lally/Ellen Degeneres do – trying, all the while to be better. Granted, some people abandon the quest to be better people and become sociopaths and/or serial murderers, but I'm assuming none of us are in that group. However, the people we choose all have some areas of failure in their lives – whether in their personal or professional lives, they've all fallen short of the ideal.

Thing is, I don't want to believe that there's no point. I'd like to believe that somewhere, somehow, something we do changes the world for the better. Thom Hartmann (incidentally, the author of a book titled 'What would Thomas Jefferson do') suggests that, through small acts of mercy, we change the flavour of the soup of the collective unconscious. So maybe that's the point: to go about life taking opportunities to do anonymous good deeds in order to decrease the misery around us. I don't know about you, but that sounds far more pleasant to me than being a hamster funding a government that makes decisions that will ultimately destroy the earth.