Raison d'être

Yesterday I walked past a fellow employee of the BBC who couldn't walk properly on one leg. I think his leg was deformed, and he looked in terrible pain with every step. It made me realise, quite unusually for early in the morning, that I am a very lucky man. Lucky to have the privileged and relatively luxurious life that I have.


Yet despite realising I'm lucky to have this life, lately I have been both consciously and sub-consciously questioning the point of living. This is quite natural for someone who has recently experienced the death of someone they loved, but nonetheless it's a question to which I have to find an answer in order to go on, as must we all at some point.


I don't mean I'm suicidal, or ever have been. But when life is unimaginably cruel, you lose the sense of raison d'être that you once took for granted and the banality of every-day life becomes more stark than ever, contrasted against the drama and uniqueness of such a tragedy. I suppose you could call it perspective, but it seems to be more vivid than the fleeting kind of perspective one gets when life seems full of possibilities over a pint or two.

So how do I answer that inner monologue that poses the question, over and over. What's the point? Why bother? You're going to die anyway and your chances of being etched into the history books of the world as a rich, famous or saintly figure are pretty small, and even if it happened, you'd still be too dead to appreciate it.


My favourite answer is the one advocated by most of the world's main religions - the point of life is to live for others and to improve their lives. But imagine if "others" similarly perceived the futility of life and were themselves living only for others. Would it work if everyone was just living for the benefit of other people? Maybe, because at least everyone would have a reason for living. And in the end, living for others is to some extent a self-satisfying act (and therefore could be simultaneously an act of 'living for yourself').

If you're not satisfied with the 'living for others' approach, you might find, as I do, that Regret is a fairly robust motivator for living. I give it a capital 'R' to distinguish it from the kind of passive, ruminating regret that leaves you spending your days wishing you could turn back time. I don't mean that kind of regret, but rather the anticipatory Regret you feel about not fulfilling your potential, or experiencing enough of what the world has to offer. If that doesn't give you the will to live, then I reckon nothing will, because anyone who could ignore Regret is ignoring the fact that, as the humanist celebrant at Claire's funeral pointed out: we only get one chance at life, and it's our duty to make the best of it.