Essay 38 - Why I Don’t Have an Elevator Pitch

I was having Father’s Day dinner with my boys when I mentioned that I was writing a book on the Meaning of Life. The older one ignored me and the younger one challenged me. “OK, what is the meaning of life?”, he asked.

“Well,” I said, “it isn’t that easy. You can’t just say the meaning of life is _____ and fill in the blank. It is much more complicated than that”.

But he did not give up that easily. “If you can’t explain it in a sentence, you don’t really understand it” he continued. (I had said that myself so many times that I knew it would come back to bite me at some point)

“Well, I can’t explain it in one sentence,” I protested as I tried to get my thoughts together enough to explain it in a paragraph.

“Then you don’t really understand it,” he proclaimed proudly as if he had just handily won that round.

Kids!! They never cut you any slack!

But upon pondering it a bit I did manage to come up with a single sentence “the meaning of life is that feeling you get when you feel that your life makes sense in terms of something larger than yourself”. Not too bad.

We have an archetypal situation (often shown in cartoon form) in which a searcher climbs to the top of the mountain to consult a guru about the meaning of life. What is interesting about this archetypal situation is that the value of this interaction is determined less by what the guru has to say than how ready the climber is to hear it. The more you have thought about the meaning of life, the easier it would be to explain it to you. If you haven’t really thought much about it, it would be difficult to explain succinctly.

I think there are a lot of people who have deep insights into life and are willing to reveal them if you are prepared to understand them. Otherwise, you are wasting everybody’s time. I hope this collection of essays has prepared you to understand the elevator pitch even though it might be meaningless without the preparation.

This essay is 373 words long and the audio is just short of 2 3/4 minutes.