Introduction

This book is a collection of 42 very short essays on a wide range of topics related to the Meaning of Life. The contents of these essays did not come to me in a dream, or from an epiphany. Neither was their source divine intervention. Instead, I began, as I have begun many projects of this type, by trying to gain a deeper understanding of the key words. Often difficult questions such as – What is the Meaning of Life? – are difficult because the terms we use are ambiguous. So, the question can mean many different things and any progress toward an answer will be thwarted by shifting meanings during the process of investigation. It is best to figure out exactly what you mean by a given question before making any attempts to answer it.

In the case of The Meaning of Life we have two very ambiguous words - meaning and life – which need to be clarified before any progress can be made. As it turns out the word meaning has several meanings. To borrow a term from information systems, it is overloaded, which means that the same word can have more than one interpretation. When encountering an overloaded word such as this, you need to identify the meanings which are germane to your investigation and discard the ones that are not. For example, if you were investigating the best ways to cook a chicken, you would want to focus on the ones you buy in the grocery store. At the same time, you would want to exclude people who are afraid of confrontations. Meaning is an ambiguous term, and it is necessary to disambiguate it before proceeding any further. This is the focus of Essay 2.

The term life is ambiguous as well. It could be the time between your birth and death. It could be a collection of medical or personal records. It could be a historical or biographical account, or many other things. I chose to focus on your life as you experience it, as that is the most relevant to understanding The Meaning of Life.

If somebody followed you around for your entire life compiling a detailed record of everything that you did and everything that happened to you (I think there was a movie like this) that would be your life from an external objective perspective. I was not interested in that. The way you experienced those moments is your life from an internal subjective perspective and that is what I chose to focus on for this investigation.

Once we understand what we mean by meaning and what we mean by life, we can put them together to understand what we mean by The Meaning of Life. And, once we understand that, we will be in a position to understand what The Meaning of Life is to an individual and what they can do to increase the meaning in their life, if they feel it is lacking. This is not, as they say, rocket science. It is merely clarifying our terms, so we understand what we are talking about. And once we understand what we are talking about we are in a much better position to do something about it.

To see more of this kind of reasoning, you may want to check out another of my books entitled The Ghost of Socrates which uses the same approach to understand some thorny problems in Information Systems such as “Do You Have a Right to Privacy?” and “Can Machines be Intelligent?”

Some of these essays may present topics that you have never thought of, on your own, and others you may have thought of but failed to follow through on because they seemed too complicated or intractable. Hopefully, you can read any essay in this book in only a few minutes and then pause to think about it more deeply.

Do not feel that you have to agree with everything I say. My goal is not to convince you of anything. Instead, my goal is to give you some insight into The Meaning of Life and make some suggestions regarding how to pursue it. It is my belief that people enjoy pausing to think more deeply about an issue, if only for a few minutes. If you read one of my essays and later ponder it again for a few minutes, then I have been successful

I tried to make these essays easy to read, although some of my sentences are a bit long. The reason for this is that formal essays by scholars and professional writers tend to be longer and more difficult to get through. So, in that spirit, I hope you enjoy reading the essays in this short volume as much as I enjoyed writing them. 

This Introduction is just under 800 words and the Audio version is a little over 6 minutes.