I just want to make one observation on the murder of Australian ball player Chris Lane by three bored, black teenagers in Oklahoma last week. Sadly but I guess to be expected, people are making all sorts of hay out of this terrible incident. Some are using it to point out the hypocrisy they see in the media’s coverage of violent crime. Others point to the need for gun control. To each his own hobbyhorse.
Searching for meaning in their lives is a human necessity. Some find meaning in parenthood. When you ask a young woman without economic prospects why she had a baby out of wedlock as often as not it’s not because she didn’t know about effective birth control but she wanted to give meaning to her life.
Others find meaning in their lives by affiliation. It’s one of the reasons that young men join gangs.
For centuries, possibly for all of our history as a species, people have found meaning and identity in their work and their work relationships. I don’t know whether this is something that is learned or something that is innate but I know that it is true. It is not something that will be easily changed or replaced and, as the murder of Chris Lane suggests, there is no guarantee that the substitutes for work that people use to give meaning to their lives and establish identities will be benign.
I think it was Freud who said what is important in life is to love and to work. I think gangs serve as a (poor) substitute for both. By the time these kids are i n their late teens, not sure there is much we can do about it.
Steve
When neither love nor work is available, young people are susceptible to reaching for lower octave choices in order to access meaning, or constructing a place setting in their lives.
Ashton Kutcher, of all people, gave a very nice speech at the MTV Teen Choice Awards on the importance of work. My favorite bit:
Preach, it brother Ashton.
However. As you know, my guess is that a smaller percentage of the population will be working in the next 20, 30, 40 years. So we’re going to need to find a way to make that possible without any more difficulty than necessary.
Meaning is always an artificial construct. There is no meaning inherent in life beyond survive, reproduce, get out of the way.
That something is an artifice does not render it unnecessary. Nor does it prove that the means by which it may be constructed are unconstrained or of equal utility.
Michael, I remember kutcher from ’70’s Show.’ He never showed such wise elegance in those days.
Meaning is sometimes derived from difficulty. To only be interested in, or defined by, survival, reproduction and otherwise getting out of the way — what is the point of life, anyway? We might as well just be a plant.
Dave:
Quite true. The fact that it’s an artifice we each in our own way feel compelled to construct suggests that it is quite necessary.
Jan:
It was a strange moment. I mean, the ceremony/event itself is totally moronic, just a bunch of screaming 14 year-olds. And then, suddenly there’s Kutcher, speaking truth. Telling them that what’s really sexy is intelligence. Saying that opportunity looks a lot like hard work. I was kind of blown away. Not that it was exactly the I Have a Dream speech or the Gettysburg Address, but in the context kind of cool.
By saying the only meaning inherent to life is survival (in other words the meaning of life is basically life) I’m not at all suggesting that we shouldn’t find our own individual meaning. Not even slightly suggesting that. I’ve found mine. I want to care for my family, love my wife, do good work and go to bed every day knowing something I didn’t know when I woke up that morning.