An Insight Into Meaningful Versus Meaningless

by Reuben Chow

Sometimes I feel life is a little meaningless.

And I know I am not alone in having such sentiments.

You know, every day many of us are sat in front of a personal computer – either a desktop or a laptop – slapping away at a keyboard and clicking furiously with a mouse (I wonder how many times we would click a mouse button in our lifetime? That would be an interesting statistic indeed. Perhaps a new statistic would be how many times we swipe and tap the touch screens of our smart phones.)

Or we laze for hours on the couch, eyes transfixed on the television set, fingers pressing on its remote control as we scroll through literally hundreds of cable TV channels.

We surf the internet and we use social media – again for many hours.

We go to work, we come home. We take walks in parks and in shopping malls.

After a while, it’s all same ol’ same ol’, and it all gets a little mundane. What’s the meaning in all this?

Then I imagined being born into a different life, in a different place, perhaps in a different life.

You and I – we could be farmers, toiling for hours in the fields. We could be factory workers, spending perhaps 12 hours a day simply carrying out a repetitive job better suited for a machine.

We could be professional soldiers, taking cover in trenches and fighting for our lives every moment. We could be transported back to the caveman era – we are hunters, and our daily mundane job is to hunt for the meat to sustain ourselves and our families; every day, our lives are in potential danger, too.

We could have been anything, doing something else, instead of being who we are and doing what we are doing. Would that something else would have been more meaningful? Or would it have been even more meaningless?

At the end of the day, when it comes to life meaning and fulfillment, maybe it’s not so important what exactly we are doing, but rather how we attach meaning to the little things that we do every single day. Anything and everything can be meaningless, yet those very same things can also be meaningful.

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