Here is about half of his latest post called The meaning of life? Whatever:
Garcin is having an existential crisis. (These days, he could just pick up a copy of The Purpose-Driven Life and be done with it.) He’s facing the Big Question: how to deal with life’s apparent meaninglessness? Of course, many other philosophers, not to mention self-help gurus, would argue that life isn’t meaningless – that meaning’s to be found in family, or work, or spirituality. But intriguing new research suggests that, for a sizeable chunk of the population, a different answer to the Big Question may be more pertinent: who cares?
Psychologists have tended to assume people can be located on a simple continuum: at one end, those who feel their lives are deeply meaningful, and are consequently happy; at the other, those who feel their lives lack meaning, and feel tortured or depressed. (Something like this is implicit in Abraham Maslow’s venerable “pyramid of needs”, with self-actualisation at the summit.) But a study by Tatjana Schnell, of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, based on a survey of 603 Germans, found 35% of them were “existentially indifferent”: they didn’t feel their lives had meaning, and frankly, it didn’t much bother them.
It’s entirely possible – not that you’d ever imagine it from the legions of self-help books promising to help you “discover your purpose”, “find your calling” or “live a life that counts” – that you simply don’t care.
