The Meaning of Life

by The School Of Life

  We are not wrong to love perfection, but it brings us a lot of pain. At its best, our work offers us a patch of gravel that we can rake, a limited space we can make ideally tidy and via which we can fulfil our powerful inner need for order and control – so often thwarted in a wider world beset by defiant unruliness.

  Our lives have to be lived in appalling ignorance: we know nothing of when and how we will die; the thoughts of others remain largely hidden from us; we often can’t make sense of our own moods; we are driven by excitements and fears we can barely make sense of. But in work, we can build up a very accurate and extensive field of understanding. We can amaze with the precision of our explanations. A wine maker might reveal that the slight taste of caramel comes from the fact that the grapes were left unusually long in the back of the truck just after they were harvested; a picture restorer will point out that a painting was relined, probably in France, in the 1850s; a dance instructor will be able to tell from the way you walk that you sleep on your left side. To the specialist, some small (but not insignificant) aspect of life has no mysteries; they understand why the boiler is leaking, or how voice recognition works, or how an apparently profitable corporation can be on the verge of bankruptcy. The understanding we come to possess via work might not sound especially thrilling in itself. But it speaks to a larger, more metaphysical, theme in human existence. In a small but real way, through our work, we are clearing and cultivating a tiny portion of a wild surrounding forest and turning it into a harmonious, comprehensible garden.

  Money

  Obviously, making money is one of the most basic reasons why people work. But our culture has tended to emphasise the negative aspects of this. We have inherited a set of concepts that make it easy to formulate the case against personal or corporate economic drive: wage-slavery, profit-gouging, exploitation, greed, selling out, commodification, materialism, cowboy capitalism… and this is just to open the list.

  Despite this, financial ambition can be intimately and properly connected to the most praiseworthy and honourable undertakings. Profit, ultimately, is based on insight: it requires identifying the genuine needs of others more clearly and sooner than one’s competitors, and meeting them more effectively. Profit is a sign that one’s insights have been on track and that the products and services one is offering are truly valued by clients and customers. It is a symptom of having understood the world slightly better than others.

  The desire to make money can, of course, be linked to greed or self-indulgence. But the connection is neither necessary nor inevitable. Money is simply a resource that extends the powers of its possessor. Wealth is what Aristotle called an ‘executive’ virtue: like physical strength or good looks, it increases an individual’s sway in the world. Via money, our kindness can be amplified, our wisdom made more consequential, and our ambitions trained on the long term.

  Creativity

  ‘Creativity’ is one of the most prestigious ideas of modern times. As a result, we often want to feel creative while lamenting that our lives don’t give us sufficient opportunities to be so. However, this impression may come down to an unfairly inflated and unhelpfully skewed notion of what creativity actually involves. We are far too focused on creativity’s dramatic high points within a narrow, clichéd band of activities, like the writing of a prize-winning novel or the making of a film that receives accolades at Cannes or Berlin. By this standard, almost no one can be creative, and creativity must remain an elite and even freakish anomaly entirely disconnected from ordinary life.

  PABLO PICASSO, Tête de taureau (Bull’s Head), 1942. Picasso was an exceptionally ‘creative’ artist. But we can all put into action a basic premise of creativity: the recombination of unlikely elements into something new and unfamiliar.

  In 1942, Pablo Picasso dismantled an old bicycle and attached the handlebars to the seat to bring out the resemblance to the head of a bull. It is hard not to be charmed. It is a move that helpfully gives us a more accurate idea of creativity. The items Picasso used were familiar to everyone. The key initiative was that he rearranged them to make each part more valuable than it had been in its previous role. This act of combination tends to be central to the creative act. And crucial to this combination was confidence. Many people might previously have noted the resemblance of handlebars to horns or of a seat to a bull’s face, but few would have taken their own perceptions seriously. As the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) put it: ‘In the minds of geniuses, we find – once more – our own neglected thoughts.’ Creative people don’t have thoughts fundamentally different from ours; they just don’t neglect them as readily.

  Very little is entirely new under the sun, but to be creative is to learn to see how apparently unlikely elements might fit together in a fruitful new arrangement. One might borrow a way of organising information from the world of computers and apply it to the management of a gym. One might take an idea associated with the history of Ancient Greece and set it to work within the running of a modern school. One could take a way of speaking that is popular in Japan and collide it with contemporary English diction. Essentially, creativity means spotting an opportunity to improve things through recombination. The German philosopher Hegel (1770–1831) put the idea in its grandest terms: we are creative, he wrote, when we ‘strip the world of its stubborn foreignness and adapt it to our needs.’ Usually, we just put up with matters that are frustrating or disappointing. But when we get creative, we adapt what is to hand – combining, reorganising, starting afresh – so that it better matches our interests and ideals. It is the opposite of feeling stuck and resigned; it is a refusal to accept the status quo. The creative person is someone particularly committed to the idea that there must be a better way of going about things.

  A lot of work – both paid and unpaid – is more creative than we usually suppose: when we repaint the bathroom and choose a more pleasing colour that we noticed in a book about houses in India; when we cook a meal and arrange the asparagus on a serving plate in the way they did in a film; when we introduce a set of icons in a report so that the main points come across more clearly; when we put a pot of geraniums we found in the garden centre on the window sill to make a space more cheerful, or introduce two friends to each other because we’ve realised how, despite some striking differences, they’ll get on well. In every case, we are being creative because we are spotting an opportunity to make an improvement through an act of rearrangement and combination.

  Creativity is not a rare and dramatic activity; it is not a sideshow incidental to the core concerns of our lives. Ideally, it is something that we are always involved in. It is a refusal to accept the world as it is in all its facets; it is a commitment to doing better with what we have. As creative people, we don’t need to write novels, we just need to be persistently on the lookout for (sometimes very small) ways of improving life.

  iv. Friendship

  Purpose

  Friendship should be an important centre of meaning, and yet it is also a routinely disappointing reality. The key to the problem of friendship is found in an odd-sounding place: we lack a sense of purpose. Our attempts at friendship tend to go adrift because we collectively resist the task of developing a clear picture of what friendship should really be for.

  The problem is that we are uncomfortable with the idea of friendship having any declared purpose to begin with, because we associate purpose with the least attractive and most cynical of motives. Yet purpose doesn’t have to ruin friendship. In fact, the more we define what a friendship might be for, the more we can focus on what we should be doing with every person in our lives. Indeed, sometimes, we might helpfully conclude that we shouldn’t be around someone at all. There is a range of goals we could be pursuing with the people we know. Grasping what the opportunities are is central to building a meaningful social existence.

  Networking

  Networking has a bad name; it is associated with self-enrichment, egoism and snobbery. But in essence it is a search for help.
It springs from a fundamentally modest awareness of how fragile and limited each of us is, and how much we need the support and strength of others.

  Networking is only ever as good or bad as the ends to which it is put. There are some very impressive versions of networking in history. The ancient Greek story of the Argonauts tells how the heroic captain Jason travelled around the countryside networking to assemble a band of associates to help him in his search for the legendary Golden Fleece. Jesus of Nazareth networked extensively in order to put together a team of disciples who could help him spread a message about love, redemption and sacrifice.

  To network means to filter intelligently, to recognise that one cannot – and indeed should not – try to get to know everyone. It involves aligning one’s path through the world with a mission. It implies a wise acknowledgement that we do not have unlimited time.

  Ideally, our networks should be wide, diverse and without snobbery, because useful information, valuable skills, perspectives, opportunities and guidance can be located in very unexpected places. In espionage, this key point has been deeply understood: it might be as productive to make contact with the embassy cleaning staff as with the economic attaché; the bartender could be as rich a source of information as the general. We can take this refreshingly open-minded attitude into the world at large. We may learn as much about business from a bankrupt felon as from a successful CEO; the taxi driver may have key things to teach us about life; the person with the woolly hat standing by the bus stop may provide the starting point for a crucial new entrepreneurial idea. With a conscious mission in mind, networking ceases to be a brutal, discriminatory activity. It’s just a way of making sure that we are never far from harvesting insights and assistance.

  Self-knowledge

  One of the oddest and most unhelpful things about being human is that we find it very difficult to know ourselves properly. Theoretically, nothing sounds simpler. We are around ourselves all the time, and we have direct access to our own minds. But in fact we often struggle to form an accurate picture of our own character. We feel angry, but are not sure why. Something is wrong with our job, but we can’t pin it down. We don’t realise why we may be quite negative about someone. We don’t see when we come across as arrogant or as fawning; at times we find it hard to work out what we really think or what is troubling us. The mind is skittish and squeamish. As a result, many issues lie confused within us.

  A true friend notices a lot about us, and has a strong enough hold on our affection and trust to raise issues in a way that we can take them on board. If we let them, they can frame a point not as a devastating criticism but as a sympathetic and generous bit of encouragement to our own better nature. They help us to like ourselves and then to tolerate recognising some less than perfect things about who we are. They take our distress or excitement or anger seriously, but ask gentle and probing questions that help us understand our own initially vague first thoughts and feelings. They listen carefully, and they make it clear that they are on our side. They help us stick with a tricky point and go into more detail; they make connections to something we said earlier; they note our facial expression or tone of voice; they don’t jump to fill a pause but wait for us to say more. They act as a judicious, kindly mirror that helps us to know and befriend our own deeper selves.

  Fun

  Despite talk of hedonism and immediate gratification, life gives us constant lessons in the need to be serious. We have to keep our heads down, avoid looking like a fool and pass as a mature adult. The pressure can become onerous, and in the end even dangerous. That is why we constantly need access to people we can trust enough to be silly with. Most of the time they might be training to be a neurosurgeon or advising medium-sized companies about their tax liabilities but when we are together, we can be therapeutically daft with them. We can put on accents, share lewd fantasies, or doodle on the newspaper, adding a huge nose and a missing front tooth to the president, or giving a model distended ears and a handlebar moustache.

  The fun friend solves the problem of shame around important but unprestigious sides of ourselves. They don’t ignore or dismiss our more serious and solemn aspects; they show us that, in their eyes, being silly is not a disgrace: it is a serious need like any other.

  Old friends

  There are people we are friends with for one major but often maligned or overlooked reason: because we were friends with them some time back. At one stage – and it might be decades ago now – we had a lot in common: we were both good at maths but bad at French at school; we had adjacent rooms at college and helped each other with assignments and commiserated in the bar about failed dates or maddening parents; we were interns in the same big firm with the same bizarre and intemperate boss.

  But life has taken us on radically different tracks. Now they’ve got three young children; they moved to the Orkneys where they are managing a fish farm; they’ve gone into politics and have become a junior minister, or they’re working as a ski teacher in the Rocky Mountains. The daily realities of our lives may be miles apart; we may know little of their world and they of ours. If we were introduced today, we’d think each other pleasant enough but would never get close.

  Yet it can be hugely helpful and redemptive to catch up with these people with a one-on-one dinner, a walk in the woods or the occasional email. These friends function as conduits to earlier versions of ourselves that are inaccessible day to day but contain important insights.

  In the company of an old friend, we can take stock of the journey we have travelled. We get to see how we have evolved, what was once painful, what mattered or what we had wholly forgotten we deeply enjoyed. The old friend is a guardian of memories on which we might otherwise have a damagingly tenuous hold.

  We need old friends because of a crucial complexity in human nature. We pass through stages of development and, as we do so, discard previous concerns and develop a lack of empathy around past perspectives. At 14, we knew a lot about resenting our parents. Twenty years later, the whole idea sounds absurd and ungrateful. Yet the old friend reconnects us with a particular atmosphere and, like a novelist, makes us at home with a character – ourselves – who might otherwise seem impossibly alien to us.

  At 22, we found single life extremely painful. We hung out a lot with a particular friend and shared a litany of wistful, alienated thoughts. At 45, with a young family around us, we might occasionally find ourselves curious about the joys of single life and of casual hook-ups. The old friend has crucial news to impart. We experience life from a succession of very different vantage points over the decades, but – understandably – tend to be preoccupied only with the present vista, forgetting the particular, incomplete but still crucial wisdom contained in earlier phases. Every age possesses a superior kind of knowledge in some area, which it usually forgets to hand on to succeeding selves.

  Remembering what it was like not to be who we are now is vital to our growth and integrity. The best professors remain friends with their past. They remember what it was like not to know about their special topic, and so don’t talk over the heads of their students. The best bosses are in touch with their own experience of starting out as a lowly employee. The best politicians clearly recall periods in their lives when they held very different views to the ones they have now formulated, which allows them to persuade and empathise with hostile constituencies. Good parents keep in touch with the feelings of injustice and sensitivity they had in early childhood. Kindly wealthy people remember what it was like not to dare to walk into a costly food shop. We are always better long-term lovers if we have an avenue of loyalty back to who we were when we first met our beloveds and were at an apogee of gratitude and modesty.

  Old friends are key activators of fascinating and valuable parts of the self that we need, but are always at risk of forgetting, in the blinkered present.

  A range of friends

  Different friends bring to the fore different sides of who we are: they influence us, encourage us and make us fee
l more at ease in varied ways. With one friend, we become more intellectual than usual; with another more adventurous, or more serious about politics, or more tender towards family. With a wide range of friends within reach, we are able to assemble and connect with the full, properly rounded, version of ourselves.

  Every friend has things to teach us; they may not deliver formal lessons, but their point of view and their values are subtly imparted to us. By liking them, their part of the world comes to seem less alien, which is why it is especially interesting and helpful to have friends who give us access to attitudes and social groups that we might otherwise fear or dismiss.

  If we are conservatively minded, it is hugely helpful to have a friend who is deeply radical. We might not agree with their ideas, but, because we like them, we don’t hold their views in contempt. Or, if we are personally without religious faith, it can be a great benefit to be close to someone who believes. We may not think they are right but we can, in their company, see how lovely, witty and intelligent someone on the other side can be.

  If we can’t be friends with someone of opposing views, we will probably never become a powerful advocate of our own convictions, because we will never properly grasp what draws someone to the views we disagree with – and we will never understand what it would take to change their minds.