Man's Search for Meaning (That title is already taken)

He concluded that if a person was to account for all the problems in the world, even just those of living, like, what should one do, that it would require a person to devote their entire lifetime just to unraveling each of the ethical knots that a person would be routinely tied in if those sorts of problems weren’t routinely pushed down to the subconscious level, or, better yet, never really rising the conscious level because people weren’t aware that driving a car was problematic on ten sorts of way, but so was eating fast food, and was it right to give a letter of recommendation to a person who you didn’t think that much of as a worker but liked personally? These sorts of things. Anyhow, one can picture the man who’d spend his entire life just figuring out how to live, brown coat, brown hat, a mutterer. He’d live alone, or maybe with a cat, and spend long hours walking by the river in his brown hat and coat, the wind whipping up near his face, trying to figure out whether it was okay to own a dog, or whether one should take all that money and love that it takes to keep a dog healthy and happy and give it to his local Catholic Church. But then, he thinks, what if I did the latter, but I gave it all to an organization that doesn’t believe in birth control or our current understanding of the universe. If he was a modern atheist, why, giving money to the church would be an abomination greater than owning a puppy. Alternatively, if the church was right, and he walked on ruminating about these things in just such a way, making it apparent to us all how King Saul just suggested that they cut the baby in half and was thus declared wise.

It would probably take a lifetime of walking over cobble stones, across uneven ground, contemplating the scattering of light coming off the frozen river from weak winter sun, watching the geese fly in V’s overhead, scanning the strata of clouds for the appearance of an airplane that would never be boarded or thought of again. That would be the only way. If a person wasn't to take the word of a man born and died two thousand years ago, or four thousand, or a man dictating from his hat, or a man from Athens wandering the streets to give advice, if a person was to cast all these aside and deeply study and engage with the world around them, create their own set of standards, not all those standards that go unmentioned, buying electronics that have been assembled with nearly cheap labor, discarding a phone that will be sifted through by children in Asia, whether to hold the door open for all five people, or just one, what is the import of the self? Asking all of these questions and making an attempt, hell, answering them, answering them all, so that on his death bed the man with the brown hat would look out the square window in his house onto the street covered in rain and the caterpillar like blossoms of oaks piled up in the gutters and know exactly how a person was to expire.

This project would create its own problem to be solved though, as if a person was to add infinity to one. The next person would have to consider why exactly a person must spend their whole life thinking about whether to swat a mosquito that is feasting on your blood if it is one of God’s creatures, a malaria carrier, or just plain annoying. And, this in and of itself is a problem, another question to answer. And, if that question has been unanswered, then the searcher would be forced to reconsider all of the considerations of the old man in the brown hat, examine them for their voracity, and in so doing, they’d pass away their life as well, this time selecting and old rocking chair and a stone hearth, occasionally lit with birch and dry leaves, and perhaps a dog for company, considering those same questions, and perhaps coming to different answers about what it means to live in a universe that will eventually be torn apart. And that was life.