Without a doubt, a large chunk of humanity gravitates towards purpose, design and order. This can be observed in our daily affairs. We usually go about our daily activities with some purpose/s in mind. We plan our days, weeks months, years towards the actualization of some goal. Take for instance a young chap who has decided to devote his life to practicing medicine. He enrolls in a college for six years and his life is alined towards the purpose of becoming a doctor. Like wise all human life is centered around one purpose or the other, this is what gives life its meaning. Hence, the meaning of life is its purpose, point, end or goal. But is finding and having a purpose sufficient for the meaningfulness of a life? Well some people think it is. They would tell you just find something to live your life by, some goal or purpose and give your life meaning. This was the central thesis of existentialism, a movement that was very popular in the 60's & 70's.



To such people meaning was entirely subjective. Thus the meaning of my life is the meaning I give my life, and the meaning of your life is the (perhaps different) meaning that you give your life, apart from this act of meaning bestowal our lives are meaningless.

I find this rather strange. Notice that if I must first give my life meaning, if it is to have some, then it has no meaning prior to and independent of my giving it meaning. That is before I decided to find some purpose to live by or defined the pursuit that would give my life meaning, it was meaningless. But since my life is meaningless, this implies that my decisions and acts are also meaningless since those decisions are mine and they subject they refer to is me. Simply put, if an agent is meaningless any action or decision he takes is also meaningless! Hence I cannot be the source of my own meaning. So I think that for life to be meaningful, apart from having a subjective driving purpose it must have an objective intrinsic positive value.



Take for instance the serial killer ted bundy. His life was purposeful, he went around stalking his potential victims with the goal of snuffing out their lives. His life was just as goal oriented an any fortune 500 company C.E.O. Yet if you say his life was objectively meaningful, I would know something is definitely wrong with you.

Even if a life is not directed towards destructive tendencies, a life could still be objectively meaningless if it is spent on trivialities and futility. Take for instance a man who decides that his life's purpose is going to be writing on every bridge in Nigeria. He travels to Lagos and decides to start at the third mainland bridge, if you were in traffic and you saw him, would you think his life was objectively purposeful?

Now lets imagine another scenario. Two teenage girls are expert gymnasts. They both go for Olympic trials and both qualify to represent their countries. But at the last minute one withdraws and says she had a calling from God, and then enters a monastery while the other goes on to win Olympic gold. Some would say the girl who opted to be a nun 'threw her life away.' But how is this so? I think what they mean to say is that such a purpose if futile because God does not exist. But if God exists then any goal short of God is utterly trivial and meaningless in comparison.

But notice if there is no God then why presuppose that there is meaning? The universe wants nothing and cares for nothing; it strives toward no goal; it neither rewards nor punishes, there is only the meaningless dance of protons and electrons. In such a situation then there could be no objective meaning to life, and in that case all that is left is subjectivity, which as I have earlier demonstrated collapses into meaninglessness.

A final illustration to drive home all my points above. Suppose I invited you over to my house to play a game of Monopoly. When you arrive I announce that the game is going to be a bit different. Before us is the Monopoly board, a set of jacks, a coin, the television remote, and a refrigerator in the corner of the room. I grant you the first turn, and puzzlingly, inform you that you may do anything you want: fill the board with hotels, throw the coin in the air, toss a few jacks, fix a sandwich, or turn on the television. You respond by putting hotels all over the board and smugly sit back as I take my turn. I respond by dumping the board upside down and tossing the coin in the air. Somewhat annoyed, you right the board and replenish it with hotels. I turn on the television and dump the board over again.
Now it wouldn’t take too many cycles of this nonsense to recognize that it didn’t really matter what you did with your turn, and here’s why. There is no goal, no purpose to the game we are playing. Our successive turns form a series of one meaningless event after another. Why? Because if the game as a whole has no purpose, the individual moves within the game are pointless. Conversely, only a game’s actual purpose according to its inventor can give the individual moves significance

In conclusion, meaning as I said earlier is tied with purpose, goals or telos. But if a life which encompasses such purposes and goals is to be meaningful then it must be have something beyond subjective meaning, namely objective intrinsic positive value. Thus a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life, but not every purpose-driven life is meaningful. But Such a value cannot come from within us, it must be from outside us. So there must be a being that assigns meaning to our lives. Such a being is God. If not, then it is as Solomon said, 'all is vanity' or meaningless!