That question begins to haunt us in our teens when we start to think for ourselves. It kicks off a life-long journey in search of a satisfying answer. Many give up on it over the years, finding it overwhelming, confusing, frustrating, and futile. Some never stop seeking something they can live with as a goal worth pursuing. Fewer keep facing the question head-on, even though it can become a sphinx-like riddle that may eat you alive if they can't come up with a good answer.
Nietzsche and the Buddha provided an answer. Our task, they said, is "wakefulness itself." But what does that mean?
Nietzsche said we must awaken from long-accepted but erroneous ideas and beliefs. These include, among others, the belief in the permanence of a personal self or, for that matter, of anything and everything; the faith that words and language can capture and convey the truth about anything; the unwarranted optimism about our ability to identify the cause of things, events, or experiences; and the ever-wishful and hopeful clinging to concepts about other-worldly realities.
The Buddha said the same things two and a half thousand years before Nietzsche. He offered detailed teachings to help his followers reach the same conclusions on their own through a combination of meditative practices and helpful everyday behaviors. Nietzsche had powerful ideas about what an awakened human being would look like, but he offered little in the way of practical suggestions. He is, for that reason, more difficult to follow than the Buddha, who was a practical philosopher and teacher. He was the world's first and still most comprehensive self-help teacher. He saw himself as a healer whose philosophy can be broken down into four elements: the diagnosis of unnecessary human unhappiness, the etiology or cause of that avoidable unhappiness, the cure for it, and the treatment that would bring it about.
But what is the point of such awakening, whether in Nietzsche or the Buddha? The point is gratitude, whose emotional signature is joy. This is, however, not for the mere pleasures of enjoyable feelings, things, events, or accomplishments, whether external or internal. It is about a profound sense of joy and gratitude for the fact that things simply but miraculously are--not necessarily as we wish them to be but as they are.
The ancient Book of Job is about the difference between the two. Job is a man who is faithful to the laws and expectations of his people and their God. Despite that, and despite their beliefs and expectations, his God allows him to be tormented within an inch of his life for no reason he can understand. But eventually, and unexpectedly, his suffering subsides when he is reminded of the miraculous display of nature's splendor that is everywhere visible, even on the worst day of his and our life. He learns to see and think beyond his personal self and his interests. That silences his and his people's talk about ideas, beliefs, and speculative concepts about how life and the universe work. After that revelatory looking at and seeing the world's wonders and not just the human concerns, Job went on to live a long and happy life and, as the narrator adds, "he died content." We can do the same. And that is the point of living.
For more on this, see my books The Necessity of Unhappiness - A Paradox and A Minimalist Ethic for Everyday Life
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