Meaningfulness and Meaninglessness

A translation of https://dialoogid2.blogspot.com/2025/08/mottekus-ja-mottetus.html from Estonian.

 

Meaningfulness and Meaninglessness 

Karmo Talts 

 

In this work, I examine the categories of meaningfulness and meaninglessness. To do this, I examine the relationship between meaningfulness and the experience that something is meaningful, draw conclusions about the category of meaninglessness, and examine whether a universal ethical system can be built on the results of my work. 

Let us look at the claim that life is meaningless, which claims to be objective. This claim does not claim anything about whether something seems meaningful to individuals. 

Let us now examine what the claim that life is meaningless could mean in a world where life seems meaningful to at least one individual. Unless we claim that a specific individual's experience that their life is meaningful does not give meaning to that individual's life, then the question of the meaning of life is relative. 

Let us now examine meaningfulness more broadly in light of this. Since the meaning of things is relative, it also follows that the meaninglessness of things is relative. It is not possible to discover that something is absolutely meaningless, something can be meaningless only for someone or for a group of beings. 

Let us see whether a universal ethical system can be built on the results of our research. Even in attempts to build such a system, the tension between individualists and collectivists remains. An individualist can claim that everyone has the right to choose a life that seems meaningful to him, and a collectivist can claim that as many conscious beings as possible should be guaranteed a life that seems meaningful to them. 

 In this work, I studied meaningfulness. I found that meaningfulness and meaninglessness are relative categories and it is not possible to discover whether something is absolutely meaningful or not. Consequently, a meaningful life simply means a life that seems meaningful to a conscious being living it. However, it is not possible to build a universal ethical system on this fact in itself, because one can argue both that everyone should be able to choose a life that seems meaningful to them, and that as many beings as possible should be guaranteed a life that seems meaningful to them.