Huckabees and Me

Philosophers have long questioned what the meaning of life is. Some of these philosophers have questioned what a meaningful life is. However, none of this matters if life isn’t meaningful or if it doesn’t make sense. Many people will argue that life isn’t meaningful, but to the contrary, I find that life is very meaningful and that if you follow through, everything makes sense.

Growing up, I had a few little theories jumbling in my mind that as I grew older I realized were real things and that I was quite ahead of my time (Toot-tooting my own horn there). One of these theories was that for everything I did, there was a result, and from that result came another result, and from that came another, and so forth. This theory is what people call the butterfly effect, that for one little action a big reaction can occur. If you take this and apply it to everyday life, it all begins to connect and make sense. I mean, if I do my homework on time for example, I get a better grade. If I get a better grade I feel happy. If I feel happy then I smile at somebody on the street and his or her day is brightened. It might sound stupid, but it’s true. If I don’t do my homework, then I’m not happy, don’t smile, and that person goes home in a bad mood and proceeds to have a miserable night. Isn’t this fun? Now this connects to Bernard, a great upbeat character from I Heart Huckabees who says that “Everything is connected and everything matters.” This is in many ways how I look at life. I try to make every action an action for a better tomorrow, a happier tomorrow, so that maybe it can make somebody else feel the same way and we can all gather around the campfire and make something great out of our lives.

I hate people who think life is meaningless. I even hate people who think that people aren’t worth having faith in. In fact, I got into a big debate about how life can exist without trust in people. I mean, I am a firm believer that everything connects, that if you follow the trail of events then you can see how everything became. From this, I led down a train of thought that went dark quickly, if I were to follow another person’s mentality that people aren’t worth trust. If you don’t have faith in others then people don’t matter so you push them away out of your life so you live alone so you have no impact so you have no purpose so you have no reason to live so die. Now, that might sound a bit harsh, but it all makes sense if you follow it through. According to Bernard’s blanket theory, everything is the same, even if it is different, so all of that is just the same thing, said a different way. To think that people are not worth having faith in is the same as saying you should go die in my book. Faith is a key component to life and everything connects so make the best of those connections.

On a final note, any one life is not meaningful to everybody. Meaningful is a subjective term, impossible to define and determine. A life can be meaningful to one person and not to another. This is not exactly news. However, everybody can live a meaningful life. Everybody has the potential in them to live the life they want to, to be happy and find their way so that they can feel fulfilled. A meaningful life might not always be easy to come by, but it is there in the depths of a tsunami rather than the shallows of Coney Island as we might hope. If life is meaningful then, is not the world? If everybody has the potential to live a meaningful life, don’t they have to chance to make the world a meaningful place, to make something better? If Wall-E teaches us anything, it is that even the smallest of events can have a world of meaning and can change everything. All lives are meaningful, life is meaningful, and most of all, our world is most definitely meaningful.