A young man's search for the meaning of life --- an evergreen theme in storytelling. Is it to slay the dragon and rescue the princess? That is a whole genre onto itself. All other popular tropes are presented in the musical Pippin:
- To be a revolutionary and commit patricide.
- To become his father and possess his power and glory.
- To have sex as much as possible.
- To amass fame and fortune (basically the same as #2).
- To find creative outlet in art or enlightenment in religion (mentioned but glossed over).
- To live an ordinary life with a wife and a kid and do humble and repetitive work.
- To light youth on fire and go out with a bang.
Whether it was Stephen Schwartz, or Roger O. Hirson, or Bob Fosse who came up with this list I don't know, although I suspect #3 was probably Fosse's contribution. What I find amusing is how all-encompassing the list is in the human culture, at least in the modern, industrial and post-industrial society. Before the modern era, religion and spiritual enlightenment might have featured a more prominent place, along with the forever father-son succession drama. Isn't it funny that people's (men's?) imagination is so limited? How many stories have been told to repeat the same quest over and over and over again?
Perhaps Joseph Campbell's followers would say that such convergence is inevitable, because humans are fundamentally the same. Men collectively pursue the same few paths that give their lives meaning. It may or may not be true, but I simply lament the shortness of the list --- can't we even come up with at least 10 options?
The same question is never debated by women, because for most of human history there were no options. Women are precious resources for making babies and making babies survive to adulthood, including young men who fret about the meaning of life. With the advent of birth control, however, women can no longer escape the same question. Whether our culture coalesces the meaning of a woman's life into a short list of options also, I don't know. I do hope, however, that our imagination is not limited to men's short list.
It is almost hilarious that, even in this day and age, we are still inundated with the same story: A person cannot find happiness unless his life has meaning and/or purpose. What might this meaning or purpose be? All the self-help gurus, who have moved their butts from books and TV to social media, are giving out the same short list, including #3. I mean, really, is this the best we can do?
Can I do better than mainstream society though? Can I come up with something outside of the list?
Well, I don't know. All I can do is observe life. What interests me is how #6 is dismissed as boring and repetitive and intolerable. Maybe an ordinary working life with one wife and one child is intolerable to Bob Fosse. I look around, however, and do not see that much repetition. Take, for example, the daily work of a health care professional, such as a nurse or a physical therapist or a primary care physician or a psychotherapist. The nature of the work remains constant, but each patient is slightly different. Even if multiple patients have the same disease, they have different symptoms, different ways of expressing their discomfort and pain, different trajectory of recovery (or not), different comorbidities, different personalities, different abilities to cope, different communication styles, different motivation to comply with or reject treatment ... The variations go on. Moreover, new treatments and new research come out all the time. Yesterday metformin was the best option for type 2 diabetes, but now everyone is shooting themselves up with Ozempic or Zepbound. What does one tell the next patient? Can we find some meaning of life in the people whose infections resolve after a week or two, whose wound you suture, whose pain that got better or worse, or whose blood pressure that went up and down?
That is just the work part. What about relationships?
Can you find meaning of life is in the argument you have with your brother, even if you have both forgotten it a few months later? Or the love you make with your spouse, and the talk about both of your 401(K) accounts afterward? Or your kid's PTA meeting in Grade 3, which is not the same as the PTA meeting in Grade 4 or 5?
In the past 6 months, I have been experimenting with recipes involving a kind of tofu skin product, a Taiwanese specialty that I first discovered on YouTube videos. It has the marvelous ability to soak up the sauce quickly in a wok. So far I have cooked it in different mushroom sauces, but I have plans for tomato sauce, braised meat sauce, and maybe seafood sauce. Could tofu skin recipes be one of my many meanings of life?
Ah, but none of these trivialities are fulfilling, says Pippin.
Let's look at the word fulfill. Full and fill. The primitive meaning is the feeling of being full, having food in the stomach, the relief of hunger.
Maybe this is the universal meaning of human life at the bottom of it all. No feeling in the world is more real than the transition from hunger to satiety. I wonder if this is one of the sources of our confusion --- the constant satiation and lack of hunger.
All the more reason to find the meaning of life --- at least some of it --- in tofu skin recipes. Once I get tired of it, I can move on to egg custard recipes and bean soup recipes.
