Why is water transparent?
48 hours of depression are enough to leave you lying in bed, typing “What is the meaning of life?” into YouTube.
YouTube is very well prepared for this. There are spiritual gurus who explain that the meaning of life is love and consciousness. There are motivational coaches who talk about self-actualisation. There are philosophy channels about Camus that soberly explain why there is no higher meaning. There are videos about nihilism, about existentialism. Some say: Life has no meaning, and that is exactly where its freedom lies. Others say: Yes, it does and you just have to find it. Ten minutes, an hour, a lecture, an animated explainer, or a single quote accompanied by calm music.
At first, it still feels as though I am simply looking for an answer. I watch videos, read things, listen to all of it, and every time I briefly think: Maybe this is it. But in the end, none of it leads me to stop asking that one question again. Because once I have asked it, I cannot stop asking it. Because I simply cannot find an answer that makes a difference.
No matter how many videos I watch, the question does not go away. But why can I not stop asking a question to which I cannot find an answer?
“What is the meaning of life?” is really just a reformulation of “Why do we live?”
Why is water transparent? Water is transparent because water molecules do not scatter or absorb visible light.
Why do the molecules not do that? Because the energy of visible light does not match the possible energy transitions within the molecule, and the molecules are too small for strong scattering.
Why does the energy not match? Because in quantum mechanics, energy can only be absorbed in fixed levels, and visible light falls exactly between the permitted energy levels of water.
Why are there only fixed levels in quantum mechanics? Because particles behave like waves and only certain “standing waves” are permitted.
Why are particles like waves? Because experiments have shown that they are.
The answer to the question why immediately becomes the reason to ask why again. The question why is never really answered. Instead, increasingly deeper levels of how are introduced, only to end once again with: Because that is what we have observed or measured.
A how connects two states. How did I get home? By bus. Why did I get home? Because I was tired, because a human being needs sleep, because the body demands rest, because it consumes energy, because life is oriented toward preserving itself, because the laws of nature shape it that way and why those laws are the way they are remains unanswered.
The how ends where the observational capacities of our senses or our developed measurement systems end, and so there is always one final why that cannot be answered. So even physics cannot answer the ultimate why.
There is therefore never a true and final answer to the ultimate question of why within any topic, no matter what topic one asks about.
Because of our everyday use of why, which is always only answered with forms of how, it often seems as though the only unanswered question is the great question: Why do we live? But all questions about the final why of any topic are actually unanswered.
Why can I not stop asking Why do we live?
I am depressed and I do not want to be. I want an answer to the meaning of my life and to end my depression through that answer. But that does not work, and I do not accept that, and that is exactly why I keep asking.
Why can I not accept that there is no single correct answer?
The question why increases understanding of the subject with every level at which it is asked. Understanding requires analysis, and analysis in turn requires observation. But observation is only possible when there is distance (detachment, decoupling) between me and the subject. The subject itself then becomes an object that is not experienced (felt), but analysed. I will refer to this emotional detachment from the lived experience produced by the why as dissociation. Repeatedly asking why maintains this dissociation, so that the how of life does not have to be perceived. As long as one is analysing, one does not have to experience. The how of life, with its uncertainties, contradictions, and vulnerabilities, remains at distance. In this context, repeatedly asking why is not an expression of depth, but the inability to endure the how of life, and thus a way of dissociating from one’s own life, again and again.
How is life?
Probably shit, if one compulsively wants to dissociate from it through a why. Probably so shit that one cannot bear how shit it is.
Why is life shit?
In everyday life, nobody lives by meaning, but by purpose.
In everyday life, most of us live by small, local purposes. I turn on the heating so it gets warm. I eat so I become full. I complete something so that it is completed. These purposes are unspectacular, but they are enough. They connect actions to one another. Some people also live in the moment. They do not eat merely to become full, instead they eat in order to eat. They do not make music merely to end up with a finished track, but they make music in order to make music.
Of course, there are people who would say they live for meaning.
For God, for others, for a calling. But what they are describing is not a higher meaning, but a stable attachment to purpose. A framework in which actions matter and effort reliably produces an effect. Someone who follows the Ten Commandments does not do so because that is “the meaning of life.” They do it because they assume it makes a difference whether they lie or tell the truth. That it makes a difference whether they steal or not. That their behaviour has consequences, perhaps because they believe they will be rewarded or punished for it. Perhaps because otherwise they would lose their place in the community. Or perhaps because they could no longer live with themselves if they violated those principles. But in every case: because it makes a difference. Someone who says they live for others does not simply sit there thinking “meaning.” They get up, go somewhere, and help in concrete ways. And what drives them is not some abstract meaning, but that it makes a difference whether they are there or not. Whether someone receives help or not. Whether something gets better or not. It is about actions making a difference. In other words: purpose.
In a depressive state, there is often the impression that other people see a meaning that one oneself lacks. But that is not true. What they experience is something else: that their actions make a difference.
Depression changes exactly that. The purposes still function, and rationally we understand that. The heating makes things warm. Food makes one full. But it no longer makes any difference to us. Whether warm or cold, completed or incomplete, the difference no longer counts for us.
People who are not depressed do not compulsively ask the question about the meaning of life because life still makes differences for them even without a final answer to that question. That means that we are not depressed because we cannot find an answer to the meaning of life, but because through the obsessive question of meaning we are trying to overcome the state in which nothing makes any difference anymore. We hope that a final answer will create differences again where we no longer feel any. But this endless analysis keeps us at a distance from the very experience in which something could begin to make a difference again.
Through the repeated conscious, and also unconscious, asking about the why of life, we remain in a constant dissociated state in which nothing can make any difference to us anyway. How is anything in our life supposed to reach us (= make a difference) if we view life as an object at a distance that is to be analysed?
At the same time, we also do not want to leave the dissociative level that maintains our separation from lived experience, because life is shit, and we cannot endure that.
What exactly can we not endure?
What makes depressive is that nothing makes a difference. What makes depression unbearable is the resistance to the fact that nothing makes a difference anymore.
The resistance to the fact that nothing matters anymore. That warm and cold, closeness and distance, success and failure, today and tomorrow no longer make any felt difference. We hope that a final answer to the why of life will dissolve the feeling that nothing makes any difference anymore. That if we only find the one correct explanation, meaning and differences will return to life. But that cannot work. Because the repeated compulsive question of meaning makes the experience of differences impossible, because it increases the distance from lived experience.
As long as we are searching for an answer that would mean we no longer have to feel what we feel, we remain at a distance, but not in processing. We avoid the unbearable instead of moving through it. And precisely because of that, it remains.
If there is no thought, no action, no explanation that can immediately dissolve the resistance to this experience, what remains? Only the very thing that has been fled from the entire time: immediate lived experience itself.
“Nothing makes a difference” sounds like a statement about life itself, as though meaninglessness were a property of reality. But if that were true, all people would have to experience the same world in that way. But they do not. The fact that other people in the same world can experience joy, closeness or motivation shows that “nothing makes a difference” cannot be an objective property of life, but rather a subjective experienced state. And subjective experienced states are not fixed forever. They express how the world feels to us, not what the world is. So this is about a feeling of meaninglessness. And feelings can be processed.
Personally, I would most closely describe meaninglessness as a combination of hopelessness, apathy, loneliness, and despair. Naturally, no human being wants to feel something like that. Wanting to avoid pain is a rather fundamental part of being human. Babies do not scream for no reason.
That does not mean that something is wrong with you. But that is also exactly where the problem lies. If meaninglessness is not a truth about life, but a subjective experienced state, then the way back into life does not lead around the feelings, but directly through them.
And by that, I do not mean that one has to learn to simply endure the unbearable. That itself would again be an unbearable idea. It is not about becoming better at carrying it. What I mean is that with every genuine act of allowing, there is less that needs to be carried.
People find different ways to avoid having to expose themselves to this experience. Some move away from pain into something else that triggers more positive feelings, such as drugs. The mechanism discussed in this text works differently. Not the escape into something else, but the escape into distance itself. Not in order to feel something different, but in order to feel less and perhaps even nothing at all. This text is about exactly that mechanism, because it is the one I personally know best.
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