Why do we exist? How might we be?

By John Hubbard

John is a retired English teacher. Currently, he is a volunteer guide for the National Trust at Thomas Hardy's birthplace cottage in Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester in Dorset. In this finely wrought reflection on human existence, John asks whether the answer to the question ‘Why do we exist?’ is always wrapped up in the enquiry ‘How might we be?’

As we drift between newspapers and the internet it is easy to get the impression that, for some in the first world, the answer to this question is simple: to develop a personal selfishness and narcissism to the highest degree possible, to make life a consumerist project in which the dominant sounds are the clanking of bucket lists and the clicks on articles about living to one hundred. All of this without any demonstration of awareness that, for many, international travel is not a recreational luxury but an imperative for survival in the face of war or famine, and that life expectancy can be as low as 53 or 54 in countries such as Chad and Nigeria.

Cruise liners increasingly resemble a "block of flats on a hull" (Image: MSC Cruises)

We might be only mildly prepared to indulge the grotesqueries of the super-rich, as they plot to live longer than anyone else, on the grounds that the accounts of their efforts and regimes show these to be manically obsessive, absurdly costly, ironically hugely time-consuming and unintentionally hilarious. Nor can we really applaud as liberating the type of tourism conducted with blocks of flats on a hull that flood cities with hordes of passengers for a brief superficial tour to the delight of the accountants behind the rapacious monopolies that are cruise lines. Water pistols at lunchtime seems a very polite protest at the damage done to the quality of life for residents.

Yet in both of these extremes the underlying gentler claims of self-preservation and interested engagement with our world are present; for the answer to the question ‘Why do we exist?’ is always wrapped up in the enquiry ‘How might we be?’

The apocryphal teenage grump ‘I didn’t ask to be born’ does pinpoint the fact that, as individuals, we are merely a biological consequence over which we had no control and, once presented with life, similar biological imperatives force us to live it. We may eventually wonder why we came ‘crying hither to this great stage of fools’, but such a thought rather comes with the circumspection of maturity.

We exist at the start solely to confirm to ourselves the world that surrounds us – an exchange of movement, exploration and sense-perception engaging looking, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching while each perception helps us learn to identify both pleasures and dangers from the scent of a rose, the warmth of the sun to the sting of a nettle, and the sharpness of a mere piece of paper. ,

This constant commerce between our living bodies and the material world never ceases, although genetic accident, misfortune, or extreme age may see aspects of it compromised. What is perhaps most interesting about the human species is that, as we acquire language, our attitudes to our perceptions can be modified by the words of others, as can our sense of ourselves and our deployment of particular partialities and predispositions or talents and affinities. As we fully mature intellectually, our multiple acquired experiences settle into a sense of being, about which we may choose to reflect in quite sophisticated ways both private and public. We may also simply acknowledge aspects of our life, relationships, routines and employment (if we are so lucky) that bring us contentment or discontent, which we may or may not articulate. Because of the ways we have developed our societies, we seem to have moved miles away from simply ‘being in nature’ which is where we started as infants.

Seeing the world as a painter sees it (Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh - public domain)

Human achievement constantly adds layers of interpretation to which we are susceptible. We see the world, but the painter offers us the way they see it. We hear the wind and the birds, but the musician offers us infinite varieties of sound to stimulate us. We smell the cypress tree, but the perfumer offers us their own interpretations of uniquely combined scents. We might go blackberrying and nibbling along the way, but cooking skills will transform one experience into another. While personal enjoyments may be instinctive at a deep level, language then adds a further layer to enable instruction, commentary, communication and interpretation. Our investigative skills in science and mathematics work profitably in another way, deconstructing and delayering the world beneath our ordinary sense-level, so that humanity grows in the knowledge of how things work or are held in the universe from nebulae to quarks, a process which started with the telescope and microscope. Within all of this we might have a particular talent for some of these skills, which will guide us into a career which may perhaps affirm our sense of self and allow us a measure of defined success, a differentiation, a confirmation of our uniqueness, even if we may share skills with others.

It was significant that at the recent Olympics nearly all those participants who chose to retire at that point all cried when interviewed, which says something about life-focus and the wrench of letting go of an occupation or preoccupation. All of these people, in relation to the general population, had achieved remarkable heights, yet their retirements placed them emotionally at the same point as the woman who recently finished work as a sales assistant in the same electrical shop after a career of a remarkable fifty-one years.

We all know we are unique as individuals, but we also cannot escape being different by the choices we make and the ways we follow those choices, through continual striving or self-improvement, or even through a settled and modest resignation to our limits.

It is perhaps the framework of the wider society and its structures of reward that can distort that most important capacity within us: the ability to achieve and to recognise contentment. If we have no choice about our existence, and in a sense about our path in life, we do have choices about the impact of that life, which might be tested against the question ‘How much is enough?’ A question that perhaps might be viewed through the lens of those in the world who have very little rather than those who have so much and are so removed from a common moral consensus that they will go to any lengths to evade their financial dues to their fellow citizens.

There also seems to have developed a cultural scorn for settled happiness, for happy ease. Expressed, of course, through our slippery language. Consider the way the words ‘comfort zone’ and ‘rut’ are used. An absence of stress, a continued steady path have both become things to deplore. We communicate that we should always be discontented with the fruits of a calm and ordinary existence. Or rather we have been persuaded by vested interests to think in such ways because, after all, contentment is the enemy of consumerism and capitalism. I suspect when others use the ghastly phrase ‘living your best life’ contentment is not what they have in mind, as it hardly fits the model of ever-increasing growth, ever-increasing wealth, and ever-increasing consumption.

Perhaps the answer to the question ‘How might we be?’ lies in becoming a very young child again and holding in wonder and delighted engagement the world as it is around us, and appreciating as an adult that finding contented existence involves, above all, the preservation of the fountainhead of our being-in-the-world, a being that in its purest sense engages with everything around us without making consuming it our first aim.

Thumbnail image is a digitally-enhanced detail of Vincent van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows (1890). Wikipedia, public domain.