The Problem of Why

Guest Blog by Chris Habib

When it comes to life in general, there are many questions we ask ourselves.  In journalism, they ask: Who, What, When, Why, How.  Lets take a brief moment to see if we can answer these as they pertain to our lives.  The Who is a little bit tricky.  At the ripe old age of 25, I can safely say I know a large part of who I am.  I play many formal roles (such as husband and doctor) and I play informal roles (that guy who cracks jokes).  The What is a little less tricky.  I am human and everything that entails biologically, physiologically, and psychologically.  The When is seemingly the easiest question to answer, using science we can answer in many ways.  A quick Google search reveals the age of the universe to be 13.75 billion years, within a margin of error.  Skipping ahead to the How, that’s a story that my parents can probably describe in better detail than I can.  Those 4 questions seem to be fairly well understood.  The Why is the real problem.

As far as I can tell, there is no real answer to the reason for my (or your, or our) existence.  If we only look at final destinations, we all end up in the same place: dead.  From this perspective, it doesn’t matter if you lived a great life, or a terrible one.  It’s all the same in the end.  Then there is the wise old saying to enjoy the process and the experience of life, not just the end product.  Well, this makes sense insomuch as we make the best with what we have, rather than spending our years on this planet brooding until our inevitable expiration date.  It’s a realistic solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem.  But it’s only a coping mechanism, not an answer.  The real only realm that seems to provide an answer is religion.  In other words, you exist because you must live by the golden rule, be judged, earn a pleasant afterlife, worship God, etc.  They all say it with a different flavour, but the overarching message is always the same: you are insignificant, unworthy, probably immoral, and your only hope lies in the next life.  I find this answer completely unsatisfying because there is no valid evidence to back it up.  No one knows what happens after we die.  I don’t know what happens, and neither do you – despite what you may tell yourself or what you believe.  I’d rather have a truthful answer than a made-up one.  I just can’t seem to find one.