Like a satin bowerbird gathering sticks, feathers, buttons and pegs for its beguiling blue mess of a bower, I have built a meaningful life from the materials around me. Year by year I have accumulated reasons for being. In my teens and twenties, I made my best friends and hashed out my loyalties – personal, political and cultural – over coffee and beer. I formed the interests I’ve strived since to shoehorn into a viable career and a manageable cluster of hobbies. In my thirties, I fell in love and started a family, a glowing new centre to my world. And in my forties, I try simply not to drop anything. Although I’ve had periods of drift and depression in my life, I’ve never felt threatened by meaninglessness. The problem has not been finding meaning but finding enough meaning, coherent meaning, authentic meaning.
In a 1957 article on values, the English and was haunted by the protagonist Meursault’s vehement declaration, while he awaited execution for a murder committed without apparent motive or remorse, that nothing matters.
