Naval Almanack · semantic note

The Meaning of Life — Three Answers

Naval gives three deliberately different answers and refuses to pick.

Answer 1: Personal

You have to find your own meaning. Any wisdom anyone else gives you will sound like nonsense.
The question, not the answer, is the important part. "Sit there and dig with the question. It might take years or decades."

Osho: "It's like writing on water or building houses of sand."
You were dead for ~10 billion years; you'll be dead for ~70 billion until heat death.
"Anything you do will fade. No one is going to remember you past a few generations."
Therefore: create your own meaning. Possible framings:
- "Is this a play I'm just watching?"
- "Is there a self-actualization dance I'm doing?"
- "Is there a specific thing I desire just for the heck of it?"
These are all meanings you make up.
No fundamental intrinsic purpose — if there were, you'd just ask "why is that the meaning?" Turtles all the way down.

The arrow of time comes from entropy (2nd law: entropy only increases).
Living things locally reverse entropy (we have action).
In doing so, we globally accelerate entropy toward the heat death.
At heat death, all energy is at the same level — everything is one thing, indistinguishable.
"What we do as living systems accelerates getting to that state. The more complex system you create — computers, civilization, art, family — you actually accelerate the heat death."
Reading: maybe the meaning of life is to push the universe toward unity-via-heat-death.

Rejects everlasting afterlife — implausible eternity-of-judgment based on a 70-year sample.
"I think after this life, it's very much like before you were born. Remember that?"

Sources: [Almanack pp194-196]