I don't know when they started, those questions about the whys and wherefores and the whole meaning of life, but they seem to have started a lot earlier with me than with my contemporaries who lived for the moment and whose drugs were sex and sports and drinking — and, in some cases, even drugs themselves.
My drug was work and I kept overdosing on it until I had to get off it, only to start again on the same drug somewhere else, hence my shifting from job to job and country to country. If there was any meaning to my life, then this was it: seeing the world while getting high on my work.
I have now lived long enough to realise that this "Lebensangst" was not unique to me but a universal human experience, although we hide it from each other, even from ourselves. We all need a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Without that, we might not. We need a "why". Without it, the world becomes a hamster wheel, a road to nowhere, an existential cul-de-sac, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing at all.
"Don't worry, be happy!" is a popular answer to the meaning of life. It's what we all want. Even for people who enjoy being miserable (count me in on that one), misery is a form of happiness. But here's the paradox: happiness comes indirectly, not through seeking it directly, so how the heck do you search for it indirectly, if you know that’s what you want?
Perhaps my best friend for almost thirty years until his untimely death in 1995 had the answer. We seemed to live our lives vicariously through each other: he through my endless postcards and letters from far-away corners of the world while he was seemingly stuck in the remote Sepik District of New Guinea, and I through his contented domesticity for which I admired him, despite or perhaps because of my restless life.
There had been an Errol-Flynn-type agelessness about him, but it was only towards his end that it became clear that he was much older than me, and only after his death did I find out that he had been twenty-five years older than me. In some Freudian way that may have made him the father-figure that had been missing in my life and me the son he had never had, but we won't go there as it's merely conjecture on my part.
I had always hoped to exploit that age difference by bouncing off him some of the searching questions of life but always drew a blank. Maybe he knew the answer but thought it too banal or too difficult to answer, because his stock standard reply always was, "A philosopher I ain't!"
Having reached his age, maybe that's the answer I should give in the unlikely event that someone should question me about the whys and wherefores and the whole meaning of life, "A philosopher I ain't!"
