Whisky, Cigarettes and the Meaning of Life - Redux

One of my constant themes is that the meaning and purpose of any person’s life is for them to choose, and exists in the dedication and work towards whatever goal they have chosen. It's not the goal that gives us meaning, but the work we do to achieve it. Any athlete, artist, scholar or entrepreneur will tell you that. Children provide meaning through the work their parents do in raising those children.

If you are religious, then God brings meaning, through your service for him in this life.(*)

Conversely, changing the objective can sometimes turn what feels like meaningless work into meaningful work. When, in my day job, I adopted the goal of making my colleagues more effective by providing them with the data they asked for (and more) quickly and accurately, what had been tedious 'SQL bashing' became meaningful. (Especially when it meant that customers got money from us: "how can I help our customers prosper today?" I used to ask one of my colleagues.)

The idea that it's not so much what your want to achieve, but that you do something to achieve it, can seem peculiar. Isn't a life spent curing people more meaningful than one spent making money in the markets? Maybe it is more valuable to other people, but the sense of meaning is personal. A doctor could feel that her efforts (to cure drug addicts) were meaningless wasted effort, and a trader could feel his efforts (on behalf of a pension fund) were useful and meaningful in that it provided money to pay the pensioners.

Or as Michael Cherrito says



For me, the action is the juice.

There's a (possibly apocryphal) story about a man who was having a slow recovery after heart surgery. One day the doctor suggested he put something on his bedside cabinet to remind him of why he was getting well. A couple of days later the doctor returns and is shocked to find a bottle of whisky and a carton of cigarettes on the man’s cabinet. “What’s all this?” the doctor asks, and the man reminds him about his suggestion. “Well, I meant a photograph of your wife and children, or a pastime like walking or sailing,” the doctor stutters. The man looks at him. “I’m not married,” he explains, “and I’ve worked hard all my life. I have no hobbies. This, the whisky and cigarettes, this is what I like to do, and it’s why I want to get better.” And the doctor did indeed notice that the man had improved even over the last two days.

The point of that story is exactly that what provides us with meaning, or motivation, is intensely personal, and may be incomprehensible to someone else. What matters is that the man started to get better, which was the point of the exercise. As with all decisions, one has to take the consequences on the chin without complaint, and not ask for a Government bail-out.