Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Analysis

When I was younger I read Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I was introduced to the question “what is the meaning of life?” The question ate at me for an inordinate amount of time, and even after months of careful thought, I could never decide on what the meaning of my life was. Most everyone has grappled with this deceptively difficult question. For some, it will simply cross their mind and then bother them no more. On the other hand, some will let it consume their being until they decide on a concise sentence that describes to them what the meaning of life is. But those people are just fooling themselves. It is not possible to just decide what the meaning of life is by thinking about it. It is not possible, either, to just decide on what it is that truly gives your life meaning. On the contrary, meaning comes from everything else in life besides thinking. Meaning is created not through conscious thought, but by the sum of one's experiential learning.

Being the hardest question in life, it makes sense that humans have a difficult time dealing with its prospects. “What [man] cannot express, he cannot conceive; what he cannot conceive is chaos, and fills him with terror,” (Langer 2). To make it even harder, this question cannot be answered through thought and analysis, which is what makes it such a dilemma for the human mind. To us, trying to think of the answer to this question is similar to the thought, “as if a grasshopper could ponder a helicopter,” (Padgett), it simply is too much of a conundrum, and cannot be