response to "I <3 Huckabees"

"I <3 Huckabees” is an existentialist movie that facilitates the argument between two dominant points of view in the existentialist community. The theory that everything is meaningful and we’re all connected and the theory that everything is meaningless and everything we do gets erased after we die. The movie gave each argument its time, but ultimately it sided with a mixture of the two.

I personally believe that everything has meaning because everything effects something else. Even "meaningless" things like a pile of crap can fertilize the soil and make plants grow which feed other animals and so on. Everything in nature is used so it has meaning, my way of measuring meaning is if that thing was gone would people miss it? and anything in the world that's taken away will be missed by someone even if they don't know it. Disease, while horrible and seemingly pointless maintains populations, without disease we'd all starve to death because we can't grow enough food, so even if we don't know it we'd miss disease. Conversely there are varying degrees of meaning, if you erase plums from the face of the earth people will miss them but not as much as they will miss sunlight, people can live without plums, but they can't live without sunlight. I agree with the blanket theory and that we all have meaning and are connected, but somethings have more connections or have more meaning. Graphically the world might look like a giant web, full of connectors and dots, dots will represent objects and lines will represent connections, some objects will have more connections than other, meaning more things depend on it, meaning comes from dependence. Even though every object is contained within the metaphorical blanket, everything in the universe has at least one connection or thread.

This leads me to believe that the world is full of meaning, however the varying degrees of meaning make us strive to make our lives meaningful. Without that hierarchy our lives are meaningless because no matter what we do we won't ultimately change. In this way Bernard is wrong in his opinion, if everything is meaningful then nothing is because nobody is different and no one can stand out, with varying degrees of meaning we can stand out and be individuals. Our purpose in life is to create meaning, to touch people's lives, to make our mark on the world. I believe that the world is full of meaning, but to truly live a great life you must create your own meaning.