{"id":65084,"date":"2025-09-05T09:57:47","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T13:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/?p=65084"},"modified":"2025-09-05T09:57:47","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T13:57:47","slug":"what-is-life-worth-if-it-has-no-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/magazine\/societe-en\/what-is-life-worth-if-it-has-no-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Life Worth if It Has No Meaning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The components of a long and healthy life are multiple, and they can often be measured or studied. But one ingredient that gives life flavour and is difficult to quantify is meaning. Can a life lived without intention be satisfying? Is it absolutely necessary to emerge stronger from the trials that life places in our path? Has the erasure of the Catholic religion left us without any point of reference to make sense of life\u2019s dramas? Alain Crevier, a renowned journalist and host, known for the <\/span>Second regard<\/span><\/i> program on Radio-Canada, <\/span>and also the author of <\/span>\u00catre : Nos qu\u00eates de sens et de libert\u00e9<\/span><\/i>, shares with us his thoughts on the search for meaning and\u2014above all\u2014on our humanity.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hello, Mr. Crevier. In 24 years at the head of <\/span><\/b>Second Regard<\/span><\/i><\/b>, do you feel that you have covered the question of meaning?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNot at all! We\u2019ve only opened some doors! When I arrived in 1995, the show was interested in religions (plural). Then, we said we were interested in religious phenomena. After that, out of a desire to modernize, we moved on to the search for meaning, whatever that meant. And that\u2019s when Robert Lalonde [Note: a Quebec actor, novelist, and playwright] entered my life. In a discussion before an interview about his book <\/span>Le seul instant<\/span><\/i>, I said to him: \u2018But Robert, surely you must be interested in the search for meaning!\u2019 He replied to me: \u2018Ah, no, Alain, I find that searching for meaning only leads to disappointment.\u2019 His answer remained stuck in my head for months, because I suspected he was right. I started suggesting to my colleagues that they search for something other than meaning. That was when we began to take an interest in our humanity. At the end of the show, there were almost no religious subjects on the program anymore. Over these years, we\u2019ve stuck, consciously or not, to Quebecers\u2019 search for meaning, I believe.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What do you think of this search?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think Robert Lalonde was right. Sometimes, I wonder if, centuries ago, we didn\u2019t make a wrong turn somewhere, as if our human GPS had led us down a path where there are no answers. If we had focused our search on serenity, on our humanity, on what the best we had to offer was, then there might have been less violence between religions, first of all, and perhaps we would have been wiser.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry, but there are a lot of things that don\u2019t make sense. My mother died of Alzheimer\u2019s disease. She was a believer, a joyous believer, and she died not remembering who Jesus was or anything else. That doesn\u2019t make sense; it\u2019s just cells that went haywire and killed her memory. I knew a guy who was in a car accident, a head-on collision with a truck, he lost his girlfriend, and he\u2019s in a thousand pieces: that doesn\u2019t make sense. Losing a child in an accident or due to illness; it just makes no sense. So, I don\u2019t look for the meaning of that. And the problem with searching for meaning is that we end up finding one. We invent one in the end that winds up reassuring us, but which falsely reassures us. In my opinion, meaning isn\u2019t transcendent, it doesn\u2019t come from above, isn\u2019t imposed on us. On the contrary, we as human beings can make sense of our ordeals, make something out of them; yes, I believe it.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So, you don\u2019t believe that everything has a meaning, that \u201ceverything happens for a reason\u201d?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo. There are some things that happen for no reason. I don\u2019t think anyone, anywhere, gives an inherent meaning to the things that happen to me. I don\u2019t like the idea that someone I\u2019ll never see is making me suffer. When I was young, that was what religion was. \u2018Why am I suffering?\u2019 \u2018Jesus is testing you.\u2019 \u2018Why is my mother dying?\u2019 \u2018God is bringing her back to him.\u2019 \u2018Yes, but what if she went to hell?\u2019 \u2018Ah well, I wouldn\u2019t think that way, because God forgives all.\u2019 All that came from somewhere else, somewhere unnameable, and justified everything. It doesn\u2019t work, because I see men acting in the name of these same principles, and it gets gleefully massacred.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Does it make us unaccountable when we believe it\u2019s what God wants?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt took me years to start asking that question. If we accept the idea that not everything necessarily has a meaning, it means that we have to take responsibility for it and find one. Science is our ally in this process. It allows us to take responsibility in the face of dramas, human tragedy, and others.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I hear this need to tell ourselves that after death, there\u2019s something else, I ask myself, \u2018and what if there were nothing?\u2019 This idea soothes me, because I don\u2019t have to live my life based on something which, in my opinion, doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet I know many people who are very anxious about the idea of there being nothing after death!<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s because they\u2019re thinking about \u2018I!\u2019 They ask themselves, \u2018what will happen to my mind?\u2019 I answer them: \u2018The life of your mind will stop when your cells stop.\u2019 And they: \u2018But what will that have served?\u2019 And my response: \u2018Others.\u2019 The most important part of the equation, I think, is \u2018we.\u2019 So, <\/span>we<\/span><\/i> are eternal, <\/span>we<\/span><\/i> have something to do, <\/span>we<\/span><\/i> will have a long life, if we don\u2019t act like idiots.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cToday, people who want to find meaning in their lives are taking open, informed, rigorous steps, and I think that at a time when religion was more present, that wasn\u2019t done. The answers were in religious texts, but they were unsatisfactory. There was cruelty, wickedness, injustice in it. People today are looking elsewhere and building their own ideas of what life is.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Has the disappearance of religion left us with a certain emptiness, in terms of rules, moral righteousness, and meaning, too?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t agree with the emptiness part. I\u2019ve already spoken with people from the Church whom I like who told me that we\u2019ve lost our bearings, our values. And I told them, \u2018But it\u2019s not true!\u2019 I have the same values as before, and I think values preceded the very idea of religion. We loved our neighbours before the Catholic, Muslim, or Jewish narrative came along. I think people have values, and I don\u2019t think that today is a worse time than my father\u2019s or mine.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m part of the generation that filled churches to the rafters, only to desert them and never return. We thought we had settled the matter, and that we were free. But the big questions came back, and they came back more intensely than before, because we no longer had the instruction manual to guide us: the missal. That left us to our own devices to find the answers to life\u2019s tragedies, but it also allowed us to question what didn\u2019t make sense in our eyes, in order to shape a society that more closely resembled us. Medical assistance in dying is one of these achievements. We could no longer tolerate the idea of forcing people to live in agony, so we made things change. And it\u2019s for the better.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Any final words?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPay attention to the echoes of our humanity. Even though our era seems to be filled with horrible people and things, there are good people around you, there\u2019s beauty everywhere, and we have to believe in that. We owe it to our children.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

To listen to the full interview hosted by Evelyne Charuest, follow our podcast Centr\u00e9 sur l\u2019\u00e9quilibre.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The components of a long and healthy life are multiple, and they can often be measured or studied. But one ingredient that gives life flavour and is difficult to quantify is meaning. Can a life lived without intention be satisfying? Is it absolutely necessary to emerge stronger from the trials that life places in our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":65243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-societe-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65084"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65247,"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65084\/revisions\/65247"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stromspa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}