written by JOHN MARK MINES | MEANING, MONEY, FAITH
I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
Joseph Campbell
Real Imaginary Friends
I have a riddle for you: what is the best joke in the world?
In 1774, unknown author Johann Wolfgang Goethe published a novel called The Sorrow of Young Werther. The story followed a love triangle between three friends. Fearful of forever enduring unrequited love, Werther kills himself.
The book was a hit, making Goethe an overnight sensation. But it had a sinister effect: copycat suicides. Men, dressed like Werther, followed in his footsteps. The book and clothing style were banned the following year.
Inspired by this trend, Professor David Phillips at the University of California at San Diego studied the impact of front-page suicides stories in the United States from 1947 to 1968. He found that each headliner increased the average number of suicides by about 58 deaths. Clearly, the “Werther effect” lives on.
These additional deaths were copycats. Publicizing single suicides increased the number of single suicides, just like publicizing murder-suicides increased the number of murder-suicides. The increase was also limited to the regions of circulation. The influence of imitation was unmistakable.
Curiously, though, Werther shows that the suicide doesn’t even need to be a real person to induce imitation. For something as serious as death itself, do we really not know the difference between fact and fiction?
It’s All Relative
Professor Phillips’ work builds on a mountain of evidence that demonstrates our susceptibility to influence. Apparently, we are highly impressionable. So impressionable, in fact, even fiction can fool us. Undoubtedly, Goethe never considered his writing to have life or death implications. Unfortunately, it did.
Somehow, Werther became real. Factually, he is fiction. He doesn’t exist. And yet the Werther effect causes a confounding conclusion: something doesn’t have to be real to make a difference. Imaginary friends matter.
mat·ter /ˈmadər/
verb: be of importance; have significance.
We love to flirt with the boundary between fact and fiction. Technology, from social media filters to computer generated imagery, emboldens us to blur the lines between physical and virtual reality. From Halloween to Comic-Con, we enjoy the in-between.
rel·a·tive /ˈrelədiv/
adjective: existing only in comparison to something else; not absolute.
Yet some lines remain fixed. If video games were real, I’m a mass murderer. I’ve racked up my fair share of kills in Call of Duty. Add that to Medal of Honor, Halo, and even GoldenEye, and I’m the most prolific serial killer of all time.
Instead, I walk the streets a free man. Why? Because they aren’t real. I killed an hallucination, not a real person. The events occurred in a video game, not in real life. And so they don’t matter.
Similarly, movies are never as terrifying as real life. A trip to the doctor’s office can be scarier than any Hitchcock film. Fiction is fun, but it’s fake. At all times, we know the difference: one is real, and the other is not.
But if that’s true, then why the Werther effect? Why would real people copycat a fictional character?
Because reality doesn’t determine what’s real: we do. And when real people follow the footsteps of an imaginary Werther, he is no longer fictional. He’s a real boy.
Monopoly Money
The blurred lines between fact and fiction go deeper than novels or video games. In fact, they form the very foundation daily life. Believe it or not, the world runs on fiction.
For the last few millennia, trade has made the world go round. Trade is the exchange of goods, like trading sheep for wheat in a game of Settlers of Catan. For most of the world’s history, trade was a physical exchange. Then, currency changed everything.
Today, the world runs on money. Money determines where we live, whom we meet and marry, and when we retire. Scores have killed and died for it. Yet, money has a dirty secret: it’s not real.
Money is fiat currency. That means it only is valuable because we said so. If we choose to stop believing in it, its value instantaneously vanishes. It evaporates so easily because it was never there in the first place.
fi·at /ˈfēət,ˈfēˌät/
noun : an arbitrary order.
But money isn’t alone. Language, too, is a collection of arbitrary sounds and symbols. Foreign languages sound like noise, because they are. Without meaning, language is reduced to gibberish.
Modern life is full of these arbitrary mediums. From TV shows to movies and TikTok videos, we spend most of our discretionary time in a pretend world. These fictions are big business too, and success can earn you lots of arbitrary dollars.
Sports, games, and the Olympics are fictions, too. There is no reason to get so worked up about an arbitrary ball going into an arbitrary hoop. Yet, real livelihoods depend on it. From Olympic sprinters to chess Grandmasters to Fortnite esports pros, made-up competitions matter.
Currency, language, and competition only matter as long as we say they do. We give greenbacks power, and assign meaning to 100-meter sprinting. We are the masters of meaning: we choose what matters and what doesn’t. That’s why the Werther effect exists. He matters, but only as long as we want him to.
Because I Said So
Money matters because we say it does. The World Cup is more than metal because we say it is. The British Monarchy is royal as long as we choose to believe it. That’s because meaning doesn’t come from reality; it comes from us. It comes from you.
We are the makers of meaning. We can make something as imaginary as a fictional love triangle become a real life-and-death situation. We have that power.
This might sound like a lot of hoopla. It might sound impossible for meaning to be manufactured out of thin air; that, somehow, meaning must instead be intrinsically embedded in reality in order to be real. Or, that meaning must be ordained by a some divine authority to have true value.
Werther proves otherwise. You make meaning every day, you just didn’t know it.
All this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings.
You’ve Got Mail
Something doesn’t have to be inherently valuable to matter. Money and language are completely made-up. Yet, we would have never gone to the Moon or eradicated smallpox without them. Sports are arbitrary, but the joy the fans feel is tangible. In all that relatively came something undeniably real.
And so, if you find yourself looking for the meaning of life, stop. You won’t find it, because meaning isn’t something to be found; it’s something to be made.
Which brings us back to the riddle: what is the best joke in the world?
The one that makes you laugh.
