116

116 is a place where I have spent much of the last four years of my life. A dark windowless room in the heart of the communication building at Boise State University. In the middle of a semester it was almost my home, all I lacked was a cot in the corner. It is a video editing lab but the truth is that it is much more. The unnumbered hours of transferring video, of rendering, of re-rendering of exporting, trans-coding and DVD burning have fostered so much more than just video production.
During the busy days around deadlines you could have all kinds of interesting conversations. Religion, philosophy, theology, pop culture, film styles and many other random, politically incorrect and taboo subjects. There are few other spaces where I learned so much or talked about such interesting things.
One of the last conversations I had in 116 before graduation was about the meaning of life. One of the 116 regulars was explaining about how the night before he had been talking with some of his friends about the meaning of life. They had decided that there wasn't one.  As I usually do I tried to take this idea to an  extreme conclusion. If life has no meaning how do we know that anything has meaning? How would you be able to even articulate the idea? If there is no over arching meaning how can there be meaning at all, even at the micro scale? He looked at me as if I had misunderstood him and went back to editing. Of course I knew what he actually meant. He was expressing a very old idea which has been around since ancient times. That all is vanity. That our toil under the sun is a pointless effort.
I sat there thinking after he had left. I wondered why he even bothered being at school. What was the use of a collage degree or anything else if in the end life is meaningless. I reflected on this idea for some time afterward, wondering why he had brought it up and if I should have said something different. Of course if life is meaningless there really isn't any point to talking about the subject. I think that the point I wanted to make was that if life is meaningless, it is a rather amazing feat that we could have ever realized it. Humanity is distinct in its search for meaning. Other life forms communicate with each other but none of them, so far as we know have ever been concerned with the meaning for their existence. It seems entirely odd to me that we have so many words and languages only to discover that there isn't anything to talk about. It seems to me that living life without meaning is like trying to have a conversation with nothing to talk about.