42 is the Answer to Life
Douglas Adams was my introduction to the comedy science fiction genre of books. His “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series with its quirky humour has gained a cult following (or baffled incomprehension in some people) who would cling on to quite a number of phrases or concepts popularized by the series. They would instantly recognize the title.
In the book, a race of super-intelligent aliens built the supercomputer Deep Thought (this was written in the late 1970s, decades before the birth of DeepMind of the infamous world-champion-beating AlphaGo computer program) to provide the ultimate answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything”. After 7.5 million years of computation, Deep Thought churned out the answer — 42.
The punchline is, they didn’t know what the ultimate question was that would make this ultimate answer meaningful. Building another computational effort to search for the ultimate question was another thread in the series (and perhaps fodder for another essay next time).
It’s painfully funny. Painful as the lessons it brings cuts too close to home. It’s a classic example of how knowing the “answer” to a wrong question is utterly useless (and may get you lynched). I’ve seen too often people (and been guilty of myself) fixating on and pushing solutions, without knowing yet what the problem actually was.
Too often for me, it’s an instinctive grab on novelty. I latch on to something new, I like it, I want to use it own it share it. For others, it may be love for new gadgets, manifesting into shopping for things that one may not really have a need or use for in their lives. For me, it’s the non-concrete things: new ideas, new information, new experience. But it’s all the same: I may be fascinated by a new self-help method from a guru and then latch on it to try out — or worse, to advocate it to some unsuspecting and oft unwilling person — before even understanding if there indeed is an underlying problem that this method would address.
Identifying a problem worth solving though, is surprisingly not easy. There are two parts to this. I’m inquisitive by nature, so finding potential problems is fortunately easy for me (and unfortunately hell of annoying for people around me I believe, as I widen my search perimeter to intersect their boundaries — sorry folks). It’s separating the wheat from the chaff that is challenging: how do I know of the many before me, which are the true problems that are worth my time and attention, and which are those that beckon at me just because “oooh my shiny new thingy is just the right thing for that”.
And for that, I need a direction.
I’m 42 this year. At this time of writing, I’m approximately halfway through with being 42. I’m also approximately halfway through my life expectancy (which is 84.8 in Singapore as of 2017).
In other words, I’m in the epitome of midlife.
This year has been a restless one for me. Outwardly, how I live, work, play, have all changed with the new normal brought upon me by CoViD-19. Inwardly, how I think, perceive, feel, too seems to shift. I feel dissonance, disquiet, more than I usually do. There are many things that I began to feel discontent about, even though nothing major seems to have changed. And as I reacted to every single one of them, I felt wearier instead of relieved. Bringing in answers to the problems didn’t necessarily help.
Instead of charging in armed with so-called solutions, I need to take a step back and reflect, if I can find a guiding principle, a direction, that will help me see the right problems to solve. In other words: what is the purpose of my life? As I cross my life midpoint, in my second act of life, what do I want to achieve before the curtain falls? The second act may necessarily be different from the first. There comes a time when I need to relook the script, revisit if the purpose as I saw it in the first half is still the same for the second half.
And the time is 42.
In hindsight, it is an appropriate time to take stock of my life. CoViD-19 brought with it a lot of upheavals that took up a lot of my time and energy. At the same time, it provided pockets of time and situations that allowed me to think differently from usual. It’s a blessing in disguise, as these pockets in a way forced me to relook at my purpose.
It’s an exercise I had done in the past. Out of school, early in my professional life, before I get married, when I changed career into my current line: I found orienting myself back to a purpose helped me focus and zoom in on what helped me live the way I want.
Now that orientation seems to have wavered. It may have slowly along the way, as my life changed, my family changed, my work changed, the world changed. It may have been so gradual that I did not notice it, until this CoViD-19 induced break. With all these, has my purpose changed? Has the ultimate question that I want to keep pursuing, changed?
So yes, to me 42 is indeed the answer I need. It is time to revisit the ultimate question in my life. I don’t know how many roads must a man walk down before he can find the destination of his life, I expect it will be a complicated journey. But The Hitchhiker’s Guide has another apt advice for this journey: Don’t Panic.
