For eons man has seen himself at the centre of the universe. But don’t think for a second that we are any less self-involved. That restlessness is a mortal’s biggest challenge for what is man without a purpose. He qualifies the term while describing one of his characters in the following words: “In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2.55, when you know that you’ve had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.” Mulling over the meaning of life, one enters what Douglas Adams calls the long, dark teatime of the soul or the listless limbo of the working man. You won’t find anyone fighting wars over it. The purposes of a paper might be many but they all are agreed upon. The point of a flower is to please you and to help its plant reproduce. The use or meaning of a muffin’s life is to fill empty stomachs. But is there one? If there is one, why do we all disagree so much on such a basic thing. The writer is an Islamabad-based TV journalist and tweets have been meaning to write about the meaning of life for a long time.
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