At some point during their lifetime, every person questions the meaning or purpose of their existence. Humans have answered this query in a variety of different ways depending on the sociohistorical context they lived in, living and dying for God, the fatherland, or liberty. With the advent of secularism and existentialist “authenticity”, it is now commonly accepted that the search for meaning is an intensely subjective and personal process. People are now urged to be true to themselves and freely choose whatever altar they should dedicate their lives to without judgment. As a human living on solid ground, my life’s purpose is significantly different from a whale swimming in the ocean because of my capacity for self-awareness, higher-level reasoning, and participation in society.
Firstly, whales do not have consciousness the same way humans do. While they are doubtlessly intelligent creatures, they are still animals with no capacity for reason or even awareness of existence beyond their physical body. For life to have transcendent meaning, there must be an element of choice and deliberateness embedded into it. However, whales are ruled primarily by instincts, and the purpose of their life is simply survival. When they eat, they might feel an endorphin rush of happiness, but this is simply a neurobiological response to stimuli. They are unaware of their own self or mortality and unable to grasp that their existence either has or does not have meaning. The same chain of reasoning does not apply to humans anymore; we are sometimes excessively aware of ourselves and our impending death. As our society grows more advanced and complex, the fundamental problems of survival now depends on conscious decision-making rather than instincts. While the survival of whales is the instinctual drive of life begetting life, human consciousness and self-awareness generate meaningful existence born out of deliberate choices.
Furthermore, whales are self-sufficient animals that generally travel the oceans alone, while humans are dependent on the larger society. To satisfy their biological needs for nutrition and reproduction, whales only have to follow their instincts – open their mouths while swimming, and find a member of the opposite sex to mate with. There is no goal beyond the continuation of life because survival is precarious and depends on individual action. However, every human born today is already part of a comprehensive system engineered to guarantee survival. Wide-scale human organization has provided an abundance of food and shelter, but each person must produce something worthwhile for society to get their share. As a result, instead of being ruled by instincts to avoid certain death, humans are free to select a certain profession that will define the purpose of their life beyond merely satisfying their biological desires. It is similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the concept of self-actualization. Life meaning is only desired and sought once basic physical needs are met, which is not the case for whales or, unfortunately, even all humans.
Thirdly, the search for meaning involves higher-level reasoning and transcendent belief in something bigger than yourself that only humans are capable of. Most often, people do not dedicate their lives to physical objects or even real people. They believe in abstract ideas — God, love, money, art, democracy, or even technological innovation and human expansion. The meaning of life is not an end-goal or simple answer, but a process of unrelenting striving toward a vague, inaccessible ideal. For humans, it really is all about the journey and its capacity to transform a person into a more mature, humane, and empathic version of himself. It is not individual achievements but rather the feeling of having contributed to a general human goal and becoming a better person that grants life meaning. The capacity to believe in abstract ideas and become better is a uniquely human characteristic that is unavailable to other animals.
Many people argue that just as animals’ lives have no inherent or transcendent meaning, neither do humans’. If the purpose of a whale is simply to survive, then the same principles apply to people, and anything else is a self-indulgent delusion. However, I think this is an unnecessarily nihilistic position that ignores the role of human agency. These people fail to understand that it is not meaning that is inherent to our existence, but rather the struggle for it and how we choose to deal with it. They are already selecting what to believe in by claiming that it does not exist. Perhaps it is true that the objective reason for individual human existence only consists in avoiding death and reproduction. Nevertheless, the very act of my choosing to dedicate myself to something bigger is what grants that ideal power and meaning over my life.
In conclusion, humans are capable of achieving transcendent life meaning that animals such as whales are not privy to. We have conquered nature and optimized our biological needs, and thus we have the opportunity to use our consciousness and higher-level reasoning to invest our existence with meaning. We can dedicate our lives to abstract concepts such as God or art. While whales are intelligent creatures, they are ruled by instincts and do not possess the mental capacity to pursue something bigger than their basic needs. Put simply, the meaning of life is a uniquely human endeavor because it is not intrinsic to any existence but rather obtained through willful effort.