What If the Meaning of Life Is in the Body?

The meaning of life is a big concept, of course, and no one has ever been able to satisfactorily answer what, exactly, it is. And yet many of us still wonder what it is we’re doing here, what our purpose is, and what we must accomplish during the short time we have on Earth.

Some believe we should pray, connect with God, and join with divinity. Others believe we must follow the rules of a religion to have a good life. Some of us believe there is no meaning; we’re just here following our animal instincts. From other perspectives, our higher self has some plan for us—but we don’t ever get to find out what the plan is.

What if the meaning of life was a little simpler than all that? What if the meaning of life is being in a body well?

Discovering Your “Spark” Through Lived Experience

The Pixar movie Soul addresses this very question through an exploration of death, the afterlife, and the before-life, when we are souls getting ready to come down to Earth and begin our lives. In the movie, Joe Gardner is a musician who finds himself suddenly dead on the very day he’s supposed to play jazz with his hero. He connects with a soul named 22 in the before-life who has no interest at all in becoming alive, and the two scheme to get Joe back into his body and allow 22 to avoid having to go through the bother of living a life.

The two work to help 22 find her “spark,” which is the inspiration with which she will live her life on Earth (so that she can give it to Joe). The two spend a lot of time trying to figure out what a “spark” actually is. Joe is sure his is jazz music, while 22 has never felt interested in any of the mundane tasks of human life. Through a series of hijinks, the two end up on Earth, with 22 inhabiting Joe’s body and Joe stuck for a little while in the body of a cat. While in Joe’s body, 22 experiences things she couldn’t in the before-life that introduce her to concepts like music, art, performance, and so on. She gets to eat pizza. She walks and feels the breeze from a subway vent. She collects a maple seed pirouetting from a tree. She listens to music, feeling the rhythm with a body she’d never had before. And, sure enough, she finds her spark.

The movie carefully avoids defining the meaning of life, but there is a moment in the movie when the beings of the before-life explain that our purpose is not about having a particular “thing” to accomplish. It’s more about the desire to experience life on Earth, in a body.

The Meaning of Life as Experiencing Your Body

Some people are so sure they know the purpose of life that they devote their entire existence to worship through abstinence. They don’t drink, barely eat, and never have sex. Most of their time is spent in deep contemplation and meditation. What if one of these people made it to the afterlife expecting a great reward, only to discover they’d gotten it completely wrong and needed to go back and try again? What if the meaning of life is about experiencing rather than denying your body?

There are plenty of theories about what happens before and after life, but the one thing we know for sure is that we have some limited amount of time to exist in a body. Even if our consciousness continues in some heaven-like place, it’s without a body that can feel pleasure or suffering. If we are reborn into endless new lives, we only get this body, this life, once.

Emotions are physical, after all. Big emotions like sadness, joy, and rage are fundamentally physical. We may have thoughts about them, but they are called feelings because we feel them. Whatever we can think or judge or imagine about our before-lives and afterlives, we likely can’t feel them.

There is a funny moment in Soul when Joe and 22 are experimenting with the different theoretical experiences that could help 22 find her spark. They come across a piece of theoretical pizza. They try to eat it, but they can’t smell or taste it, and when they put it in their mouths, the piece of pizza pops, fully formed, right back out of their behinds. They can experience almost any theoretical reality in the before-life, but they can’t smell, taste, or touch anything. These are the gifts we can only have during the short time when we exist within a body.

So, what if our work here is not so much about changing the world or leaving some type of mark, but simply experiencing the world? Having empathy, connection, loss, grief, joy, and pain? How would your day-to-day life change if you knew your sole purpose in this life was to be in your body well?

Learn how philosophical thinking can add meaning to your life.