Malfeasance

\mal-FEE-zuhn(t)s\, noun:
Wrongdoing, misconduct, or misbehavior, especially by a public official.

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Most of our most grand and correct ideas about the meaning of life are not eventuating or thousands of years away, but among our entire history, relatively unchanging. Love, curiosity and creation (there may and probably are others, but these stick out). They form the foundation of everything, and always have. The road to truth or great creation is not graduating toward some singular end, but rather, a road where every step is, itself, a destination. So too is the meaning of life—not some vast and incredible truth hiding beneath a massive shroud and being chipped away at by the great minds across centuries, but relatively simplistic ideas, some of which are so commonsensical that they are cliché.

To answer truth in terms of a singular thesis describing everything is to mistake the human question. Our pursuits in love, truth and creation are not ones of eventual destinations, but of roads. Should we ever reach the end of those roads, we will find ourselves displaced, bored, and without meaning. Instead, meaning is, so often, the search for it—the search for love and improvement and knowledge. It is intuitive, but incorrect, to think of knowledge as the light at the end of a tunnel. There is no grand thesis, and if there were, we wouldn’t be very much motivated to learn anything ever again.

It is the mild anxiety of not knowing (the class-mentioned cognitive dissonance) that motivates us to know—and I suspect the wisest people in history have turned that feeling away from anxiety, and indulged it, instead, as curiosity. Humans are not naturally disposed, I think, toward this sort of step-by-step acceptance, instead preferring a comfortable tier on which to rest. Continually climbing the stairs, however (I’m just insatiable with these metaphors today, I guess), I find to be a much more rewarding endeavor.