Episode Details

The question feels timeless, but the phrase "the meaning of life" first appears in English around 1833 — and in German in the 1790s — right as the scientific picture began eroding the religious one. Was the question itself a symptom of that crisis rather than a permanent human inheritance? This episode traces the arc: what Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and traditions from the Lakota to the Maya say the point of it all is; how the analytic philosophers split the problem into supernaturalism, naturalism, and nihilism; and what the Greeks — Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, Cyrenaics, and Epicureans — each answered differently. The strangest finding: traditions with no contact keep arriving at the same answer. Whether that convergence is a fingerprint of the divine or a fingerprint of us may be undecidable. Episode #260865 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/260865