The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Humanity
Meaning Crisis, Ignorance, Microcosm, Why Do You Do What You Do?, Questions
A good book has a radioactive half-life
Russell T Davies
I.
Meaning Crisis
Visionary eccentrics intrigue me. People like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Perhaps it’s because they seem so alien to me, or maybe it’s because deep down I’d like to be more like them—in only the good ways, of course. (I keep a permanent six feet of social distance from any reality distortion field or demon mode.) What really piques my curiosity when it comes to guys like these is their undeniable sense of purpose and duty. Visionaries are known for being mission-driven and, even if their life mission isn’t entirely clear to them, they’re driven to the nth degree to figure it out and fulfill it.
That said, in today’s 5 Big Ideas, I attempt to understand what’s motivating Elon Musk. Whether you like it or not, Musk is currently the wealthiest person in the world1 and one of the most influential2. Given his status on Earth, we may as well peel back the layers of the onion and figure out what’s inside.
According to Musk3, at around age 11 or 12, he experienced an existential crisis—he couldn’t find any meaning in life or the world. As a voracious reader, he turned to religious texts like the Bible, Qur’an, Torah, and various Hindu works in a desperate search for meaning. When religion didn’t provide the answers, he took to German philosophy, namely Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which only deepened his despair. It wasn’t until he encountered Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at around 14 that he began to find some answers to his meaning crisis. Musk describes the book as “philosophy disguised as humor,” and it led him to the realization that “We don’t actually know all the answers. In fact, we don’t even know the right questions to ask.” This insight, drawn from a whimsical sci-fi novel, became the foundation of Musk’s life philosophy.
I was dying to know: What in tarnation did he find in this book?
So, I read it. And while I may not have reached the same epiphany as Musk (no plans to start a rocket company… yet), I did glean some interesting ideas about humanity from Douglas Adams’s delineation of the galaxy.
II.
Ignorance
I’d far rather be happy than right any day.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
People are fundamentally ignorant. And not just some people, all people. And it’s our unwillingness to accept or acknowledge our default state of ignorance that makes us unhappy. We want to be RIGHT. We want our way to be THE WAY. We want our opinions to be THE FACTS. When things don’t go our way, or we’re confronted with conflicting information, we tend to throw a fit. We don’t like it when our subjective worldview is challenged because it reminds us that we aren’t actually the center of the Universe.
In truth, we rarely know what’s true. In reality, we confuse our subjective reality with the objective one. In fact, we know so little about the facts that we’re perpetually on edge. In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy writes, “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” The Highest Degree. True wisdom comes from humbling ourselves and acknowledging that we know nothing. Only by starting from a baseline of not knowing anything can we begin to learn something.
It’s perhaps our ignorance, the fact that we don’t know everything, that makes life exciting. Ignorance is a prerequisite for adventure. If we knew precisely how the future would unfold, there would be no future to look forward to. The fact that some people think they have all the answers—to Life, the Universe, and Everything—is preposterous. We can’t even reach a consensus on U.S. politics, let alone all the other Life stuff.
A Friendly Reminder:
III.
Microcosm
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
While The Guide takes us on a wild journey through time and space, it also delves into the inner cosmos of its characters. Not unlike life on earth, denizens of the Galaxy grapple with a slew of mental and emotional health issues. Across the Universe, shame is a terminal illness, stress and anxiety are serious social problems, egos are out of control, and paranoia is a shared experience. Every being faces an outer and inner world, and they both scare the bejesus out of us.
One fascinating idea from the book is that Earth is said to be a planet-sized supercomputer, and the strange ape-like beings inhabiting it are totally unaware that they are simply a part of a gigantic computer program. Without this knowledge, nothing on Earth seems to make any sense. People often take everything personally when it’s entirely possible that everything happens for a higher purpose of which we’re completely oblivious to. If you’re a person of faith—whether it’s faith in God, Allah, Yahweh, Jesus, the Universe, science, spirituality, supercomputers, the World Economic Forum, or whatever—you’re putting your faith in something bigger than yourself. To truly be faithful, nothing can be personal.
Microcosm comes from the Greek phrase mikros kosmos, meaning “little universe.” Inside each of us is a little universe, a reflection of the greater whole. Our menial personal problems are but an iota of the world’s collective chaos.
IV.
Why Do You Do What You Do?
Ford: “Do you really enjoy this sort of thing? Stomping around, shouting, pushing people out of spaceships…”
Vogon: “Well, the hours are good.”
Ford: “But if it’s mostly lousy, then why do you do it? What is it? The girls? The leather? The machismo? Or do you just find that coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?”
Vogon: “Er… Er… I dunno. My aunt said that spaceship guard was a good career for a young Vogon—you know, the uniform, the low-slung stun-ray holster, the mindless tedium… You see if I keep it up I can eventually get promoted to Senior Shouting Officer, and there aren’t usually many vacancies for non-shouting and non-pushing-people-about officers, so I think I’d better stick to what I know.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy4
While I don’t know many Vogon Spaceship Guards, I do know quite a few people who remain in mindless jobs for their entire 40-plus-year career for these very reasons and, given that they have only one life and Earth could be obliterated at any point to make way for a hyperspatial express route, I’m not quite sure why they don’t try doing something they’d actually enjoy for their life’s work.
Just my two cents.
V.
Questions
If I have a religion, it’s the religion of curiosity. I’m trying to understand the universe, or at least set things in motion so that at some point civilization is able to understand the universe.
Elon Musk5
In Idea #3, I mentioned the notion that Earth is just a planet-sized supercomputer running a gigantic computer program, of which all humans are a part. I’d like to expand on that now.
According to The Guide, Earth is the greatest supercomputer in the Universe. Before Earth, there was another supercomputer called Deep Thought, which was tasked with calculating the “Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.” After seven and a half million years of computation and contemplation, Deep Thought revealed that the Ultimate Answer is “Forty-two.”
Forty-two.
42.
Unfortunately, forty-two is not a particularly enlightening answer to such an important question. But perhaps that’s the point. The profound philosophical answers people often seek through religion, literature, work, relationships, adventure, activism, education, and whatnot may not be as illuminating as we hope. In fact, the answers to what we’re seeking may be right in front of our very eyes—they may be as simple as 42, You, me, the Earth itself, or the Universe.
What may be more important than the answers to our deepest existential questions are the questions themselves. The Socratic method is a form of inquiry that uses persistent questioning to stimulate critical thinking and uncover ideas. It’s based on the belief that all thinking comes from asking questions and that asking one question should lead to further questions and so on, so forth. In other words, how deep one delves depends on the quality and quantity of questions asked—even if the answers remain unclear.
Like Tolstoy, Socrates professed his ignorance, claiming that recognizing this ignorance was the only thing that made him wiser than other philosophers. For Socrates, the purpose of his method of inquiry wasn’t just to find answers, but to reveal and highlight one’s own lack of understanding. There’s nothing quite like asking questions upon questions to make one feel truly ignorant.
And, sometimes, it takes acknowledging that no one actually has all the answers to snap us out of our meaning crisis. After all, how can we find meaning if we don’t even know what it is that we’re looking for?
According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the program that the Earth computer is running—a program so mindbogglingly complex and elusive that it surpasses even the “Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything”—is this:
What is the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything?
PS: Don’t Panic
Musk was named Time’s “Person of the Year” for 2021 and was also recognized as one of the world’s most influential people by Time in 2010, 2013, and 2018
paraphrased
Another great piece. Thank you. I am a great fan of Douglas Adams and your essay brought back some great memories. And as you know, only one thing is certain, and that is that nothing is certain. Yet again you have brightened up my Sunday morning.
I find Elon Musk fascinating and loved this piece. Personally I think that while nobody can be sure what the meaning is, it’s also healthy to identify a meaning and purpose for yourself. I think we all need an organizing principle to our lives, and without one we flounder. I think it’s important to have a cohesive worldview you’ve developed through curiosity while remaining willing to adapt that worldview in response to new, carefully considered information aligning to your values. We are undoubtedly living in a meaning crisis, but I think on a deeper level, it’s a crisis of faith because people have lost faith in the prevailing institutions and socially, our values have shifted to the temporal, like career, rather than the transcendental, like beauty, truth and goodness. While this loss of faith is warranted because our institutions have proven themselves untrustworthy, I think the onus has shifted to the individual to define meaning for themselves. Many people now find faith in their political party or some other vessel of power, and that seems to deepen the meaning crisis rather than alleviate it. Sadly we’ve all been dumbed down and become cyborg-like because of technology addictions, but the task before us should we choose to accept it, I believe, is to find and pursue our own ideas of meaning.