One of the ironies of our entertainment culture is that Hollywood keeps turning out movies which powerfully illustrate the utter absurdity, emptiness, and meaninglessness of modern secular life even as they persist in endorsing that very life.
The irony occurred to me again the other night while watching About Schmidt, a film starring Jack Nicholson who portrays a 66 year-old recently retired insurance salesman named Warren Schmidt who realizes at the end of the film that everything about his life is pointless (there is a small moment of redemption at the end to keep the viewer from running out to the nearest high bridge). For me, the climactic scene was when he acknowledges to himself that when he and those who knew him are all dead nothing he did in his life will have mattered.
I'm not a movie aficionado, but it seems to me that films addressing, intentionally or otherwise, the existential vacuum that is modern secular life get made a lot. Films such as American Beauty, Synecdoche, A Serious Man, About Schmidt, or almost any Woody Allen film all raise the question and none of them, in my opinion, offers a persuasive answer: In a world without God, what's the significance of our lives? What does anything we do really mean? About Schmidt opens with those questions (at his retirement dinner) and ends with the realization that our lives don't mean a thing.
(Those who saw the film might object that the bond he forges with Ndugu puts meaning into his life, but personally I don't see that as anything more than a superficial anodyne in the overall pattern of his life).
Why would we be the sort of creatures capable of asking these questions, of experiencing this angst about life's purpose, if there really is no answer to them? Why would nature evolve us to need something that's unattainable, to need meaning? Perhaps our existential yearning for meaningfulness runs so deep because meaningfulness is possible, but genuine meaning is only possible if death does not end our existence. If death is the end then nothing matters and everything is ultimately empty. If it isn't the end then it's possible that everything matters and matters forever.
Naturalism, atheism, and materialism all lead to hopelessness and absurdity. They're worldviews that entail nihilism, which is one reason why so many find it impossible to live consistently with their belief in a godless world.
