To grasp this concept of thinking, talking, and conceptualizing in terms of metaphors I will use an example described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. One of their examples is love, which we metaphorically structure in different ways :
LOVE IS A CONTAINER
He is in love.
LOVE IS MADNESS
She is just crazy about him.
Harry went wild for her.
LOVE IS MAGIC
She put a spell on me.
LOVE IS WAR
He persued for her and won her hand in marriage.
LOVE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE
Their relationship is filled with energy.
I was drawn to her.
His whole life revolves around her.
LOVE IS CHEMISTRY
Their is chemistry between them.
Light my fire baby.
Very rarely do we discuss love in terms of an emotion or a psychological occurrence, and even then we still speak metaphorically about love. Our concepts of life and its meaning are structured and understood in a similar manner :
LIFE IS AN ANTAGONIST
Life is a bitch.
LIFE IS A CONTAINER
There is so much in life to enjoy.
Life is full of mystery.
In my lifetime I have traveled the world.
I want so much more out of life.
What is my purpose in life?
LIFE IS PATH
I have come so far in my life.
She doesn't know where she is going in life.
LIFE IS BUILDING
This is the framework by which I live my life.
God is the foundation of my life.
I built my livelihood from my rugged past.
LIFE IS A FLUID
Just go with the flow.
I'm just cruising through life.
LIFE IS WAR
I fought my way through life to get where I am now.
His life is a battlefield.
LIFE IS AN ENTITY
My children are my life.
It is very hard, of course, for us to conceptualize life as life itself. It is sort of like how physicists always try to use analogies to explain complex ideas. For example, the expanding universe is explained as an expanding balloon. Light are explained as ripples in water (waves) and as billiard balls (particles). But they never really talk about the expanding universe as an expanding universe. We have to render foreign concepts in terms of a familiar experience, such as balloons, playing pool, war, containers, et cetera.
Every human on this planet has a natural curiosity to the nature of life, its meaning, and their purpose in life. But considering we understand this peculiar concept of life in metaphors, in terms of another familiar experience, then we are subjectively interpreting life, not as life, but as something else. It is our inability to comprehend life as it is, and therefore we lack the mental capacity to objectify it in terms of a concrete experience, in which we would not discuss life as a metaphorical structure, but as it is.
This latter part is, more or less, and extension of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, in which our reality is limited to our vocabulary to describe it. For instance, if I walk into Ethan & Allen and see a light blue sample I say it is "light blue". But someone who works at Ethan & Allen, having more words to describe more colors would say they see "coral dust blue". The Philippines have a single word for purple, blue, and green. Obviously they see purple, but they comprehend it as a variation of blue and green. A person who doesn't know much about cars really only sees a car. So if a Hyundai Sonata cuts them off in traffic they might say, "Oh, that right. Just jump right in car!" But someone who knows more cars would say, "Thanks for cutting me off Sonata!"
Because we do not have a sufficient vocabulary and conceptual structure to comprehend the meaning of life, and until we do life will remain an abstract concept that we experience subjectively. Until we can objectify life as a fundamental experience that is as basic as war, spatial orientation, container, path, et cetera, then life will remain subjective to our reality. So far, life is an illusion that cannot be comprehended without the use of metaphors and analogies.
So what is the meaning of life? It is a metaphorical number (42). It is a metaphorical stick that bends (as Howard Roark bends the stick into whatever he wills it to be). The meaning of life is anything objectively concrete, except for life itself. The only objective statement I have encountered about the meaning of life was from Joseph Campbell : "The meaning of life is life."
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