Religious & Secular life and life's meaning

On a recent trip to the US, I went on a tour to explore the lives of Hasidic Jews living in Brooklyn. They give you a glimpse of their homes, how they live, their community and way life. The experience is somewhat unique and different, especially if you haven't really interacted with them before. After the tour, it made me reflect more on meaning and connection in a secular life vs a religious life.

What gives life meaning in a secular life? Career? Seeking Wealth, Status, Comfort? It differs but for most would it not be seeking pleasure and avoiding pain? Perhaps it's their job, their families, the chase of fame and fortune, of status and comfort? What gives a religious life meaning? Living in accordance with god? the divine? following the commandments, traditions, rituals?

The true religious life does not entirely live for seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, although that is human nature, the true religious life lives for god. For the divine. What does that lead to? Perhaps a less empty feeling. The secular notion of creating meaning or of substituting meaning for maximising pleasure and minimising pain has this emptiness associated with it. A groundless, nihilistic feeling of what's the point and purpose of it all once a little of that is achieved.

Death has a shallow meaning for the secular life.. It is the end of the bodily existence and nothing to come after it. Even if you are not afraid or death, you will stare at the emptiness that comes after death and how it robs you of a fulfilling feeling. Do you then live for the moment? Do you live for the present? Do you live to make every moment of your life more and more pleasurable? To achieve everything before you die?

Let's say you do. Let's say you obtain decent amount of wealth, comfort, pleasure, status and that you leave a legacy, will it fulfil or will there still linger a feeling of emptiness, of purposelessness? of knowing that its all to glorify the senses and feel good. And when the feeling subsidies, will you ask yourself what's next? more wealth? more comfort? more pleasure?

What does the divine say about death and life's meaning? There's usually something after.. a next life, heaven, hell, judgement. It's not the end. There's more to come. This more to come fills that emptiness with a feeling of wait, there's more next that I don't know? That along with a framework gives life a different form of meaning that seeks to live in accordance with god.

Realistically, there's only a minority of people that live on opposite ends of the spectrum. The orthodox religious group and the atheistic crowd. Although, in different parts of the world both ends seem to be increasing. But most of us live somewhere in between borrowing meaning from both places to create a life that gives us meaning. Does the secular life rob us being rooted, grounded and having a deeper sense of fulfilment?

Ultimately being grounded, fulfilled comes from our own sense of meaning and values but the secular group overlooks how easy it is for the religious. Or perhaps that's how it seems to me. The secular group overlooks the impact of meaning, identity that does not give rise to the existential anxiety, the drifting, the paralysis, the confusion that sometimes comes with a secular life.

I now have better understanding of the philosophers that wrote about this - Nietzsche, Satre, Camus. Nietzsche mourned the loss of divine meaning and sought to replace it with human creative will. Sartre argued that meaning is self-created, not given. Camus accepted absurdity and proposed rebellion through living fully in spite of it.

I'm not sure yet if the meaning, connection, community offered by the religious life is the better way to live but I see better the nihilism that can sometimes creep in with a secular life and the grounded and rooted sense of being that comes with a pure religious life.

'*
The essay frames “secular” as mostly pleasure-seeking and “religious” as meaning-seeking. That’s too binary. Secular humanism, for instance, offers moral and communal frameworks without invoking the divine. Meanwhile, religious life can also become performative or shallow when reduced to ritual without spirit.