I was having a conversation this morning about the meaning of life. I suggested that one of the biggest problems is that it's such a vaguely specified concept, and another is that talking about the ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ of life in the first place suggests a presumption of some sort of intent in the mind of ‘whoever’ put life there in the first place, and hence a presumption of some (fairly nonspecific) form of theism. Which is fine if you're a theist anyway, but makes the question a difficult one to even start answering if you're not.

So I said that if the question were rephrased into one which is neither presumptively theist nor hopelessly and unanswerably vague, I'd be happy to try to answer it; and then I mused that actually it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that any such reworded question was embarrassingly trivial to answer, and that the really difficult aspect of the original question lay in determining what non-vague rewording of it you really meant to ask in the first place.

This seemed like a basically defensible position to me when I said it, and nicely articulated the essential frustration I have often felt when discussing the question. ‘If you tell me what you mean by that, I'll try to answer you!’

However, it wasn't until an hour later that I thought about what I'd said. Giving an answer to the Great Question is relatively easy compared to working out what the Question was in the first place? Suddenly I realised I'd heard someone say that before, and it was Deep Thought.

So my philosophical worldview has apparently been subconsciously shaped by Douglas Adams. I suppose there are far worse people, but I'm still a little unnerved to discover that.