The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything (It's Not What You Think)

A little over 42 years ago, Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and gave us a piece of philosophical wisdom that's outlasted the story itself.

The tale follows Arthur Dent, an extraordinarily average Englishman who wakes up hungover to discover Earth is about to be demolished for an intergalactic bypass. His alien best friend rescues him moments before destruction, launching an adventure across the galaxy where Arthur befriends a depressed robot, a girl from a party, and a two-headed politician.

The climax comes when Arthur is kidnapped by "hyper-intelligent pandimensional beings" who want his perfectly ordinary human brain—the result of a 10,000,000-year experiment holding the key to the Ultimate Answer about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Millions of years ago, these aliens got "so fed up with the constant bickering about the meaning of life" that they built Deep Thought, the smartest supercomputer in existence, to solve the problem once and for all.

When asked for the answer to "Life, the Universe, and Everything," Deep Thought promised an answer after some thinking. Approximately 7,500,000 years of thinking.

The answer? "Forty-two."

"Forty-two!" they shout. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"

Deep Thought assures them the answer is correct, but points out the real problem: "You've never actually known what the question is."

Rather than accept that maybe life's super-meaning isn't meant to be understood, these beings double down. They build another supercomputer to determine the Ultimate Question—a computer called Earth.

But Earth was destroyed at our story's beginning, leaving only Arthur's brain as the "organic part of the penultimate configuration." Just as they're about to extract it, his friends rescue him, and they escape to grab dinner at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Adams is making a brilliant point about the impossibility and absurdity of finding a satisfactory answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Life is an experience to be lived, not a question that needs answering.

The more time we spend pursuing answers for their own sake, the less time we have for actually living.

Since 1979, fans have spent countless hours searching for forty-two's significance everywhere—the angle light reflects off water to create rainbows, molybdenum's atomic number, its appearances in the Book of Revelation.

But I have another theory. Maybe the answer Earth was about to present before its destruction aligns with Viktor Frankl's insight: meaning is in the doing. Meaning comes from what we give to the world, what we experience, and the outlook we choose on whatever life throws at us.

Life is an adventure. The goal is to have fun, make the most of it, and try to be good people while we're doing it.