After nearly three years of people feeling hopeless as they try to deal with the apocalypse while pretending everything is normal, a new study is giving hope to millions. Through dozens of interviews, surveys and focus group meetings, a research team discovered that life is not actually pointless.
“We noticed that people were starting to wonder whether they should just completely give up on life,” said the first author of the study, “so we decided to conduct a study to find out whether life actually has a point or whether it is all just meaningless bullshit.” He continued, “We found that life actually doesn’t have a point, but that if you say that to people it just makes them feel even more hopeless.” As a result of this finding, the authors decided to reinterpret the results to make them more in line with what people wanted to hear. “We decided that the ethical thing to do was to lie about the results,” said the senior author of the paper. The study has been published in The Journal of Socially Pleasing Truths, a new open access journal that offers open peer review and has no gatekeepers.
According to the paper, which is titled Is life pointless? Let’s argue about it on social media, the meaning of life is ‘Arguing about stuff on social media.’ “We had considered classic ideas like helping other people and hanging out with loved ones, but we figured we might as well just pick something people already do. Also, my coauthors and I are all hoping to quit academia and get tech jobs, and this probably can’t hurt.”
A researcher not associated with the study urged caution in interpreting the results, “This so-called study isn’t even a study at all. The researchers just sat around talking about whether life was pointless or not in their depressing zoom-based lab meetings for three years and this was the only idea they came up with,” she told RPT. “They couldn’t find a place that would publish it so they decided to start their journal. Which is really just a blog on the senior author’s website.”
Because the results of this study challenge the status quo, this has led to controversy in the field. Another Psychologist told RPT, “This undercuts all the hard work legitimate scientists have done proving life has no meaning.” He then added “Anyone who disagrees can find me on Twitter.”
