If you type, “the answer to life, the universe and everything,” into Google calculator, it comes up with an answer.
Forty-two.
Google takes mere nanoseconds to calculate its result. This is substantially faster than the 7.5 million years it took Deep Thought, the second-largest computer ever made in Douglas Adam’ sci-fi comedy series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2), to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question.
This answer, which ranks as cult status to H2G2 fans, sparked many theories behind the Adams’ numerical choice, spanning from mathematics, science, technology, and astronomy to religion, pop culture, and sports.
However, in 1993, Adams said there was no hidden meaning.
“It was a joke,” he said in a statement on his website. “It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one…I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do.’”
It’s an answer without a question—if it were Jeopardy, not even Ken Jennings could get this one. Forty-two is just a number and does nothing, in real life or in H2G2, to shed light on what the Ultimate Question really is.
The meaning of life remains just as elusive. Google calculator can’t help you here. People, urgently searching for the answers to life’s ultimate questions, are repeatedly proving to buy into anything promising health, wealth and happiness.
Distressed and desperate, people ask God to bless them and give them the answers to all of life’s mysteries. Looking at prayer this way—God as the super computer, who will give us whatever we wish for—sets us up to be exploited.
I can’t expect God to radically step in and make my life perfect just because I am praying that he will.
October 2009’s LifeTrac article, Learning to Live in the Real World, is Linette Schut’s personal discovery of the key to finding purpose through life changes: prayer.
Throughout university Schut rarely questioned her existence. Her life was neatly organized and she lived by imposed schedules, which were comfortable and stimulating.
After graduation, however, she woke up to what she calls the real world—a place without structure or routine; a place where it’s easy to forget yourself.
Find out how she learns how to use prayer to grow closer to God and focus on what really matters.
By Robyn Roste
Read bio and see more from this author
