The Meaning of Life is 67
Plot twist, it is no longer 42
Three years ago during my first West Coast tour to Los Angeles, I spent an unhurried afternoon at the Museum of Contemporary Arts. One thing that piqued my annoyance was the way the gallery opened and unfolded into corridors and rooms, and sometimes, even more rooms, often without a prescribed path to follow. The absence of order felt disorientating. But admittedly so, museum galleries are meant for wandering, they are not an IKEA showroom; they are spaces for getting lost, for letting meaning find you rather than the other way around.
Much has been said about 67, the latest piece of internet lingo. It first slipped into existence on TikTok, popularised by Gen Alpha, before eventually making its way into mass media — though not before thoroughly perplexing older generations about what it actually meant. No, it is not 69-adjacent.
67 resists a fixed definition by design, just like paths in art galleries and in life, it refuses a prescribed route, a singular meaning, or any meaning at all. 67 is about what it testifies to rather than what it is. And this is precisely why Gen Alpha using 67 infuriates many, boomers and Gen Xs alike, especially those hardwired for control, for extracting meaning from everything. Internet memes, life, career goals, retirement goals: when meaning cannot be extracted, categorised, or disciplined, it unsettles. On social media many try to explain 67 through Cantonese, hoping a translation in dialect might do it, or at least render some meaning to it; however, by doing so, they are missing the forest for the trees, but I digress. The refusal is the meaning itself.
In the same vein, contemporary art also often comes under fire from the same critics. Be it Mark Rothko’s Colour Fields or Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (It is a porcelain urinal), contemporary art can be a hard concept to reconcile a stable meaning. But alas, art was never about literalism alone: art is about the context, the intent, the medium, the experimentation, the interpretation; art is a relationship between the sign and the signified. And to those detractors who protest, “Even my five year old could have made it!” This was the exact provocation Duchamp intended against the board of the Society of Independent Artists who rejected Fountain as a piece of art in 1917.
In life, having a clear path is comforting; We are trained, socially and institutionally, to demand clarity and motive: What is the plan? What is the purpose? Where is this going? Society accords social norms, traditions and values as guardrails to create order and to funnel individual towards a collective idea of a social good and national identity. However so, they are all relative. Instead, 67 is about finding our own purpose through creating our own subjective meaning and values for a self-directed life that doesn’t require resonance, let alone permission:
Individual liberty and intentionality: to be free to pursue one’s “ideal” life, even at the risk of absurdity.
Rebellion: to critique the herder and the herd against meaninglessness and to live passionately and authentically on one’s own terms, be it the path least taken. It resists the pressure to perform meaning for an audience.
Subjective purpose: Defining what matters to you personally, such as relationships, creativity, or simple pleasures, even if these things are transient, unoptimised or inefficient.
And perhaps Albert Camus’s philosophy of Absurdism sums it all up — how can we live in a meaningless and absurd world and face it with courage, and to find meaning from within?
Last weekend, I visited Into The Modern: Impressionism, an exhibition of Impressionist paintings by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, hosted by National Gallery of Singapore. And again, there wasn’t so much of a fixed route to follow. But this time, I didn’t look for one. I moved deliberately, intentionally, and perhaps, not everything needs a map, nor a path.