In the movie Alfie, Michael Caine is portrayed as a young dude just wanting to get laid. That was portrayed as the key to his existence. It was, for him, “what it (life) was all about.” Of course, we all know from experience that getting laid was NOT what was important to Alfie. What was IMPORTANT to him was the power he felt in “conquering”. He might as well have been Genghis Khan.

Don’t each of us, as humans, carry in us that eagerness for “power”, though certainly expressed in different ways? Isn’t how we live our lives an expression of that “search”? (And it’s not just in our modern life that we encounter these mysteries. Philosophers throughout the centuries have grappled with this very issue.)

For Alfie, the search for “what’s life all about?” expresses itself in “conquering” women. For someone else the “what’s it all about?” is to acquire money; for another it may be fame; for others it might be just the opposite; i.e. seeing “what’s it all about” as having close family ties and raising children to be honest and good.

In fact, there are so many “answers” to Alfie’s question that most of us are too busy to even formulate the damn question let alone answer it (even though “the question” is what eats at us, either consciously or unconsciously, our entire existence).

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