Question 7 in the age of 6-7: a journey of meaning-making
I finished Question 7, a book by Richard Flanagan, a few days ago. I don’t think I’ve ever been so moved by a book in my life. It left me shaken, weepy and filled with hope and awe. It sounds insane to make such a sweeping statement. I’ve read so many books, consumed so many stories, but this one gave me something entirely new. I held my breath throughout the entire last chapter.
As a work of art it defies category and genre—it’s not memoir, not fiction, not fact—but all of them blended together. It’s meta in the way it fictionalises historical authors; Chekhov, H.G.Wells, Vonnegut. It’s almost academic in approach, presenting a thesis of sorts on life and living. It’s driven by concept more than story which usually drives me crazy, but it gripped me because, despite that, there is something fundamentally human about it. All the characters are emotionally affecting—none more so than the author himself.
The book left me with this intense sense of clarity about my own life, but as each day passes since I turned the last page, that feeling slips farther and farther out of reach. The funny thing is that Question 7 describes this concept of clarity searched for, found, and lost, over and over again. That’s life. At one point Flanagan quotes Chekhov who once said, “the role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” He added his own belief to the sentiment: that the best works of art are not the ones offering answers, but the ones asking the right questions.
I’ve been dwelling on this idea of asking the right questions, and it’s sent me down a French philosophy rabbit hole. I studied the French philosophers at uni on two separate occasions and hated them for the most part. In a way, they’re the opposite of what Chekhov and Flanagan describe, confidently proposing answers when questions are needed. In my own lifelong pursuit of meaning I’ve always been frustrated by opaque language, and philosophers are nothing if not opaque, especially if you add the potential for ideas to be lost in the untranslatable grey between French and English (why can I not afford Derrida the same grace as J-Hope, I wonder?)
A few of them do have ideas I can’t shake – Foucault’s panopticon, for example (the modern moral panoptican of social media is a trip, right?). Here’s another: Baudrillard’s theory of ‘code’ and ‘noise’. He talks about noise as ‘the implosion of meaning in the media’—when meaning is obscured by the sheer volume of ‘signs and signals’. In his theory, code is a system of meaning developed from this noise that refers only to itself – essentially replacing reality.
Have you heard of the Gen Alpha linguistic trend known as ‘6-7’? I feel like Baudrillard would have loved it.
6-7 is a saying that would be absent of meaning if it hadn’t appeared in the age of TikTok. The viral replicatory nature of the platform created the right conditions for Gen Alpha to develop a system of meaning for the meaningless. They now use it to perform their belonging.
The trend started innocuously. It’s a lyric from a track by Skrilla which was released in December 2024. The track was picked up and spread by kids on TikTok, and then one viral clip linked it to a basketball player who was 6’7. After that, kids around the world started jokingly inserting “6-7” into their vernacular with wild abandon. A boy named Mason was filmed saying it at a basketball game in the States and that clip went viral. Now it’s been named the Word of the Year by Dictionary.com. The meaninglessness of 6-7 is exactly the point, it’s a generational in-joke—the by-product of an implosion of meaning amidst an avalanche of noise, codified by the meme replicating platforms of the day and the youth who innately understand them.
I think this is the inflection point where my brain becomes dissatisfied with the limits of Baudrillard’s theory. The continued attempt to bestow meaning upon 6-7 is the crux of my discontent. For me it’s not about the loss of reality in a system of meaning derived from an implosion, but the human drive to continually create systems of meaning when faced with irrefutable daily evidence that life is absent of it. It’s not just code from noise, but the misplaced belief that the cycle of code-noise-code-noise-code-noise will ever end.
I was born and raised in a godless household so look away now if you’re offended by blasphemy, but I truly believe the cosmic joke of the universe is that life is meaningless, but all living entities are driven to search for meaning until we die. Sorry, that’s dark. Life creates meaning from replicating patterns – whether it be RNA molecules stitching themselves together from the primordial soup, ancestral lines of human and animal DNA stretching across centuries through our evolutionary drive to reproduce, or cultural patterns of story, myth and religion spread through books, music, and TikTok trends.
All humans continually create systems and patterns to make sense of the world—whether those systems be lines of code, daily routines, or story tropes (enemies to lovers is my personal fave). So in that sense pattern-making is a response to chaos, but I think that true happiness and creative fulfilment are actually derived from the process of pattern-making, not the pattern itself. The journey, not the destination. Live. Laugh. Love.
The only period of time in my adult life when I’ve found myself uninterested in searching for some kind of meaning or sense of purpose has been during the past 7 years while I’ve been raising my babies. I was served a reel recently where Bob Odenkirk articulated this perfectly.
I haven’t felt the urge to engage with challenging or even thought-provoking art for years because I haven’t been looking for meaning. I’ve existed within a fundamentally mundane, meaningful life, my brain turned to mush by the undeniable importance of every moment. It was so quiet. Was I happy? Ummmmmm. It’s complicated. I’ve learned that contentment and happiness are not the same thing.
Rudderless and drifting, I instead listened to hundreds of trope-filled romance audiobooks while rocking my babies to sleep in dark rooms alone. I watched comedy and action films. I giggled at funny dog videos my husband sent me from a different dark room in the same house. I listened exclusively to pop music. My consumption of art was about pure entertainment, diversion, and maybe a little numbing and escapism. I almost rebelled against the weight of meaning in my daily life, searching for its absence in art.
Now that my kids are getting bigger and are a lot more self-contained — tiny humans, beginning to engage in their own process of meaning-making— I’ve found myself returning to a place of curiosity. It’s as if the basic clarity of my life in early parenthood is fading, and the mush of my brain matter is reforming into a meaning-making machine once more. I feel nothing but relief at this homecoming.
Perhaps Question 7 moved me so much because it provided me with a doorway back into the maze of code-noise-code-noise-code-noise. That’s what this blog experiment is all about right? “A serial fangirl tries to make sense of the world.” The key word there being ‘tries’, because success is not my objective, I get my kicks out of asking the right questions. If life is truly absent of meaning, and my existence is contingent upon continuing to search for it anyway, I may as well build my joy into the search by looking in the corners of the world that make me happy — like Bangtan TV.