On his third solo album his response is threefold:
1. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die
2. Find endless reasons to laugh about life's absurdities
3. Make desperate pleas to the universe (including extra terrestrials!) in the probably vain hope that someone, somewhere will listen.
The opening track, As For My Soul, falls squarely into the first category with the advice to "Light a fire, drink a beer, sing a song".
Seize The Night also recommends drowning your sorrows in booze on the basis that "If you know where you are when you wake up, something's wrong".
Of the jokey songs, the cream of the crop is Talking Cat Blues, a singular break up song which manages to weave together the tale of a sick cat, a viral video and the outbreak of World War III and still have space for a dig at David Cameron. It's clever but the sort of song where the funny line wear thin after a few hearings.
And you don't have to look far beneath the surface of Varley's dour wit and heavy irony to find a rich seam of sadness and quiet desperation.
With no faith in politicians or global institutions, he looks to the universe for answers. On Is Anyone Out There? he makes an open invitation to aliens to come and save the planet before we destroy it.
In a different league entirely is the album's obvious standout -The Man Who Fell To Earth; a contender for song of the year.
This takes as its subject, the lonesome death of an African immigrant, Jose Matata, whose body was discovered in a London suburb after falling out of the fuselage of a British Airways 747 plane. Here, Varley's themes are similar to those of Bob Dylan's 'Ballad of Hollis Brown albeit with updated and localised reference points.
Dylan's song ended "There's seven people dead on a South Dakota farm, somewhere in the distance there's seven new people born". The message being, of course, that as the cycle of life continues it absorbs tragedies while individual deaths, whether by natural or unnatural causes, are soon forgotten.
So it is in Varley's "dark cold universe" where, "in the stillness of morning", a baby is born and a body is found while ordinary life goes on: drunks pass out on buses, businessmen sell lies, people get ready for work, news reporters "wait for things to go wrong".
Wordy, worldly and wise; it's a brilliant song which illustrates how Varley's songs are at their most powerful and poignant when he doesn't opt for easy laughs.
Dark Days Away, for instance, has plenty of humour, but it also a touching love song. On The Endlessness And The Space Between he sensitively explores the gulf that separates dreams and reality.
Concept Of Freedom is a serious protest song in the tradition of Lennon's Working Class Hero which ends with the stark line: "There's no such as a free man now"
Among the other tracks, Send My Love To The System and The Question Of Passing Time find Varley feeling old at 27, making him prone to the early onset of nostalgia.
The album is produced by Tristan Ivemy and mastered at Abbey Road, not, one imagines, the most complex of jobs as this is the sound of just one voice on an acoustic guitar.
In the down to earth Englishness and no frills arrangements, there are obvious similarities with Frank Turner, who Varley recently toured with. This album, however, shows Varley to be both wittier and more politically astute than Turner. I'd hesitate to call it sophisticated but there's a subtlety, range and depth which comes as a pleasant surprise.
