a life worth living essay

A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus on Our Search for Meaning and Why Happiness Is Our Moral Obligation

By maria popova.

In the beautifully titled and beautifully written A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning ( public library ), historian Robert Zaretsky considers Camus’s lifelong quest to shed light on the absurd condition, his “yearning for a meaning or a unity to our lives,” and its timeless yet increasingly timely legacy:

If the question abides, it is because it is more than a matter of historical or biographical interest. Our pursuit of meaning, and the consequences should we come up empty-handed, are matters of eternal immediacy. […] Camus pursues the perennial prey of philosophy — the questions of who we are, where and whether we can find meaning, and what we can truly know about ourselves and the world — less with the intention of capturing them than continuing the chase.

Reflecting on the parallels between Camus and Montaigne , Zaretsky finds in this ongoing chase one crucial difference of dispositions:

Camus achieves with the Myth what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed for Montaigne’s Essays: it places “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.” For Camus, however, this astonishment results from our confrontation with a world that refuses to surrender meaning. It occurs when our need for meaning shatters against the indifference, immovable and absolute, of the world. As a result, absurdity is not an autonomous state; it does not exist in the world, but is instead exhaled from the abyss that divides us from a mute world.

Camus himself captured this with extraordinary elegance when he wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus :

This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.

To discern these echoes amid the silence of the world, Zaretsky suggests, was at the heart of Camus’s tussle with the absurd:

We must not cease in our exploration, Camus affirms, if only to hear more sharply the silence of the world. In effect, silence sounds out when human beings enter the equation. If “silences must make themselves heard,” it is because those who can hear inevitably demand it. And if the silence persists, where are we to find meaning?

This search for meaning was not only the lens through which Camus examined every dimension of life, from the existential to the immediate, but also what he saw as our greatest source of agency. In one particularly prescient diary entry from November of 1940, as WWII was gathering momentum, he writes:

Understand this: we can despair of the meaning of life in general, but not of the particular forms that it takes; we can despair of existence, for we have no power over it, but not of history, where the individual can do everything. It is individuals who are killing us today. Why should not individuals manage to give the world peace? We must simply begin without thinking of such grandiose aims.

For Camus, the question of meaning was closely related to that of happiness — something he explored with great insight in his notebooks . Zaretsky writes:

Camus observed that absurdity might ambush us on a street corner or a sun-blasted beach. But so, too, do beauty and the happiness that attends it. All too often, we know we are happy only when we no longer are.

Perhaps most importantly, Camus issued a clarion call of dissent in a culture that often conflates happiness with laziness and championed the idea that happiness is nothing less than a moral obligation. A few months before his death, Camus appeared on the TV show Gros Plan . Dressed in a trench coat, he flashed his mischievous boyish smile and proclaimed into the camera:

Today, happiness has become an eccentric activity. The proof is that we tend to hide from others when we practice it. As far as I’m concerned, I tend to think that one needs to be strong and happy in order to help those who are unfortunate.

This wasn’t a case of Camus arriving at some mythic epiphany in his old age — the cultivation of happiness and the eradication of its obstacles was his most persistent lens on meaning. More than two decades earlier, he had contemplated “the demand for happiness and the patient quest for it” in his journal, capturing with elegant simplicity the essence of the meaningful life — an ability to live with presence despite the knowledge that we are impermanent :

[We must] be happy with our friends, in harmony with the world, and earn our happiness by following a path which nevertheless leads to death.

But his most piercing point integrates the questions of happiness and meaning into the eternal quest to find ourselves and live our truth:

It is not so easy to become what one is, to rediscover one’s deepest measure.

A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning comes from Harvard University Press and is a remarkable read in its entirety. Complement it with Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons , then revisit the story of his unlikely and extraordinary friendship with Nobel-winning biologist Jacques Monod.

— Published September 22, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/09/22/a-life-worth-living-albert-camus/ —

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Life Worth Living is an initiative of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School .

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"... to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain."

For some it may seem obvious that the good life should feel as good as possible. Indeed, what could we possibly want other than for ourselves and others to feel good? Utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill offers a classic formulation of this idea.

[.alt-blockquote]“Pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and … all desirable things … are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.”[.alt-blockquote]

[.alt-blockquote-attribution]—John Stuart Mill, “What Utilitarianism Is” in On Liberty and Other Essays , p. 137[.alt-blockquote-attribution]

Do you agree or disagree that pleasure is the only desirable outcome of the life worth living? Why?
Can you think of any other ends worth striving for? Are you sure you don’t value them only because they lead to pleasure or reduce pain?
What limits or concerns do you see in this utilitarian perspective? What stipulations would you add to the greatest happiness principle?
How would your life differ if you lived to cultivate the greatest amount of happiness possible in the world?
John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Other Essays.
‍ Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most , Chapter 4: How does a good life feel?

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Our responses to life's big questions are meant to form a coherent whole—a vision of life worth living. A response to one question will fit well with certain responses to other questions, but it will be incompatible with others. We've provided the "Pairs Well With" and "Pairs Poorly With" sections for this article to help you consider these questions of coherence.

Pairs Well With

Cost/benefit analysis
Perhaps some Buddhist conceptions of suffering and how to overcome it

Pairs Poorly With

Strong affirmation of the sanctity and dignity of life
Certain Christian elevations of suffering and martyrdom
Wilde's high evaluation of sorrow

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Albert Einstein’s Surprising Thoughts on the Meaning of Life

Albert Einstein was one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, influencing scientific thought immeasurably. He was also not shy about sharing his wisdom about other topics , writing essays, articles, letters, giving interviews and speeches. His everyday-life opinions on social and intellectual issues that do not come from the world of physics give an insight into the spiritual and moral vision of the scientist , offering much to take to heart.

The collection of essays and ideas “The World As I See It” gathers Einstein’s thoughts from before 1935, when he was as the preface says “at the height of his scientific powers but not yet known as the sage of the atomic age”.

In the book, Einstein comes back to the question of the purpose of life, and what a meaningful life is, on several occasions. In one passage, he links it to a sense of religiosity.

“What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it many any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life,” wrote Einstein.

Did Einstein himself hold religious beliefs ? Raised by secular Jewish parents, he had complex and evolving spiritual thoughts. He generally seemed to be open to the possibility of the scientific impulse and religious thoughts coexisting in people’s lives .

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind,” said Einstein in his 1954 essay on science and religion.

Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein’s spiritual views pantheism , largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza . Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes.

Himself a famous atheist, Richard Dawkins calls Einstein’s pantheism a “sexed-up atheism,” but other scholars point to the fact that Einstein did seem to believe in a supernatural intelligence that’s beyond the physical world. He referred to it in his writings as “a superior spirit,” “a superior mind” and a “spirit vastly superior to men”. Einstein was possibly a deist , although he was quite familiar with various religious teachings, including a strong knowledge of Jewish religious texts .

In another passage from 1934, Einstein talks about the value of a human being, reflecting a Buddhist-like approach:

“The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self”.

This theme of liberating the self to glimpse life’s true meaning is also echoed by Einstein later on, in a 1950 letter to console a grieving father Robert S. Marcus:

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”

In case you are wondering whether Einstein saw value in material pursuits, here’s him talking about accumulating wealth in 1934, as part of the “The World As I See It”:

“I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?”

In discussing the ultimate question of life’s real meaning , the famous physicist gives us plenty to think about when it comes to the human condition .

Can philosophy lead us to a good life ? Here, Columbia Professor Philip Kitcher explains how great minds—like Plato , Aristotle , Socrates , Confucius, Mencius, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche , Albert Camus , and Jean-Paul Sartre—can help us find meaning and wellbeing in human existence—even if there is no “ better place “.

Related reading: Sapiens: Can Humans Overcome Suffering and Find True Happiness?

Related reading: A Growing Number of Scholars Are Questioning the Historical Existence of Jesus Christ

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Philosophy of Life — What Makes A Life Worth Living: A Philosophy of Life

What Makes a Life Worth Living: a Philosophy of Life

Categories: Meaning of Life Philosophy of Life

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Words: 670 |

Published: Aug 14, 2023

Words: 670 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

The difference between philosophy and sophistry, socrates’s account of philosophical life.

Famakinwa, J. (2012). IS THE UNEXAMINED LIFE WORTH LIVING OR NOT? Think, 11(31), 97-103. doi:10.1017/S1477175612000073
Goodreads. (n.d.). Life worth living quotes (14 quotes). Goodreads. Retrieved December 3, 2021, from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/life-worth-living.
Vocabulary.com. (n.d.)., https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary.
Mitchell, H.B. (2019), Roots of Wisdom: A Tapestry of Philosophical Traditions , Eighth Edition, © 2019, 2015, 2011 Cengage Learning, ISBN: 978-1-337-55980-5
Timmons, G. (2019, September 9). Socrates. Biography.com. Retrieved December 3, 2021, from https://www.biography.com/scholar/socrates.

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What Makes Life Worth Living?

Love, work, and play..

Posted February 25, 2010 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

Here are some possible answers to the question of what makes life worth living:

love, work, and play

Evidence from psychology and neuroscience supports the fourth answer. Here's why.

A few despondent philosophers—such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and David Benatar—have cast doubts on whether life has any intrinsic meaning, and some people are driven to suicide by depression or negative events in their lives. But most people, fortunately, are able to find lots of reason to value their lives, and in surveys most people report themselves as pretty happy. So nihilism may not be a plausible position.

2. Religion

Surveys also indicate that many people report that religion and spirituality are major sources of meaning in their lives. Unfortunately, however, these sources may not be valid, particularly if there is no evidence to support claims for particular religious beliefs. Religious faith may be reassuring, but science cannot objectively tell someone whether they should adhere to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or some other religion. It cannot even tell an individual what version of Christianity (Catholic, Baptist, Morman, etc.) or Islam (Shia or Sunni) they ought to adopt. Hence, religion and vague spiritual ideas—such as "everything happens for a reason"—cannot provide an evidence-supported basis for living.

3. Happiness

Psychological research has identified many ways in which people can increase the happiness in their lives, as in Sonja Lyubomirsky's fine book, The How of Happiness . But happiness is usually the result of having a meaningful life, not what makes life worth living in itself. There are people whose lives are meaningful even though they may not be very happy—for example, someone who is struggling with a challenging job while raising a special needs child.

On the other hand, happiness can be cheaply achieved by slacker serenity, a mindless bliss resulting from having minimal goals , access to drugs, or unlimited time for leisure. You can have happiness without much meaning, and meaning without much happiness; thus, happiness is likely not the meaning of life.

4. Love, work, and play

In my new book, The Brain and the Meaning of Life , I argue that these three activities make life worth living. Love includes friendships and family relationships as well as romantic ones. Work includes diverse productive activities, such as community volunteering, in addition to working for wages. Play includes all forms of entertainment such as reading and watching movies, not just games.

Surveys and other psychological studies indicate that love, work, and play do indeed enable people to have lives they value. Neuroscience provides a deeper understanding of how brain processes generate needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence that can be satisfied by the successful pursuit of love, work, and play. Such satisfaction often yields happiness, but even the pursuit is enough to give life meaning.

Paul Thagard, Ph.D. , is a Canadian philosopher and cognitive scientist. His latest book, published by Columbia University Press, is Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It.

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Realizing Your Meaning: 5 Ways to Live a Meaningful Life

If you have ever had this thought, then take comfort that you are not alone. There is ample anecdotal evidence that people are looking for ways to live a more meaningful life.

Living a meaningful life and deciding what is meaningful are age-old questions (e.g., Marcus Aurelius wrestled with this question when he was Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD).

If you are reading this article, then living a meaningful life must be of interest to you. You might be wondering what we mean by ‘meaningful,’ and whether there are any benefits to striving toward such a way of living. Are there any practical suggestions for how to achieve a meaningful life?

Here we will summarize the existing psychological research that examines this question and provide you with a starting point on your journey.

Before we get to the practical suggestions about how to live a meaningful life, we first define what ‘meaningful’ means, explore why living a meaningful life is worthwhile, and detail the benefits that are associated with this type of experience.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Meaning and Valued Living Exercises for free . These creative, science-based exercises will help you learn more about your values, motivations, and goals and will give you the tools to inspire a sense of meaning in the lives of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains:

The big questions: how to find meaning in life, a psychological take, 5 ways to realize your meaning, finding meaning as you age, 9 inspiring quotes about finding meaning, positivepsychology.com resources, a take-home message.

The question of finding meaning in life has its roots in two fields: philosophy and psychology.

The philosophical question is aimed at understanding the meaning of life in general, as well as our role in that meaning. For the purposes of this article, we’re putting the philosophical perspective on this issue to the side. As psychologists, we can’t contribute to this answer.

However, the second variation of this question – how we find meaning in life – is psychological and of more interest to us.

Why am I doing this?
Do I want to do this?
What do I want to do?

These questions are also repackaged in popular psychology and leadership self-help books, such as Find Your Why (Sinek, Mead, & Docker, 2017) and How to Find Your Passion and Purpose (Gaisford, 2017).

Observant readers might comment that these are questions typically asked about our vocations or professional activities. However, people who are unemployed or employed part time also ask questions such as these and seek a meaningful life. These questions are easily repurposed for other spheres of our lives.

Before we can answer the question of how to find meaning, we first need to consider what is meant by ‘meaning.’

Psychological researchers conduct research and measure psychological constructs such as happiness, depression, and intelligence. However, constructs first need to be defined before they can be measured.

Although ‘meaningfulness’ is often confounded with other constructs such as purpose, coherence, and happiness, some researchers argue that these constructs are not interchangeable, but instead form a complex relationship and exist separately.

For example, Steger, Frazier, Oishi, and Kaler (2006) posit that meaning consists of two separate dimensions: coherence and purpose. Coherence refers to how we understand our life, whereas purpose relates to the goals that we have for our life.

Reker and Wong (1988) argue that meaningfulness is better explained and understood using a three-dimensional model consisting of coherence, purpose, and a third construct: significance. Significance refers to the sense that our life is worth living and that life has inherent value. Together, these three constructs contribute to a sense of meaningfulness.

In some research, coherence, purpose, and significance have been reframed as motivational and cognitive processes. Specifically, Heintzelman and King (2014) suggest a model with three components: goal direction, mattering, and one’s life making sense.

Goal direction and mattering are both motivational components and synonymous with purpose and significance, respectively. The third component – one’s life making sense – is a cognitive component, akin to significance.

Together, these three components – coherence, purpose, and significance – result in feelings of meaningfulness. Knowing that meaningfulness is derived from three distinct fields, let’s look at ways in which we can find our meaning.

Finding something to live and die for – Einzelganger

How can we go about finding our meaning? First, there is no single panacea to the sense of living without meaning. Finding meaning is ultimately a personal journey. What brings me meaning might not bring you meaning. However, this doesn’t mean that the techniques used to find meaning won’t be helpful. Viktor Frankl (1959, p. 99) supported the notion that finding meaning is a unique journey when he wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning :

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance that will satisfy his own will to meaning.

With this mind, consider the following suggestions in your quest to find meaning:

1. Foster a passion (purpose)

Vallerand (2012) argues that either motivation or passion drives our desire and interest in activities.

Motivation is useful for activities that are considered dull (e.g., washing the dishes), whereas passion is the driving force for activities that have significance for us.

Passion can be negative or positive, however. Negative passions, referred to as obsessive passions, are maladaptive and lead to unhealthy behaviors; these types of passions should be avoided. On the other hand, positive, harmonious passions improve our behavior and lead to optimal functioning.

Vallerand (2012) found that people who had more harmonious relationships with their passions also had stronger relationships with the people who shared their passions.

2. Develop and foster social relationships (purpose, significance)

Making connections with other individuals and maintaining these relationships are reliable ways to develop a sense of meaningfulness (Heintzelman & King, 2014).

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3. Relationships that increase your sense of belonging (significance)

Although social connections are important, not all social relationships are equal. Make sure to focus on relationships that make you feel like you ‘belong’ (Lambert et al., 2013), where you feel like you fit in with the members of that group, and where there is group identification.

Participants who were asked to think of people with whom they felt that they belonged reported higher ratings of meaningfulness compared to participants who remembered instances when they received help or support, or instances when they received positive compliments or statements of high social value (Lambert et al., 2013).

These findings also tie in with the negative impact of ostracism on the sense of meaning (Williams, 2007). If you feel like you don’t belong, then you have a lower sense of meaningfulness.

4. Monitor your mood (coherence)

Experimental laboratory studies have demonstrated a temporal relationship between positive mood and sense of meaning. Inducing a positive mood results in higher reports of meaning (for a review, see Heintzelman & King, 2014).

Managing your mood can be difficult. However, there are some techniques that you can use; for example, make time for interests and hobbies, get enough sleep, exercise regularly, eat healthily, and consider developing a mindfulness practice (e.g., through meditation).

5. Take control of your environment (coherence)

A cognitively coherent environment can boost ratings of meaningfulness (Heintzelman & King, 2014).

Heintzelman and King (2014) suggest that routines, patterns (which could refer to your behavior and the behavior of your family), time blocking, and clean environments can all contribute to an increased ability to make sense of one’s environment, which in turn can lead to an increased sense of meaningfulness.

Simple ways to induce a cognitively coherent environment would be to implement a fixed routine, schedule time for unexpected tasks (e.g., “emergencies” delivered via email), formally schedule downtime for exercise and passions, and maintain a tidy environment (in other words, your desk is not the place for all those dirty coffee mugs).

However, do not be unreasonable with your expectations of your environment. Unexpected challenges will pop up. Your child might have a meltdown, or you might drop a box of eggs on the floor, but these experiences will have less of a negative impact if you already have a sense of control over your environment.

We are also likely to experience multiple losses as we age. We may lose our parents, our partners, face layoffs, or develop an illness. The stereotypical concept of an older adult is of someone who is frail and requires care; however, older age is not synonymous with a less meaningful or valuable life.

In fact, many older adults live incredibly long, busy lives, and their positive psychological profiles act as a buttress against illness, loneliness, and depression. There is vast evidence that centenarians have very positive attitudes and psychological traits and few negative personality traits.

Centenarians are more relaxed and easygoing (Samuelsson et al., 1997), place a great deal of importance on social relationships and events (Wong et al., 2014), have a more positive life attitude in general (Wong et al., 2014), and report low anxiety (Samuelsson et al., 1997).

These positive aging traits and attitudes, coupled with the few negative traits, act as a protective buffer against depression, illness, and loneliness (Jopp, Park, Lehrfeld, & Paggi, 2016; Keyes, 2000), and contribute to the longevity of centenarians.

It is difficult to change your personality traits suddenly; however, it is possible to change your thinking patterns by working with a therapist trained in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Your therapist can help you identify and change negative patterns of thinking and behavior, and help you to adopt a positive pattern of thinking.

Centenarians greatly value their social experiences and are actively involved in social events (Wong et al., 2014).

It can be difficult for older adults to make new social connections, especially after retirement, because the ‘natural environment’ for meeting new people, such as the workplace, is removed. However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways for older adults to meet new people and form new relationships.

With retirement comes more free time and possibly an opportunity to develop a new hobby or passion. And as we previously mentioned, finding a passion is one way to develop meaning. Vallerand (2012) provides an excellent summary of the role that motivation plays in developing passion and how passion leads to a meaningful life.

If you are an older adult, then perhaps this is good time in your life to start. Remember that positive (rather than negative/obsessive/maladaptive) passions are born from the positive association made with particular activities (Vallerand, 2012). These passions are activities that we find time for, that we invest in, and that we embody.

For example, if you have a passion for painting, you will carve out time to paint, experience a great deal of happiness when you complete the activity, and may embody that passion in your understanding of your identity (e.g., you may consider yourself a ‘painter’). Embodying the activity into your understanding of your self-concept is one of the first steps toward laying habits (Clear, 2018).

Harmonious passions (Vallerand, 2012) play a vital role in how we find meaning in our lives.

These positive passions are worth developing. Not only do they help us find meaning in our lives, but older adults who do have a ‘passion’ also score higher on measures of psychological wellbeing. They report higher life satisfaction, better health, more meaning in their lives, and lower anxiety and lower depression than adults without a passion (Rosseau & Vallerand, 2003, as cited in Vallerand, 2012).

To summarize, it appears that centenarians adopt a positive mindset and psychological traits and value their social relationships. These factors may contribute to a longer, more meaningful life and protect against illness and depression. Fostering interests and hobbies is another way to find meaning in your life, buttressing against negative feelings and thoughts.

So, what can you do to find meaning in your life as you age? The following list can give you some guidance:

1. Make time for friends, family, and social events

It’s easy to neglect social relationships in favor of alone time (which is also important) or work deadlines, but promoting these relationships will have a more positive impact in the long term. If you are the type of person who forgets to see friends or family, add a reminder to your calendar.

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2. Start now to develop a new hobby or interest

Carve out some time for your own interest and commit to that time. If you have a partner, ask your partner to shoulder other responsibilities during that time so that you can indulge your interests.

3. Express what makes you happy

If you’re in the early stages of developing a new hobby, it might help to express what you enjoy about the hobby. Consider writing a journal entry about what you enjoyed or tell your partner/friends/family members about your new hobby.

Expressing why you enjoy the hobby helps to build and strengthen positive associations with the hobby.

4. Share your hobby

Try to find a group of like-minded individuals who enjoy the same interest that you do. If you like painting, consider joining an art class.

Or perhaps you want to learn a new language. Try to find people who are also learning this language and watch a film in that language together.

5. Aim to engage and invest in your community

Simple acts such as greeting and chatting to your neighbors, talking to the vendors at your local stores and neighborhood markets, and participating in neighborhood events will help you to develop relationships with your community members.

With time, these relationships will deepen and become more meaningful. Furthermore, recognize that as an older adult, you can offer a great deal to your community. You have lived through numerous life experiences, career/professional/vocational decisions, and family decisions. You have a wealth of knowledge that you can share with your community.

Older adults who regularly engage in their favorite pastimes and who have a healthy, positive relationship with their favorite activity have better psychological functioning.

Each of us must become impassioned, finding meaning and self-fulfillment in our own life’s journey.

Alexandra Stoddard

Life is difficult. Not just for me or other ALS patients. Life is difficult for everyone. Finding ways to make life meaningful and purposeful and rewarding, doing the activities that you love and spending time with the people that you love – I think that’s the meaning of this human experience.

Steve Gleason

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.

Viktor E. Frankl

I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Joseph Conrad

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

Richard Dawkins

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.

Dalai Lama XIV

I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I’ve got.

Hermann Hesse

It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.

Malcolm Gladwell

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

Maya Angelou

17 Tools To Encourage Meaningful, Value-Aligned Living

This 17 Meaning & Valued Living Exercises [PDF] pack contains our best exercises for helping others discover their purpose and live more fulfilling, value-aligned lives.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

We have different types of resources that you will find useful in helping you live a meaningful life:

1. From Our Worksheet Library

In Japanese culture, to find meaning and purpose in life is to find one’s ikigai . We have a fantastic and in-depth exercise called Identifying Your Ikigai , which takes you through a series of steps to assess and help you find your fulfilling meaning in life.

Living a life with meaning and value can make you happier, more content, more resilient through hard times, and more likely to influence the lives of others.

If you are filled with questions about what you should do with your life and what really matters, then the Uncover Your Purpose worksheet is for you. It has several tough questions, but if you can answer them honestly and comprehensively, it will shine a light on the path you are meant to follow.

2. 17 Meaning & Valued Living Exercises

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others discover meaning, this collection contains 17 validated meaning tools for practitioners. Use them to help others choose directions for their lives in alignment with what is truly important to them.

Finding meaning in life is a journey that could start with something as simple as a pen and paper, deep reflection, and one of our tools mentioned above. Or your journey could start by stepping out the door and connecting with a neighbor, making a newfound friend, or starting a hobby you have wanted to explore but never got around to.

During your journey, you might that having meaning in life is not about yourself, but serving others.

Selfless service is often discovered to be the ultimate pinnacle of having a meaningful life, and many intriguing conversations with service workers, nurses, aid workers, and volunteers illustrate how they enjoy a meaningful life by serving others.

We hope that after reading this article you will also embark on this journey to find meaning in your life. We shared many different strategies you can implement when looking for that ultimate answer, and we sincerely hope that when you have found your ikigai , you will make changes to actively live that life of meaning. If some of the strategies do not work for you, try another suggestion from the list.

Most important is to find a meaning that makes sense to you and recognize that this meaning might change as you go through different stages of your life.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Meaning and Valued Living Exercises for free .

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Samuelsson, S. M., Alfredson, B. B., Hagberg, B., Samuelsson, G., Nordbeck, B., Brun, A., … Risberg, J. (1997). The Swedish centenarian study: A multidisciplinary study of five consecutive cohorts at the age of 100. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 45 (3), 223–253.
Sinek, S., Mead, D., & Docker, P. (2017). Find your why: A practical guide for discovering purpose for you and your team. Portfolio.
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Williams, K. D. (2007). Ostracism. Annual Review of Psychology, 58 , 425–452.
Wong, W. C., Lau, H. P., Kwok, C. F., Leung, Y. M, Chan, M. Y., & Cheung, S. L. (2014). The well-being of community-dwelling near-centenarians and centenarians in Hong Kong: A qualitative study. BMC Geriatrics, 14 (63), 1–8.

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This post was truly worthwhile to read. I wanted to say thank you for the key points you have pointed out as they are enlightening.

As an elder stateman I congratulate you all on a job well done.

God Bless you all. Yours Sincerely Thomas A Mc Henry (Ret ‘d) ( Yesterday’s Man)

This concept of Ikigai is the best. It set apart this article from others that just say “Find something you like” and gave a visual representation of what finding meaning is. I recently discovered something I am passionate about, am good at in some ways (although I need professional training and knowledge), and would like to work in as a career. In fact, this site led me to the realization that I would like to pursue that occupation. There’s an endless goldmine of useful information on this site.

Really great article thank you. As an Occupational Therapist in mental health ‘meaningful occupation ‘ is at the core of my philosophy. Your article puts the concept very concisely and has some excellent quotes and explanations to illustrate a meaningful life that so many people struggle to comprehend.

Please correct the dates of Marcus Aurelius’ reign. Thank you for the article. Agape

Hi Agape, Good spotting! We’ll pass this onto our editing team. Kind regards, Nicole

Thank you! This is a very informative article. Here are very detailed steps to identify your calling, your life purpose. Unfortunately, life can’t be that simple, and to realize your meaning, you need to gain and comprehend life experience. I can’t rationally think things over when I don’t feel it emotionally. I hope you know what I mean. I can’t find my calling because I don’t feel that’s what I want to do. And I can’t answer the rest of the questions at the beginning of this article unambiguously. Well, it turns out I have a lot of work to do on myself…

Hey mate 🙂 , How are you ? Spinoza states something like that : “to realize your meaning, you need to gain and comprehend life experience.” Check out this guy Spinoza, Ethics ” For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. ” I guess the point is to try doing things to find out what makes you happy and your life meaningfull: “I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I’ve got.” So if u want to know more about it u can search for SPINOZAS theory

I have the same work I need to do myself. This has opened up alot of questions that I don’t have easy answers to. I will take steps, small steps but I must fulfill this in my life in some way. I believe this will help me in great ways.

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How to Keep a Healthy Mind While Aging: 8 Easy Strategies

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3 Meaning Exercises Pack (PDF)

Life Worth Living

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First Online: 01 January 2024
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Thaddeus Metz 2

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Worthwhile life

Although a contested matter among philosophers, many would agree that a life is worth living roughly insofar as it has enough goods to outweigh the bads in it to warrant exhibiting positive orientations toward the life such as being grateful for it or wanting it to exist.

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The concept of a life worth living is closely related to ideas of happiness and meaning in life, but can also be seen to be distinct from them. This entry first discusses the contexts in which the idea of a life worth living is salient, after which it differentiates this idea from other value-theoretic concepts. Then, it lays out competing philosophical accounts of what in fact makes a life worth living and concludes by discussing “nihilist” or “pessimist” positions according to which virtually no one’s life is worth living.

We often think about whether a life is worth living or not when making major bioethical decisions about whether to allow a life to end, if not to...

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Metz, T. (2023). Life Worth Living. In: Maggino, F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17299-1_4195

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The Meaning of Life

Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997). Consider, for instance, Aristotle on the human function, Aquinas on the beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good. Relatedly, think about Koheleth, the presumed author of the Biblical book Ecclesiastes, describing life as “futility” and akin to “the pursuit of wind,” Nietzsche on nihilism, as well as Schopenhauer when he remarks that whenever we reach a goal we have longed for we discover “how vain and empty it is.” While these concepts have some bearing on happiness and virtue (and their opposites), they are straightforwardly construed (roughly) as accounts of which highly ranked purposes a person ought to realize that would make her life significant (if any would).

Despite the venerable pedigree, it is only since the 1980s or so that a distinct field of the meaning of life has been established in Anglo-American-Australasian philosophy, on which this survey focuses, and it is only in the past 20 years that debate with real depth and intricacy has appeared. Two decades ago analytic reflection on life’s meaning was described as a “backwater” compared to that on well-being or good character, and it was possible to cite nearly all the literature in a given critical discussion of the field (Metz 2002). Neither is true any longer. Anglo-American-Australasian philosophy of life’s meaning has become vibrant, such that there is now way too much literature to be able to cite comprehensively in this survey. To obtain focus, it tends to discuss books, influential essays, and more recent works, and it leaves aside contributions from other philosophical traditions (such as the Continental or African) and from non-philosophical fields (e.g., psychology or literature). This survey’s central aim is to acquaint the reader with current analytic approaches to life’s meaning, sketching major debates and pointing out neglected topics that merit further consideration.

When the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people tend to pose one of three questions: “What are you talking about?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, and “Is life in fact meaningful?”. The literature on life's meaning composed by those working in the analytic tradition (on which this entry focuses) can be usefully organized according to which question it seeks to answer. This survey starts off with recent work that addresses the first, abstract (or “meta”) question regarding the sense of talk of “life’s meaning,” i.e., that aims to clarify what we have in mind when inquiring into the meaning of life (section 1). Afterward, it considers texts that provide answers to the more substantive question about the nature of meaningfulness (sections 2–3). There is in the making a sub-field of applied meaning that parallels applied ethics, in which meaningfulness is considered in the context of particular cases or specific themes. Examples include downshifting (Levy 2005), implementing genetic enhancements (Agar 2013), making achievements (Bradford 2015), getting an education (Schinkel et al. 2015), interacting with research participants (Olson 2016), automating labor (Danaher 2017), and creating children (Ferracioli 2018). In contrast, this survey focuses nearly exclusively on contemporary normative-theoretical approaches to life’s meanining, that is, attempts to capture in a single, general principle all the variegated conditions that could confer meaning on life. Finally, this survey examines fresh arguments for the nihilist view that the conditions necessary for a meaningful life do not obtain for any of us, i.e., that all our lives are meaningless (section 4).

1. The Meaning of “Meaning”

2.1. god-centered views, 2.2. soul-centered views, 3.1. subjectivism, 3.2. objectivism, 3.3. rejecting god and a soul, 4. nihilism, works cited, classic works, collections, books for the general reader, other internet resources, related entries.

One of the field's aims consists of the systematic attempt to identify what people (essentially or characteristically) have in mind when they think about the topic of life’s meaning. For many in the field, terms such as “importance” and “significance” are synonyms of “meaningfulness” and so are insufficiently revealing, but there are those who draw a distinction between meaningfulness and significance (Singer 1996, 112–18; Belliotti 2019, 145–50, 186). There is also debate about how the concept of a meaningless life relates to the ideas of a life that is absurd (Nagel 1970, 1986, 214–23; Feinberg 1980; Belliotti 2019), futile (Trisel 2002), and not worth living (Landau 2017, 12–15; Matheson 2017).

A useful way to begin to get clear about what thinking about life’s meaning involves is to specify the bearer. Which life does the inquirer have in mind? A standard distinction to draw is between the meaning “in” life, where a human person is what can exhibit meaning, and the meaning “of” life in a narrow sense, where the human species as a whole is what can be meaningful or not. There has also been a bit of recent consideration of whether animals or human infants can have meaning in their lives, with most rejecting that possibility (e.g., Wong 2008, 131, 147; Fischer 2019, 1–24), but a handful of others beginning to make a case for it (Purves and Delon 2018; Thomas 2018). Also under-explored is the issue of whether groups, such as a people or an organization, can be bearers of meaning, and, if so, under what conditions.

Most analytic philosophers have been interested in meaning in life, that is, in the meaningfulness that a person’s life could exhibit, with comparatively few these days addressing the meaning of life in the narrow sense. Even those who believe that God is or would be central to life’s meaning have lately addressed how an individual’s life might be meaningful in virtue of God more often than how the human race might be. Although some have argued that the meaningfulness of human life as such merits inquiry to no less a degree (if not more) than the meaning in a life (Seachris 2013; Tartaglia 2015; cf. Trisel 2016), a large majority of the field has instead been interested in whether their lives as individual persons (and the lives of those they care about) are meaningful and how they could become more so.

Focusing on meaning in life, it is quite common to maintain that it is conceptually something good for its own sake or, relatedly, something that provides a basic reason for action (on which see Visak 2017). There are a few who have recently suggested otherwise, maintaining that there can be neutral or even undesirable kinds of meaning in a person’s life (e.g., Mawson 2016, 90, 193; Thomas 2018, 291, 294). However, these are outliers, with most analytic philosophers, and presumably laypeople, instead wanting to know when an individual’s life exhibits a certain kind of final value (or non-instrumental reason for action).

Another claim about which there is substantial consensus is that meaningfulness is not all or nothing and instead comes in degrees, such that some periods of life are more meaningful than others and that some lives as a whole are more meaningful than others. Note that one can coherently hold the view that some people’s lives are less meaningful (or even in a certain sense less “important”) than others, or are even meaningless (unimportant), and still maintain that people have an equal standing from a moral point of view. Consider a consequentialist moral principle according to which each individual counts for one in virtue of having a capacity for a meaningful life, or a Kantian approach according to which all people have a dignity in virtue of their capacity for autonomous decision-making, where meaning is a function of the exercise of this capacity. For both moral outlooks, we could be required to help people with relatively meaningless lives.

Yet another relatively uncontroversial element of the concept of meaningfulness in respect of individual persons is that it is logically distinct from happiness or rightness (emphasized in Wolf 2010, 2016). First, to ask whether someone’s life is meaningful is not one and the same as asking whether her life is pleasant or she is subjectively well off. A life in an experience machine or virtual reality device would surely be a happy one, but very few take it to be a prima facie candidate for meaningfulness (Nozick 1974: 42–45). Indeed, a number would say that one’s life logically could become meaningful precisely by sacrificing one’s well-being, e.g., by helping others at the expense of one’s self-interest. Second, asking whether a person’s existence over time is meaningful is not identical to considering whether she has been morally upright; there are intuitively ways to enhance meaning that have nothing to do with right action or moral virtue, such as making a scientific discovery or becoming an excellent dancer. Now, one might argue that a life would be meaningless if, or even because, it were unhappy or immoral, but that would be to posit a synthetic, substantive relationship between the concepts, far from indicating that speaking of “meaningfulness” is analytically a matter of connoting ideas regarding happiness or rightness. The question of what (if anything) makes a person’s life meaningful is conceptually distinct from the questions of what makes a life happy or moral, although it could turn out that the best answer to the former question appeals to an answer to one of the latter questions.

Supposing, then, that talk of “meaning in life” connotes something good for its own sake that can come in degrees and that is not analytically equivalent to happiness or rightness, what else does it involve? What more can we say about this final value, by definition? Most contemporary analytic philosophers would say that the relevant value is absent from spending time in an experience machine (but see Goetz 2012 for a different view) or living akin to Sisyphus, the mythic figure doomed by the Greek gods to roll a stone up a hill for eternity (famously discussed by Albert Camus and Taylor 1970). In addition, many would say that the relevant value is typified by the classic triad of “the good, the true, and the beautiful” (or would be under certain conditions). These terms are not to be taken literally, but instead are rough catchwords for beneficent relationships (love, collegiality, morality), intellectual reflection (wisdom, education, discoveries), and creativity (particularly the arts, but also potentially things like humor or gardening).

Pressing further, is there something that the values of the good, the true, the beautiful, and any other logically possible sources of meaning involve? There is as yet no consensus in the field. One salient view is that the concept of meaning in life is a cluster or amalgam of overlapping ideas, such as fulfilling higher-order purposes, meriting substantial esteem or admiration, having a noteworthy impact, transcending one’s animal nature, making sense, or exhibiting a compelling life-story (Markus 2003; Thomson 2003; Metz 2013, 24–35; Seachris 2013, 3–4; Mawson 2016). However, there are philosophers who maintain that something much more monistic is true of the concept, so that (nearly) all thought about meaningfulness in a person’s life is essentially about a single property. Suggestions include being devoted to or in awe of qualitatively superior goods (Taylor 1989, 3–24), transcending one’s limits (Levy 2005), or making a contribution (Martela 2016).

Recently there has been something of an “interpretive turn” in the field, one instance of which is the strong view that meaning-talk is logically about whether and how a life is intelligible within a wider frame of reference (Goldman 2018, 116–29; Seachris 2019; Thomas 2019; cf. Repp 2018). According to this approach, inquiring into life’s meaning is nothing other than seeking out sense-making information, perhaps a narrative about life or an explanation of its source and destiny. This analysis has the advantage of promising to unify a wide array of uses of the term “meaning.” However, it has the disadvantages of being unable to capture the intuitions that meaning in life is essentially good for its own sake (Landau 2017, 12–15), that it is not logically contradictory to maintain that an ineffable condition is what confers meaning on life (as per Cooper 2003, 126–42; Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014), and that often human actions themselves (as distinct from an interpretation of them), such as rescuing a child from a burning building, are what bear meaning.

Some thinkers have suggested that a complete analysis of the concept of life’s meaning should include what has been called “anti-matter” (Metz 2002, 805–07, 2013, 63–65, 71–73) or “anti-meaning” (Campbell and Nyholm 2015; Egerstrom 2015), conditions that reduce the meaningfulness of a life. The thought is that meaning is well represented by a bipolar scale, where there is a dimension of not merely positive conditions, but also negative ones. Gratuitous cruelty or destructiveness are prima facie candidates for actions that not merely fail to add meaning, but also subtract from any meaning one’s life might have had.

Despite the ongoing debates about how to analyze the concept of life’s meaning (or articulate the definition of the phrase “meaning in life”), the field remains in a good position to make progress on the other key questions posed above, viz., of what would make a life meaningful and whether any lives are in fact meaningful. A certain amount of common ground is provided by the point that meaningfulness at least involves a gradient final value in a person’s life that is conceptually distinct from happiness and rightness, with exemplars of it potentially being the good, the true, and the beautiful. The rest of this discussion addresses philosophical attempts to capture the nature of this value theoretically and to ascertain whether it exists in at least some of our lives.

2. Supernaturalism

Most analytic philosophers writing on meaning in life have been trying to develop and evaluate theories, i.e., fundamental and general principles, that are meant to capture all the particular ways that a life could obtain meaning. As in moral philosophy, there are recognizable “anti-theorists,” i.e., those who maintain that there is too much pluralism among meaning conditions to be able to unify them in the form of a principle (e.g., Kekes 2000; Hosseini 2015). Arguably, though, the systematic search for unity is too nascent to be able to draw a firm conclusion about whether it is available.

The theories are standardly divided on a metaphysical basis, that is, in terms of which kinds of properties are held to constitute the meaning. Supernaturalist theories are views according to which a spiritual realm is central to meaning in life. Most Western philosophers have conceived of the spiritual in terms of God or a soul as commonly understood in the Abrahamic faiths (but see Mulgan 2015 for discussion of meaning in the context of a God uninterested in us). In contrast, naturalist theories are views that the physical world as known particularly well by the scientific method is central to life’s meaning.

There is logical space for a non-naturalist theory, according to which central to meaning is an abstract property that is neither spiritual nor physical. However, only scant attention has been paid to this possibility in the recent Anglo-American-Australasian literature (Audi 2005).

It is important to note that supernaturalism, a claim that God (or a soul) would confer meaning on a life, is logically distinct from theism, the claim that God (or a soul) exists. Although most who hold supernaturalism also hold theism, one could accept the former without the latter (as Camus more or less did), committing one to the view that life is meaningless or at least lacks substantial meaning. Similarly, while most naturalists are atheists, it is not contradictory to maintain that God exists but has nothing to do with meaning in life or perhaps even detracts from it. Although these combinations of positions are logically possible, some of them might be substantively implausible. The field could benefit from discussion of the comparative attractiveness of various combinations of evaluative claims about what would make life meaningful and metaphysical claims about whether spiritual conditions exist.

Over the past 15 years or so, two different types of supernaturalism have become distinguished on a regular basis (Metz 2019). That is true not only in the literature on life’s meaning, but also in that on the related pro-theism/anti-theism debate, about whether it would be desirable for God or a soul to exist (e.g., Kahane 2011; Kraay 2018; Lougheed 2020). On the one hand, there is extreme supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary for any meaning in life. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by this view, everyone’s life is meaningless. On the other hand, there is moderate supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary for a great or ultimate meaning in life, although not meaning in life as such. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by this view, everyone’s life could have some meaning, or even be meaningful, but no one’s life could exhibit the most desirable meaning. For a moderate supernaturalist, God or a soul would substantially enhance meaningfulness or be a major contributory condition for it.

There are a variety of ways that great or ultimate meaning has been described, sometimes quantitatively as “infinite” (Mawson 2016), qualitatively as “deeper” (Swinburne 2016), relationally as “unlimited” (Nozick 1981, 618–19; cf. Waghorn 2014), temporally as “eternal” (Cottingham 2016), and perspectivally as “from the point of view of the universe” (Benatar 2017). There has been no reflection as yet on the crucial question of how these distinctions might bear on each another, for instance, on whether some are more basic than others or some are more valuable than others.

Cross-cutting the extreme/moderate distinction is one between God-centered theories and soul-centered ones. According to the former, some kind of connection with God (understood to be a spiritual person who is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful and who is the ground of the physical universe) constitutes meaning in life, even if one lacks a soul (construed as an immortal, spiritual substance that contains one’s identity). In contrast, by the latter, having a soul and putting it into a certain state is what makes life meaningful, even if God does not exist. Many supernaturalists of course believe that God and a soul are jointly necessary for a (greatly) meaningful existence. However, the simpler view, that only one of them is necessary, is common, and sometimes arguments proffered for the complex view fail to support it any more than the simpler one.

The most influential God-based account of meaning in life has been the extreme view that one’s existence is significant if and only if one fulfills a purpose God has assigned. The familiar idea is that God has a plan for the universe and that one’s life is meaningful just to the degree that one helps God realize this plan, perhaps in a particular way that God wants one to do so. If a person failed to do what God intends her to do with her life (or if God does not even exist), then, on the current view, her life would be meaningless.

Thinkers differ over what it is about God’s purpose that might make it uniquely able to confer meaning on human lives, but the most influential argument has been that only God’s purpose could be the source of invariant moral rules (Davis 1987, 296, 304–05; Moreland 1987, 124–29; Craig 1994/2013, 161–67) or of objective values more generally (Cottingham 2005, 37–57), where a lack of such would render our lives nonsensical. According to this argument, lower goods such as animal pleasure or desire satisfaction could exist without God, but higher ones pertaining to meaning in life, particularly moral virtue, could not. However, critics point to many non-moral sources of meaning in life (e.g., Kekes 2000; Wolf 2010), with one arguing that a universal moral code is not necessary for meaning in life, even if, say, beneficent actions are (Ellin 1995, 327). In addition, there are a variety of naturalist and non-naturalist accounts of objective morality––and of value more generally––on offer these days, so that it is not clear that it must have a supernatural source in God’s will.

One recurrent objection to the idea that God’s purpose could make life meaningful is that if God had created us with a purpose in mind, then God would have degraded us and thereby undercut the possibility of us obtaining meaning from fulfilling the purpose. The objection harks back to Jean-Paul Sartre, but in the analytic literature it appears that Kurt Baier was the first to articulate it (1957/2000, 118–20; see also Murphy 1982, 14–15; Singer 1996, 29; Kahane 2011; Lougheed 2020, 121–41). Sometimes the concern is the threat of punishment God would make so that we do God’s bidding, while other times it is that the source of meaning would be constrictive and not up to us, and still other times it is that our dignity would be maligned simply by having been created with a certain end in mind (for some replies to such concerns, see Hanfling 1987, 45–46; Cottingham 2005, 37–57; Lougheed 2020, 111–21).

There is a different argument for an extreme God-based view that focuses less on God as purposive and more on God as infinite, unlimited, or ineffable, which Robert Nozick first articulated with care (Nozick 1981, 594–618; see also Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014). The core idea is that for a finite condition to be meaningful, it must obtain its meaning from another condition that has meaning. So, if one’s life is meaningful, it might be so in virtue of being married to a person, who is important. Being finite, the spouse must obtain his or her importance from elsewhere, perhaps from the sort of work he or she does. This work also must obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is meaningful, and so on. A regress on meaningful conditions is present, and the suggestion is that the regress can terminate only in something so all-encompassing that it need not (indeed, cannot) go beyond itself to obtain meaning from anything else. And that is God. The standard objection to this relational rationale is that a finite condition could be meaningful without obtaining its meaning from another meaningful condition. Perhaps it could be meaningful in itself, without being connected to something beyond it, or maybe it could obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is beautiful or otherwise valuable for its own sake but not meaningful (Nozick 1989, 167–68; Thomson 2003, 25–26, 48).

A serious concern for any extreme God-based view is the existence of apparent counterexamples. If we think of the stereotypical lives of Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa, and Pablo Picasso, they seem meaningful even if we suppose there is no all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good spiritual person who is the ground of the physical world (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 31–37, 49–50; Landau 2017). Even religiously inclined philosophers have found this hard to deny these days (Quinn 2000, 58; Audi 2005; Mawson 2016, 5; Williams 2020, 132–34).

Largely for that reason, contemporary supernaturalists have tended to opt for moderation, that is, to maintain that God would greatly enhance the meaning in our lives, even if some meaning would be possible in a world without God. One approach is to invoke the relational argument to show that God is necessary, not for any meaning whatsoever, but rather for an ultimate meaning. “Limited transcendence, the transcending of our limits so as to connect with a wider context of value which itself is limited, does give our lives meaning––but a limited one. We may thirst for more” (Nozick 1981, 618). Another angle is to appeal to playing a role in God’s plan, again to claim, not that it is essential for meaning as such, but rather for “a cosmic significance....intead of a significance very limited in time and space” (Swinburne 2016, 154; see also Quinn 2000; Cottingham 2016, 131). Another rationale is that by fulfilling God’s purpose, we would meaningfully please God, a perfect person, as well as be remembered favorably by God forever (Cottingham 2016, 135; Williams 2020, 21–22, 29, 101, 108). Still another argument is that only with God could the deepest desires of human nature be satisfied (e.g., Goetz 2012; Seachris 2013, 20; Cottingham 2016, 127, 136), even if more surface desires could be satisfied without God.

In reply to such rationales for a moderate supernaturalism, there has been the suggestion that it is precisely by virtue of being alone in the universe that our lives would be particularly significant; otherwise, God’s greatness would overshadow us (Kahane 2014). There has also been the response that, with the opportunity for greater meaning from God would also come that for greater anti-meaning, so that it is not clear that a world with God would offer a net gain in respect of meaning (Metz 2019, 34–35). For example, if pleasing God would greatly enhance meaning in our lives, then presumably displeasing God would greatly reduce it and to a comparable degree. In addition, there are arguments for extreme naturalism (or its “anti-theist” cousin) mentioned below (sub-section 3.3).

Notice that none of the above arguments for supernaturalism appeals to the prospect of eternal life (at least not explicitly). Arguments that do make such an appeal are soul-centered, holding that meaning in life mainly comes from having an immortal, spiritual substance that is contiguous with one’s body when it is alive and that will forever outlive its death. Some think of the afterlife in terms of one’s soul entering a transcendent, spiritual realm (Heaven), while others conceive of one’s soul getting reincarnated into another body on Earth. According to the extreme version, if one has a soul but fails to put it in the right state (or if one lacks a soul altogether), then one’s life is meaningless.

There are three prominent arguments for an extreme soul-based perspective. One argument, made famous by Leo Tolstoy, is the suggestion that for life to be meaningful something must be worth doing, that something is worth doing only if it will make a permanent difference to the world, and that making a permanent difference requires being immortal (see also Hanfling 1987, 22–24; Morris 1992, 26; Craig 1994). Critics most often appeal to counterexamples, suggesting for instance that it is surely worth your time and effort to help prevent people from suffering, even if you and they are mortal. Indeed, some have gone on the offensive and argued that helping people is worth the sacrifice only if and because they are mortal, for otherwise they could invariably be compensated in an afterlife (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 91–94). Another recent and interesting criticism is that the major motivations for the claim that nothing matters now if one day it will end are incoherent (Greene 2021).

A second argument for the view that life would be meaningless without a soul is that it is necessary for justice to be done, which, in turn, is necessary for a meaningful life. Life seems nonsensical when the wicked flourish and the righteous suffer, at least supposing there is no other world in which these injustices will be rectified, whether by God or a Karmic force. Something like this argument can be found in Ecclesiastes, and it continues to be defended (e.g., Davis 1987; Craig 1994). However, even granting that an afterlife is required for perfectly just outcomes, it is far from obvious that an eternal afterlife is necessary for them, and, then, there is the suggestion that some lives, such as Mandela’s, have been meaningful precisely in virtue of encountering injustice and fighting it.

A third argument for thinking that having a soul is essential for any meaning is that it is required to have the sort of free will without which our lives would be meaningless. Immanuel Kant is known for having maintained that if we were merely physical beings, subjected to the laws of nature like everything else in the material world, then we could not act for moral reasons and hence would be unimportant. More recently, one theologian has eloquently put the point in religious terms: “The moral spirit finds the meaning of life in choice. It finds it in that which proceeds from man and remains with him as his inner essence rather than in the accidents of circumstances turns of external fortune....(W)henever a human being rubs the lamp of his moral conscience, a Spirit does appear. This Spirit is God....It is in the ‘Thou must’ of God and man’s ‘I can’ that the divine image of God in human life is contained” (Swenson 1949/2000, 27–28). Notice that, even if moral norms did not spring from God’s commands, the logic of the argument entails that one’s life could be meaningful, so long as one had the inherent ability to make the morally correct choice in any situation. That, in turn, arguably requires something non-physical about one’s self, so as to be able to overcome whichever physical laws and forces one might confront. The standard objection to this reasoning is to advance a compatibilism about having a determined physical nature and being able to act for moral reasons (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009, 145–77). It is also worth wondering whether, if one had to have a spiritual essence in order to make free choices, it would have to be one that never perished.

Like God-centered theorists, many soul-centered theorists these days advance a moderate view, accepting that some meaning in life would be possible without immortality, but arguing that a much greater meaning would be possible with it. Granting that Einstein, Mandela, and Picasso had somewhat meaningful lives despite not having survived the deaths of their bodies (as per, e.g., Trisel 2004; Wolf 2015, 89–140; Landau 2017), there remains a powerful thought: more is better. If a finite life with the good, the true, and the beautiful has meaning in it to some degree, then surely it would have all the more meaning if it exhibited such higher values––including a relationship with God––for an eternity (Cottingham 2016, 132–35; Mawson 2016, 2019, 52–53; Williams 2020, 112–34; cf. Benatar 2017, 35–63). One objection to this reasoning is that the infinity of meaning that would be possible with a soul would be “too big,” rendering it difficult for the moderate supernaturalist to make sense of the intution that a finite life such as Einstein’s can indeed count as meaningful by comparison (Metz 2019, 30–31; cf. Mawson 2019, 53–54). More common, though, is the objection that an eternal life would include anti-meaning of various kinds, such as boredom and repetition, discussed below in the context of extreme naturalism (sub-section 3.3).

3. Naturalism

Recall that naturalism is the view that a physical life is central to life’s meaning, that even if there is no spiritual realm, a substantially meaningful life is possible. Like supernaturalism, contemporary naturalism admits of two distinguishable variants, moderate and extreme (Metz 2019). The moderate version is that, while a genuinely meaningful life could be had in a purely physical universe as known well by science, a somewhat more meaningful life would be possible if a spiritual realm also existed. God or a soul could enhance meaning in life, although they would not be major contributors. The extreme version of naturalism is the view that it would be better in respect of life’s meaning if there were no spiritual realm. From this perspective, God or a soul would be anti-matter, i.e., would detract from the meaning available to us, making a purely physical world (even if not this particular one) preferable.

Cross-cutting the moderate/extreme distinction is that between subjectivism and objectivism, which are theoretical accounts of the nature of meaningfulness insofar as it is physical. They differ in terms of the extent to which the human mind constitutes meaning and whether there are conditions of meaning that are invariant among human beings. Subjectivists believe that there are no invariant standards of meaning because meaning is relative to the subject, i.e., depends on an individual’s pro-attitudes such as her particular desires or ends, which are not shared by everyone. Roughly, something is meaningful for a person if she strongly wants it or intends to seek it out and she gets it. Objectivists maintain, in contrast, that there are some invariant standards for meaning because meaning is at least partly mind-independent, i.e., obtains not merely in virtue of being the object of anyone’s mental states. Here, something is meaningful (partially) because of its intrinsic nature, in the sense of being independent of whether it is wanted or intended; meaning is instead (to some extent) the sort of thing that merits these reactions.

There is logical space for an orthogonal view, according to which there are invariant standards of meaningfulness constituted by what all human beings would converge on from a certain standpoint. However, it has not been much of a player in the field (Darwall 1983, 164–66).

According to this version of naturalism, meaning in life varies from person to person, depending on each one’s variable pro-attitudes. Common instances are views that one’s life is more meaningful, the more one gets what one happens to want strongly, achieves one’s highly ranked goals, or does what one believes to be really important (Trisel 2002; Hooker 2008). One influential subjectivist has recently maintained that the relevant mental state is caring or loving, so that life is meaningful just to the extent that one cares about or loves something (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94, 2004). Another recent proposal is that meaningfulness consists of “an active engagement and affirmation that vivifies the person who has freely created or accepted and now promotes and nurtures the projects of her highest concern” (Belliotti 2019, 183).

Subjectivism was dominant in the middle of the twentieth century, when positivism, noncognitivism, existentialism, and Humeanism were influential (Ayer 1947; Hare 1957; Barnes 1967; Taylor 1970; Williams 1976). However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, inference to the best explanation and reflective equilibrium became accepted forms of normative argumentation and were frequently used to defend claims about the existence and nature of objective value (or of “external reasons,” ones obtaining independently of one’s extant attitudes). As a result, subjectivism about meaning lost its dominance. Those who continue to hold subjectivism often remain suspicious of attempts to justify beliefs about objective value (e.g., Trisel 2002, 73, 79, 2004, 378–79; Frankfurt 2004, 47–48, 55–57; Wong 2008, 138–39; Evers 2017, 32, 36; Svensson 2017, 54). Theorists are moved to accept subjectivism typically because the alternatives are unpalatable; they are reasonably sure that meaning in life obtains for some people, but do not see how it could be grounded on something independent of the mind, whether it be the natural or the supernatural (or the non-natural). In contrast to these possibilities, it appears straightforward to account for what is meaningful in terms of what people find meaningful or what people want out of their lives. Wide-ranging meta-ethical debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language are necessary to address this rationale for subjectivism.

There is a cluster of other, more circumscribed arguments for subjectivism, according to which this theory best explains certain intuitive features of meaning in life. For one, subjectivism seems plausible since it is reasonable to think that a meaningful life is an authentic one (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94). If a person’s life is significant insofar as she is true to herself or her deepest nature, then we have some reason to believe that meaning simply is a function of those matters for which the person cares. For another, it is uncontroversial that often meaning comes from losing oneself, i.e., in becoming absorbed in an activity or experience, as opposed to being bored by it or finding it frustrating (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94; Belliotti 2019, 162–70). Work that concentrates the mind and relationships that are engrossing seem central to meaning and to be so because of the subjective elements involved. For a third, meaning is often taken to be something that makes life worth continuing for a specific person, i.e., that gives her a reason to get out of bed in the morning, which subjectivism is thought to account for best (Williams 1976; Svensson 2017; Calhoun 2018).

Critics maintain that these arguments are vulnerable to a common objection: they neglect the role of objective value (or an external reason) in realizing oneself, losing oneself, and having a reason to live (Taylor 1989, 1992; Wolf 2010, 2015, 89–140). One is not really being true to oneself, losing oneself in a meaningful way, or having a genuine reason to live insofar as one, say, successfully maintains 3,732 hairs on one’s head (Taylor 1992, 36), cultivates one’s prowess at long-distance spitting (Wolf 2010, 104), collects a big ball of string (Wolf 2010, 104), or, well, eats one’s own excrement (Wielenberg 2005, 22). The counterexamples suggest that subjective conditions are insufficient to ground meaning in life; there seem to be certain actions, relationships, and states that are objectively valuable (but see Evers 2017, 30–32) and toward which one’s pro-attitudes ought to be oriented, if meaning is to accrue.

So say objectivists, but subjectivists feel the pull of the point and usually seek to avoid the counterexamples, lest they have to bite the bullet by accepting the meaningfulness of maintaining 3,732 hairs on one’s head and all the rest (for some who do, see Svensson 2017, 54–55; Belliotti 2019, 181–83). One important strategy is to suggest that subjectivists can avoid the counterexamples by appealing to the right sort of pro-attitude. Instead of whatever an individual happens to want, perhaps the relevant mental state is an emotional-perceptual one of seeing-as (Alexis 2011; cf. Hosseini 2015, 47–66), a “categorical” desire, that is, an intrinsic desire constitutive of one’s identity that one takes to make life worth continuing (Svensson 2017), or a judgment that one has a good reason to value something highly for its own sake (Calhoun 2018). Even here, though, objectivists will argue that it might “appear that whatever the will chooses to treat as a good reason to engage itself is, for the will, a good reason. But the will itself....craves objective reasons; and often it could not go forward unless it thought it had them” (Wiggins 1988, 136). And without any appeal to objectivity, it is perhaps likely that counterexamples would resurface.

Another subjectivist strategy by which to deal with the counterexamples is the attempt to ground meaningfulness, not on the pro-attitudes of an individual valuer, but on those of a group (Darwall 1983, 164–66; Brogaard and Smith 2005; Wong 2008). Does such an intersubjective move avoid (more of) the counterexamples? If so, does it do so more plausibly than an objective theory?

Objective naturalists believe that meaning in life is constituted at least in part by something physical beyond merely the fact that it is the object of a pro-attitude. Obtaining the object of some emotion, desire, or judgment is not sufficient for meaningfulness, on this view. Instead, there are certain conditions of the material world that could confer meaning on anyone’s life, not merely because they are viewed as meaningful, wanted for their own sake, or believed to be choiceworthy, but instead (at least partially) because they are inherently worthwhile or valuable in themselves.

Morality (the good), enquiry (the true), and creativity (the beautiful) are widely held instances of activities that confer meaning on life, while trimming toenails and eating snow––along with the counterexamples to subjectivism above––are not. Objectivism is widely thought to be a powerful general explanation of these particular judgments: the former are meaningful not merely because some agent (whether it is an individual, her society, or even God) cares about them or judges them to be worth doing, while the latter simply lack significance and cannot obtain it even if some agent does care about them or judge them to be worth doing. From an objective perspective, it is possible for an individual to care about the wrong thing or to be mistaken that something is worthwhile, and not merely because of something she cares about all the more or judges to be still more choiceworthy. Of course, meta-ethical debates about the existence and nature of value are again relevant to appraising this rationale.

Some objectivists think that being the object of a person’s mental states plays no constitutive role in making that person’s life meaningful, although they of course contend that it often plays an instrumental role––liking a certain activity, after all, is likely to motivate one to do it. Relatively few objectivists are “pure” in that way, although consequentialists do stand out as clear instances (e.g., Singer 1995; Smuts 2018, 75–99). Most objectivists instead try to account for the above intuitions driving subjectivism by holding that a life is more meaningful, not merely because of objective factors, but also in part because of propositional attitudes such as cognition, conation, and emotion. Particularly influential has been Susan Wolf’s hybrid view, captured by this pithy slogan: “Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (Wolf 2015, 112; see also Kekes 1986, 2000; Wiggins 1988; Raz 2001, 10–40; Mintoff 2008; Wolf 2010, 2016; Fischer 2019, 9–23; Belshaw 2021, 160–81). This theory implies that no meaning accrues to one’s life if one believes in, is satisfied by, or cares about a project that is not truly worthwhile, or if one takes up a truly worthwhile project but fails to judge it important, be satisfied by it, or care about it. A related approach is that, while subjective attraction is not necessary for meaning, it could enhance it (e.g., Audi 2005, 344; Metz 2013, 183–84, 196–98, 220–25). For instance, a stereotypical Mother Teresa who is bored by and alienated from her substantial charity work might have a somewhat significant existence because of it, even if she would have an even more significant existence if she felt pride in it or identified with it.

There have been several attempts to capture theoretically what all objectively attractive, inherently worthwhile, or finally valuable conditions have in common insofar as they bear on meaning in a person’s life. Over the past few decades, one encounters the proposals that objectively meaningful conditions are just those that involve: positively connecting with organic unity beyond oneself (Nozick 1981, 594–619); being creative (Taylor 1987; Matheson 2018); living an emotional life (Solomon 1993; cf. Williams 2020, 56–78); promoting good consequences, such as improving the quality of life of oneself and others (Singer 1995; Audi 2005; Smuts 2018, 75–99); exercising or fostering rational nature in exceptional ways (Smith 1997, 179–221; Gewirth 1998, 177–82; Metz 2013, 222–36); progressing toward ends that can never be fully realized because one’s knowledge of them changes as one approaches them (Levy 2005); realizing goals that are transcendent for being long-lasting in duration and broad in scope (Mintoff 2008); living virtuously (May 2015, 61–138; McPherson 2020); and loving what is worth loving (Wolf 2016). There is as yet no convergence in the field on one, or even a small cluster, of these accounts.

One feature of a large majority of the above naturalist theories is that they are aggregative or additive, objectionably treating a life as a mere “container” of bits of life that are meaningful considered in isolation from other bits (Brännmark 2003, 330). It has become increasingly common for philosophers of life’s meaning, especially objectivists, to hold that life as a whole, or at least long stretches of it, can substantially affect its meaningfulness beyond the amount of meaning (if any) in its parts.

For instance, a life that has lots of beneficence and otherwise intuitively meaning-conferring conditions but that is also extremely repetitive (à la the movie Groundhog Day ) is less than maximally meaningful (Taylor 1987; Blumenfeld 2009). Furthermore, a life that not only avoids repetition but also ends with a substantial amount of meaningful (or otherwise desirable) parts seems to have more meaning overall than one that has the same amount of meaningful (desirable) parts but ends with few or none of them (Kamm 2013, 18–22; Dorsey 2015). Still more, a life in which its meaningless (or otherwise undesirable parts) cause its meaningful (desirable) parts to come about through a process of personal growth seems meaningful in virtue of this redemptive pattern, “good life-story,” or narrative self-expression (Taylor 1989, 48–51; Wong 2008; Fischer 2009, 145–77; Kauppinen 2012; May 2015, 61–138; Velleman 2015, 141–73). These three cases suggest that meaning can inhere in life as a whole, that is, in the relationships between its parts, and not merely in the parts considered in isolation. However, some would maintain that it is, strictly speaking, the story that is or could be told of a life that matters, not so much the life-story qua relations between events themselves (de Bres 2018).

There are pure or extreme versions of holism present in the literature, according to which the only possible bearer of meaning in life is a person’s life as a whole, and not any isolated activities, relationships, or states (Taylor 1989, 48–51; Tabensky 2003; Levinson 2004). A salient argument for this position is that judgments of the meaningfulness of a part of someone’s life are merely provisional, open to revision upon considering how they fit into a wider perspective. So, for example, it would initially appear that taking an ax away from a madman and thereby protecting innocent parties confers some meaning on one’s life, but one might well revise that judgment upon learning that the intention behind it was merely to steal an ax, not to save lives, or that the madman then took out a machine gun, causing much more harm than his ax would have. It is worth considering how far this sort of case is generalizable, and, if it can be to a substantial extent, whether that provides strong evidence that only life as a whole can exhibit meaningfulness.

Perhaps most objectivists would, at least upon reflection, accept that both the parts of a life and the whole-life relationships among the parts can exhibit meaning. Supposing there are two bearers of meaning in a life, important questions arise. One is whether a certain narrative can be meaningful even if its parts are not, while a second is whether the meaningfulness of a part increases if it is an aspect of a meaningful whole (on which see Brännmark 2003), and a third is whether there is anything revealing to say about how to make tradeoffs between the parts and whole in cases where one must choose between them (Blumenfeld 2009 appears to assign lexical priority to the whole).

Naturalists until recently had been largely concerned to show that meaning in life is possible without God or a soul; they have not spent much time considering how such spiritual conditions might enhance meaning, but have, in moderate fashion, tended to leave that possibility open (an exception is Hooker 2008). Lately, however, an extreme form of naturalism has arisen, according to which our lives would probably, if not unavoidably, have less meaning in a world with God or a soul than in one without. Although such an approach was voiced early on by Baier (1957), it is really in the past decade or so that this “anti-theist” position has become widely and intricately discussed.

One rationale, mentioned above as an objection to the view that God’s purpose constitutes meaning in life, has also been deployed to argue that the existence of God as such would necessarily reduce meaning, that is, would consist of anti-matter. It is the idea that master/servant and parent/child analogies so prominent in the monotheist religious traditions reveal something about our status in a world where there is a qualitatively higher being who has created us with certain ends in mind: our independence or dignity as adult persons would be violated (e.g., Baier 1957/2000, 118–20; Kahane 2011, 681–85; Lougheed 2020, 121–41). One interesting objection to this reasoning has been to accept that God’s existence is necessarily incompatible with the sort of meaning that would come (roughly stated) from being one’s own boss, but to argue that God would also make greater sorts of meaning available, offering a net gain to us (Mawson 2016, 110–58).

Another salient argument for thinking that God would detract from meaning in life appeals to the value of privacy (Kahane 2011, 681–85; Lougheed 2020, 55–110). God’s omniscience would unavoidably make it impossible for us to control another person’s access to the most intimate details about ourselves, which, for some, amounts to a less meaningful life than one with such control. Beyond questioning the value of our privacy in relation to God, one thought-provoking criticism has been to suggest that, if a lack of privacy really would substantially reduce meaning in our lives, then God, qua morally perfect person, would simply avoid knowing everything about us (Tooley 2018). Lacking complete knowledge of our mental states would be compatible with describing God as “omniscient,” so the criticism goes, insofar as that is plausibly understood as having as much knowledge as is morally permissible.

Turn, now, to major arguments for thinking that having a soul would reduce life’s meaning, so that if one wants a maximally meaningful life, one should prefer a purely physical world, or at least one in which people are mortal. First and foremost, there has been the argument that an immortal life could not avoid becoming boring (Williams 1973), rendering life pointless according to many subjective and objective theories. The literature on this topic has become enormous, with the central reply being that immortality need not get boring (for more recent discussions, see Fischer 2009, 79–101, 2019, 117–42; Mawson 2019, 51–52; Williams 2020, 30–41, 123–29; Belshaw 2021, 182–97). However, it might also be worth questioning whether boredom is sufficient for meaninglessness. Suppose, for instance, that one volunteers to be bored so that many others will not be bored; perhaps this would be a meaningful sacrifice to make. Being bored for an eternity would not be blissful or even satisfying, to be sure, but if it served the function of preventing others from being bored for an eternity, would it be meaningful (at least to some degree)? If, as is commonly held, sacrificing one’s life could be meaningful, why not also sacrificing one’s liveliness?

Another reason given to reject eternal life is that it would become repetitive, which would substantially drain it of meaning (Scarre 2007, 54–55; May 2009, 46–47, 64–65, 71; Smuts 2011, 142–44; cf. Blumenfeld 2009). If, as it appears, there are only a finite number of actions one could perform, relationships one could have, and states one could be in during an eternity, one would have to end up doing the same things again. Even though one’s activities might be more valuable than rolling a stone up a hill forever à la Sisyphus, the prospect of doing them over and over again forever is disheartening for many. To be sure, one might not remember having done them before and hence could avoid boredom, but for some philosophers that would make it all the worse, akin to having dementia and forgetting that one has told the same stories. Others, however, still find meaning in such a life (e.g., Belshaw 2021, 197, 205n41).

A third meaning-based argument against immortality invokes considerations of narrative. If the pattern of one’s life as a whole substantially matters, and if a proper pattern would include a beginning, a middle, and an end, it appears that a life that never ends would lack the relevant narrative structure. “Because it would drag on endlessly, it would, sooner or later, just be a string of events lacking all form....With immortality, the novel never ends....How meaningful can such a novel be?” (May 2009, 68, 72; see also Scarre 2007, 58–60). Notice that this objection is distinct from considerations of boredom and repetition (which concern novelty ); even if one were stimulated and active, and even if one found a way not to repeat one’s life in the course of eternity, an immortal life would appear to lack shape. In reply, some reject the idea that a meaningful life must be akin to a novel, and intead opt for narrativity in the form of something like a string of short stories that build on each other (Fischer 2009, 145–77, 2019, 101–16). Others, though, have sought to show that eternity could still be novel-like, deeming the sort of ending that matters to be a function of what the content is and how it relates to the content that came before (e.g., Seachris 2011; Williams 2020, 112–19).

There have been additional objections to immortality as undercutting meaningfulness, but they are prima facie less powerful than the previous three in that, if sound, they arguably show that an eternal life would have a cost, but probably not one that would utterly occlude the prospect of meaning in it. For example, there have been the suggestions that eternal lives would lack a sense of preciousness and urgency (Nussbaum 1989, 339; Kass 2002, 266–67), could not exemplify virtues such as courageously risking one’s life for others (Kass 2002, 267–68; Wielenberg 2005, 91–94), and could not obtain meaning from sustaining or saving others’ lives (Nussbaum 1989, 338; Wielenberg 2005, 91–94). Note that at least the first two rationales turn substantially on the belief in immortality, not quite immortality itself: if one were immortal but forgot that one is or did not know that at all, then one could appreciate life and obtain much of the virtue of courage (and, conversely, if one were not immortal, but thought that one is, then, by the logic of these arguments, one would fail to appreciate limits and be unable to exemplify courage).

The previous two sections addressed theoretical accounts of what would confer meaning on a human person’s life. Although these theories do not imply that some people’s lives are in fact meaningful, that has been the presumption of a very large majority of those who have advanced them. Much of the procedure has been to suppose that many lives have had meaning in them and then to consider in virtue of what they have or otherwise could. However, there are nihilist (or pessimist) perspectives that question this supposition. According to nihilism (pessimism), what would make a life meaningful in principle cannot obtain for any of us.

One straightforward rationale for nihilism is the combination of extreme supernaturalism about what makes life meaningful and atheism about whether a spiritual realm exists. If you believe that God or a soul is necessary for meaning in life, and if you believe that neither is real, then you are committed to nihilism, to the denial that life can have any meaning. Athough this rationale for nihilism was prominent in the modern era (and was more or less Camus’ position), it has been on the wane in analytic philosophical circles, as extreme supernaturalism has been eclipsed by the moderate variety.

The most common rationales for nihilism these days do not appeal to supernaturalism, or at least not explicitly. One cluster of ideas appeals to what meta-ethicists call “error theory,” the view that evaluative claims (in this case about meaning in life, or about morality qua necessary for meaning) characteristically posit objectively real or universally justified values, but that such values do not exist. According to one version, value judgments often analytically include a claim to objectivity but there is no reason to think that objective values exist, as they “would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe” (Mackie 1977/1990, 38). According to a second version, life would be meaningless if there were no set of moral standards that could be fully justified to all rational enquirers, but it so happens that such standards cannot exist for persons who can always reasonably question a given claim (Murphy 1982, 12–17). According to a third, we hold certain beliefs about the objectivity and universality of morality and related values such as meaning because they were evolutionarily advantageous to our ancestors, not because they are true. Humans have been “deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a distinterested, objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey” (Ruse and Wilson 1986, 179; cf. Street 2015). One must draw on the intricate work in meta-ethics that has been underway for the past several decades in order to appraise these arguments.

In contrast to error-theoretic arguments for nihilism, there are rationales for it accepting that objective values exist but denying that our lives can ever exhibit or promote them so as to obtain meaning. One version of this approach maintains that, for our lives to matter, we must be in a position to add objective value to the world, which we are not since the objective value of the world is already infinite (Smith 2003). The key premises for this view are that every bit of space-time (or at least the stars in the physical universe) have some positive value, that these values can be added up, and that space is infinite. If the physical world at present contains an infinite degree of value, nothing we do can make a difference in terms of meaning, for infinity plus any amount of value remains infinity. One way to question this argument, beyond doubting the value of space-time or stars, is to suggest that, even if one cannot add to the value of the universe, meaning plausibly comes from being the source of certain values.

A second rationale for nihilism that accepts the existence of objective value is David Benatar’s (2006, 18–59) intriguing “asymmetry argument” for anti-natalism, the view that it is immoral to bring new people into existence because doing so would always be on balance bad for them. For Benatar, the bads of existing (e.g., pains) are real disadvantages relative to not existing, while the goods of existing (pleasures) are not real advantages relative to not existing, since there is in the latter state no one to be deprived of them. If indeed the state of not existing is no worse than that of experiencing the benefits of existence, then, since existing invariably brings harm in its wake, it follows that existing is always worse compared to not existing. Although this argument is illustrated with experiential goods and bads, it seems generalizable to non-experiential ones, including meaning in life and anti-matter. The literature on this argument has become large (for a recent collection, see Hauskeller and Hallich 2022).

Benatar (2006, 60–92, 2017, 35–63) has advanced an additional argument for nihilism, one that appeals to Thomas Nagel’s (1986, 208–32) widely discussed analysis of the extremely external standpoint that human persons can take on their lives. There exists, to use Henry Sidgwick’s influential phrase, the “point of view of the universe,” that is, the standpoint that considers a human being’s life in relation to all times and all places. When one takes up this most external standpoint and views one’s puny impact on the world, little of one’s life appears to matter. What one does in a certain society on Earth over 75 years or so just does not amount to much, when considering the billions of temporal years and billions of light-years that make up space-time. Although this reasoning grants limited kinds of meaning to human beings, from a personal, social, or human perspective, Benatar both denies that the greatest sort of meaning––a cosmic one––is available to them and contends that this makes their lives bad, hence the “nihilist” tag. Some have objected that our lives could in fact have a cosmic significance, say, if they played a role in God’s plan (Quinn 2000, 65–66; Swinburne 2016, 154), were the sole ones with a dignity in the universe (Kahane 2014), or engaged in valuable activities that could be appreciated by anyone anywhere anytime (Wolf 2016, 261–62). Others naturally maintain that cosmic significance is irrelevant to appraising a human life, with some denying that it would be a genuine source of meaning (Landau 2017, 93–99), and others accepting that it would be but maintaining that the absence of this good would not count as a bad or merit regret (discussed in Benatar 2017, 56–62; Williams 2020, 108–11).

Finally, a distinguishable source of nihilism concerns the ontological, as distinct from axiological, preconditions for meaning in life. Perhaps most radically, there are those who deny that we have selves. Do we indeed lack selves, and, if we do, is a meaningful life impossible for us (see essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018; Le Bihan 2019)? Somewhat less radically, there are those who grant that we have selves, but deny that they are in charge in the relevant way. That is, some have argued that we lack self-governance or free will of the sort that is essential for meaning in life, at least if determinism is true (Pisciotta 2013; essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018). Non-quantum events, including human decisions, appear to be necessited by a prior state of the world, such that none could have been otherwise, and many of our decisions are a product of unconscious neurological mechanisms (while quantum events are of course utterly beyond our control). If none of our conscious choices could have been avoided and all were ultimately necessited by something external to them, perhaps they are insufficient to merit pride or admiration or to constitute narrative authorship of a life. In reply, some maintain that a compatibilism between determinism and moral responsibility applies with comparable force to meaning in life (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009, 145–77), while others contend that incompatibilism is true of moral responsibility but not of meaning (Pereboom 2014).

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Belshaw, C., 2005, 10 Good Questions About Life and Death , Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Cottingham, J., 2003, On the Meaning of Life , London: Routledge.
Eagleton, T., 2007, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fischer, J. M., 2019, Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life , New York: Oxford University Press.
Ford, D., 2007, The Search for Meaning: A Short History , Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hauskeller, M., 2020, The Meaning of Life and Death: Ten Classic Thinkers on the Ultimate Question , London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Martin, M., 2002, Atheism, Morality, and Meaning , Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Messerly, J., 2012, The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Approaches , Seattle: Darwin and Hume Publishers.
Ruse, M., 2019, A Meaning to Life , New York: Oxford University Press.
Young, J., 2003, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life , New York: Routledge.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Delon, N., 2021, “ The Meaning of Life ”, a bibliography on PhilPapers.
Metz, T., 2021, “ Life, Meaning of ”, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , E. Mason (ed.).
O’Brien, W., 2021, “ The Meaning of Life: Early Continental and Analytic Perspectives ”, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , J. Fieser and B. Dowden (eds.).
Seachris, J., 2021, “ Meaning of Life: The Analytic Perspective ”, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , J. Fieser and B. Dowden (eds.).

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Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, summary of william james’ “is life worth living”.

William James (1842 – 1910) was trained as a medical doctor, was one of the most important figures in the history of American philosophy, and was a pioneering psychologist. He is the brother of the novelist Henry James, and friend of numerous intellectuals including: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Mark Twain, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud. He spent his entire academic career at Harvard. The following is a summary of an address James gave to the Harvard YMCA in 1895 entitled: “Is Life Worth Living?”

James began by noting that some answer this question with a temperamental optimism that denies the existence of evil—for example, the poet Walt Whitman and philosopher Rousseau. For both of them to breathe, to walk, or to sleep is joy or felicity itself. According to James, the problem with this approach is that such moods are impermanent, and the personalities that experience them are not universal; if they were, the question of whether life is worth living would not arise. Instead, most of us oscillate between joy and sadness, between ecstasy and despair, and therefore for most of us the thought that life is not worth living occasionally arises. Almost anyone in the midst of some merriment and suddenly confronted with death, disease, and suffering, would find that their unabated exuberance about life quickly dispelled.

Suicide is evidence that not all individuals are temperamentally optimistic, and many more experience despondency after philosophical reflection. If such reflection about the ultimate nature of things breeds despair, how can reflection combat that gloom? James provides a preview of his answer: “Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing more recondite than religious faith.” [i] The reason for this is that pessimism results from a religious demand that has not been satisfied. The chief source of this pessimism is our reflective grasp of the contradiction between the facts of nature and our desire to believe there is something good behind those facts. For the credulous such reflective pessimism does not surface, but for more scientific minded there are only two possible solutions to the apparent discord: 1) forgo a religious or poetic reading of reality and accept the bare facts of nature; or 2) adopt new beliefs or discover new facts to reconcile a religious reading of reality with the hard facts of science.

But what new religious beliefs might hasten this reconciliation? James claims that the essence of religious supernaturalism is the view that the natural order is part of a larger reality which in turn gives significance to our mundane existence and explains the world’s riddles. These are the kinds of belief that might aid us in our search for meaning. James now presents a preview of his conclusion: “that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust …” [ii]

To those who claim that his approach is mystical or unscientific, James responds that science and the scientifically minded should not be arrogant. Science gives us a glimpse of what is real, but its knowledge is minuscule compared to the vastness of our ignorance. Agnostics admit as much but will not use their ignorance to say anything positive about the unknown, counseling us to withhold assent in matters where the evidence is inconclusive. James accepts such a view in the abstract, but neutrality cannot be maintained practically. If I refrain from believing in the supernatural, I express my refrain by acting as if the supernatural is not real; by not acting as if religion were true, one effectively acts as if it were not true. But science has no authority to deny the existence of an invisible world that gives us what the visible world does not. Science can only say what is, it cannot speak of what is not; and the agnostic prescription to proportion assent to evidence is merely a matter of taste.

The benefits of believing in an unseen spiritual world are practical and if we remove this comfort from human beings, suicidal despair may result. As for the claim that such belief is just wishful thinking, James reminds us how little we know of reality relative to omniscience. While such belief is based on the possibility of something rather than its confirmed reality, human lives and actions are always undertaken with uncertainty. If the only way off a mountain is to leap, then you must trust yourself and leap—if you hesitate too long the outcome is certain death. Although we cannot be sure of much, it is best to believe in the practical, in that which helps us live.

For James the issue of whether life is worth living is similar. You can accept a pessimistic view of life and even commit suicide—you can make something true for yourself by believing it. But suppose instead you cling to the view that there is something good beyond this world? Suppose further that your subjectivity will not yield to gloom, that you find joy in life. Have you not then made life worth living? Yes, we can make our lives worth living with our optimism. So it is our faith in an unseen world, in a religious or spiritual world, that grounds our belief in this world’s worthiness. Courage means risking one’s life on a mere possibility, and the faithful believe in that possibility. James concludes with the following exhortation:

These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The ‘scientific proof’ that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment … is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: “Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there. [iii]

Summary – We need to be optimistic and have faith in an unseen spiritual world for life to be meaningful.

__________________________________________________________________________

[i] William James, “Is Life Worth Living? in The Search For Meaning In Life , ed. Robert F. Davidson (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1962), 240. [ii] William James, “Is Life Worth Living? 241. [iii] William James, “Is Life Worth Living? 245.

The Value of Life: A Personal Perspective

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Introduction

Familial and interpersonal love: pillars of strength.

Personal Growth: A Journey of Self-Discovery

The beauty of shared moments.

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A Life Worth Ending

On the way to visit my mother one recent rainy afternoon, I stopped in, after quite some constant prodding, to see my insurance salesman. He was pressing his efforts to sell me a long-term-care policy with a pitch about how much I’d save if I bought it now, before the rates were set to precipitously rise. For $5,000 per year, I’d receive, when I needed it, a daily sum to cover my future nursing costs. With an annual inflation adjustment of 5 percent, I could get in my dotage (or the people caring for me would get) as much as $900 a day. My mother carries such a policy, and it pays, in 2012 dollars, $180 a day—a fair idea of where heath-care costs are going.

I am, as my insurance man pointed out, a “sweet spot” candidate. Not only do I have the cash (though not enough to self-finance my decline) but a realistic view: Like so many people in our fifties—in my experience almost everybody—I have a parent in an advanced stage of terminal breakdown.

It’s what my peers talk about: our parents’ horror show. From the outside—at the office, restaurants, cocktail parties—we all seem perfectly secure and substantial. But in a room somewhere, hidden from view, we occupy this other, unimaginable life.

I didn’t need to be schooled in the realities of long-term care: The costs for my mother, who is 86 and who, for the past eighteen months, has not been able to walk, talk, or to address her most minimal needs and, to boot, is absent a short-term memory, come in at about $17,000 a month. And while her LTC insurance hardly covers all of that, I’m certainly grateful she had the foresight to carry such a policy. (Although John Hancock, the carrier, has never paid on time, and all payments involve hours of being on hold with its invariably unhelpful help-line operators—and please fax them, don’t e-mail.) My three children deserve as much.

And yet, on the verge of writing the check (that is, the first LTC check), I backed up.

We make certain assumptions about the necessity of care. It’s an individual and, depending on where you stand in the great health-care debate, a national responsibility. It is what’s demanded of us, this extraordinary effort. For my mother, my siblings and I do what we are supposed to do. My children, I don’t doubt, will do the same.

And yet, I will tell you, what I feel most intensely when I sit by my mother’s bed is a crushing sense of guilt for keeping her alive. Who can accept such suffering—who can so conscientiously facilitate it?

“Why do we want to cure cancer? Why do we want everybody to stop smoking? For this?” wailed a friend of mine with two long-ailing and yet tenacious in-laws.

In 1990, there were slightly more than 3 million Americans over the age of 85. Now there are almost 6 million. By 2050 there will be 19 million—approaching 5 percent of the population. There are various ways to look at this. If you are responsible for governmental budgets, it’s a knotty policy issue. If you are in marketing, it suggests new opportunities (and not just Depends). If you are my age, it seems amazingly optimistic. Age is one of the great modern adventures, a technological marvel—we’re given several more youthful-ish decades if we take care of ourselves. Almost nobody, at least openly, sees this for its ultimate, dismaying, unintended consequence: By promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death, we have created a new biological status held by an ever-growing part of the nation, a no-exit state that persists longer and longer, one that is nearly as remote from life as death, but which, unlike death, requires vast service, indentured servitude really, and resources.

This is not anomalous; this is the norm.

The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying in one’s sleep, of unreasonably dropping dead in the street, of even a terminal illness, are now exotic ways of going. The longer you live the longer it will take to die. The better you have lived the worse you may die. The healthier you are—through careful diet, diligent exercise, and attentive medical scrutiny—the harder it is to die. Part of the advance in life expectancy is that we have technologically inhibited the ultimate event. We have fought natural causes to almost a draw. If you eliminate smokers, drinkers, other substance abusers, the obese, and the fatally ill, you are left with a rapidly growing demographic segment peculiarly resistant to death’s appointment—though far, far, far from healthy.

Sometimes we comb my mother’s hair in silly dos, or photograph her in funny hats—a gallows but helpful humor: Contrary to the comedian’s maxim, comedy is easy, dying hard. Better plan on two years minimum, my insurance agent says, of this stub period of life—and possibly much more.

Mike Wallace, that indefatigable network newsman, died last month in a burst of stories about his accomplishments and character. I focused, though, on a lesser element in the Times ’ obituary, that traditional wave-away line: “He had been ill for several years.”

“What does that mean?” I tweeted the young reporter whose byline was on the obit. Someone else responded that it meant Wallace was old. Duh! But then I was pointed to a Washington Post story mentioning dementia. The Times shortly provided an update: Wallace had had bypass surgery four years ago and had been at a facility in Connecticut ever since.

This is not just a drawn-out, stoic, and heroic long good-bye. This is human carnage. Seventy percent of those older than 80 have a chronic disability, according to one study; 53 percent in this group have at least one severe disability; and 36 percent have moderate to severe cognitive impairments; you definitely don’t want to know what’s considered to be a moderate impairment.

From a young and healthy perspective, we tend to look at dementia as merely Alzheimer’s—a cancerlike bullet, an unfortunate genetic fate, which, with luck, we’ll avoid. In fact, Alzheimer’s is just one form—not, as it happens, my mother’s—of the ever-more-encompassing conditions of cognitive collapse that are the partners and the price of longevity.

There are now more than 5 million demented Americans. By 2050, upward of 15 million of us will have lost our minds.

Speaking of price: This year, the costs of dementia care will be $200 billion. By 2050, $1 trillion.

Make no mistake, the purpose of long-term-care insurance is to help finance some of the greatest misery and suffering human beings have yet devised.

I hesitate to give my mother a personality here. It is the argument I have with myself everyday—she is not who she was; do not force her to endure because of what she once was. Do not sentimentalize. And yet … that’s the bind: She remains my mother.

She graduated from high school in 1942 and went to work for the Paterson Evening News, a daily newspaper in New Jersey. In a newsroom with many of its men off to war, Marguerite Vander Werf—nicknamed “Van” in the newsroom and forevermore—shortly became the paper’s military reporter. Her job was to keep track of the local casualties. At 18, a lanky 95 pounds in bobby socks, my mother would often show up at a soldier’s parent’s front door before the War Department’s telegraph and have to tell these souls their son was dead. Many decades later, she would still go pensive at this memory. She married my father, Lew Wolff, an adman, and left the paper after eleven years to have me—then my sister, Nancy, and brother, David. She did freelance journalism and part-time PR work (publicity, it was called then). She was a restless and compelling personality who became a civic power in our town, elected to the board of education and taking charge of the public library, organizing and raising the money for its new building and expansion. She was the Pied Piper, the charismatic mom, a talker of great wit and passion—holding the attention of children and dinner-party drunks alike.

My father, whose ad agency had wide swings of fortune, died, suddenly, in that old-fashioned way, of a heart attack at 63, during one of the downswings. My mother was 58—the age I am now—and left with small resources. She applied her charm and guile to a breathtaking reinvention and personal economic revival, becoming a marketing executive at first one and then another pharmaceutical company. At 72, headed to retirement but still restless, she capped off her career as the marketing head of an online-game company.

For 25 years, she lived in an apartment building in Ridgewood, New Jersey, in a sitcom mode of sociability and gossip. Once a week, every week, she drove into Manhattan to cook dinner for my family and help my three children with their homework—I am not sure how I would have managed my life and raised children without her.

This is the woman, or what is left of this woman, who now resides in a studio apartment in one of those new boxy buildings that dot the Upper West Side—a kind of pre-coffin, if you will. It is even, thanks to my sister’s diligence, my mother’s LTC insurance and savings, and the contributions of my two siblings and me, what we might think of as an ideal place to be in her condition. It is a spacious room with a large picture window that, from the ninth floor and my mother’s bed, has an uninterrupted view across town. The light pours in. The weather performs. The seasons change. A painting from 1960 by March Avery, from the collection she and my father assembled—an Adirondack chair facing a blue sea—hangs in front of her. Below the painting is the flat-screen TV where she watches cooking shows with a strange intensity. She is attended 24/7 by two daily shifts of devoted caregivers.

It is peaceful and serene.

Except for my mother’s disquiet. She stares in mute reprimand. Her bewilderment and resignation somehow don’t mitigate her anger. She often tries to talk—desperate guttural pleas. She strains for cognition and, shockingly, sometimes bursts forward, reaching it—“Nice suit,” she said to me, out of the blue, a few months ago—before falling back.

That is the thing that you begin to terrifyingly appreciate: Dementia is not absence; it is not a nonstate; it actually could be a condition of more rather than less feeling, one that, with its lack of clarity and logic, must be a kind of constant nightmare.

“Old age,” says one of Philip Roth’s protagonists, “isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre.” I’d add, it’s a holocaust. Circumstances have conspired to rob the human person—a mass of humanity—of all hope and dignity and comfort.

When my mother’s diaper is changed she makes noises of harrowing despair—for a time, before she lost all language, you could if you concentrated make out what she was saying, repeated over and over and over again: “It’s a violation. It’s a violation. It’s a violation.”

The numbing thing is that you see this all coming—you see it, but purposely and stubbornly don’t see it.

As it started with my mother, it was already advanced for a college friend and close colleague. As an only child, he had less room to hide. I looked on with mild concern at his helplessness. I kept thinking my situation could never get as bad as his—he spoke actually, not comically, of murder. But we all catch up with each other. All train wrecks occur on a time line.

For my mother, it began with her feet. Her complaint, which no doctor could put a useful name to or offer much respite from, was that she felt the skin on her feet was too tight. One evening, almost three years ago, getting into the shower, she caught her lagging foot on the rail of the shower door and went down into the tub. She lay there, shivering in the tepid water until morning, when her neighbor became alarmed. There is a precept here, which no doctor quite spells out: Once it has begun, it has begun; decline follows decline; incident precedes incident. Here’s the medical language: “A decrement in capacity occurs.”

But we’ll cope, of course. My mother’s shower was equipped with special chairs (the furniture of aging is its own horrid story), grab-bars and easy-reach phones installed and I-can’t-get-up beepers subscribed to. She actually learned how to fall (not falling not being an option). At the least sign of a tumble, she would sink almost elegantly to the ground, and then, not being able to get up, she’d beep the police, the affable police, who would come and hoist her to her feet, whereupon she’d fix them coffee and all would be sort of well.

And then a holiday—those unfailing barometers of family health. Thanksgiving 2009 was already a weird one. My wife and I had split earlier in the year. The woman I was seeing—and had moved in with—was coming. My children were boycotting. It was my mother who was trying to be the strong and constant pillar. She insisted she could do the job. Her neighbor—a man who had been squiring her around for many years—would load the turkey, too heavy for my mother to lift, into the oven. My sister and I would arrive before the handful of other guests to do the finishes. All was in order when we got there—the potatoes boiled and ready to be mashed in one pot, the carrots roasted, the onion custard baked—all in order except that my mother had done these preparations a week before. Every pot yielded an alarming odor. What was worse was her lack of comprehension—and lack of alarm.

Plans, obviously, had to begin in earnest. Her three children—my sister and I in New York, my brother, a software consultant, in Maui—conferred. An independent life goes into receivership—and you think, How did we miss all the failing indicators? My mother, like a rogue accountant, had been hiding much of the evidence: She could no longer tell time, nor count, nor keep track of dates.

Anyway, this is what assisted living is for, no?

We would move her to Manhattan, and, we managed to convince her and ourselves, she’d begin a great new adventure.

She was game—and relieved. The place, the Atria on West 86th Street, was just a few blocks from where my sister, an artist, lives and works. A national chain of residences for the elderly, the Atria is more a real-estate business than a health-care enterprise, providing, at hefty cost—the apartments are in the $8,000-a-month range—quite a pleasant one-bedroom apartment in a prewar building, full of amenities (terraces and hairdressers) and gradations of assistance. But it is important to understand—and there is no reason why one would—that assistance in an assisted-living facility, even as you increase it and pay more for it, is really not much more than kind words and attendance, opened doors, a bit of laundry, and your medications delivered to you. If there is a need for real assistance of almost any kind that involves any sort of calibration of concern, of dealing with the real complications and existential issues of aging people, then 911 is invariably called. This is quite a brilliant business model: All responsibility and liability is posthaste shifted to public emergency services and the health-care system.

The rate of hospitalization for all other age groups is declining or holding steady, but for people over 65 it’s skyrocketed. The elderly use 50 percent of all hospital days, according to one study. Emergency rooms, the last stop for gangbangers and the rootless, at least in the television version, are really the land of the elderly, and their first step into the hospital system—where, as Medscape matter-of-factly explains, the “inability to recognize normal aging changes … raises the chances of iatrogenic illness.” Iatrogenic illnesses being the ones caused by hospitals or doctors.

My mother went to the Atria’s after-dinner movie— The African Queen, as I recall—one evening in May and then told someone she was short of breath. My sister got to the emergency room first—St. Luke’s Roosevelt—and called me to say I ought to come.

Everybody would manage his or her parent’s decline differently. Nobody is proud of himself. We all mess it up. This is partly because there is no good outcome. And it is partly because modern medicine is a random process without a real point of view and without anyone ultimately being in charge. The buck is relentlessly passed. Down this rabbit hole, we all become ineffective and pitiful.

My mother’s cardiologist, Dr. Barbara Lipton, a peppy younger woman who, annoyingly, called my mom “Mom,” had been for many years monitoring her for a condition called aortic stenosis—a narrowing of the aortic valve. The advice was do nothing until something had to be done. If it ever had to be done.

This was good advice insofar as she had lived with this condition uneventfully for fifteen years. But now that she was showing symptoms that might suddenly kill her, why not operate and reach for another few good years? What’s to lose? That was the sudden reasoning and scenario.

My siblings and I must take the blame here. It did not once occur to us to say: “You want to do major heart surgery on an 84-year-old woman showing progressive signs of dementia? What are you, nuts?”

This is not quite true: My brother expressed doubts, but since he was off in Maui, and therefore unable to appreciate the reality of, well, the reality of being near, we discounted his view. And my mother protested. Her wishes have always been properly expressed, volubly and in writing: She urgently did not want to end up where she ultimately has ended up. She had enough sense left to resist—sitting in the hospital writing panicky, beseeching, Herzog-like notes, to anyone who might listen—but of course who listens to a woman who scribbles such notes?

The truth is you’re so relieved that someone else has a plan, and that the professionals with the plan seem matter-of-fact and unconcerned, that you disregard even obvious fallacies of logic: that the choice is between life as it was before the operation and death, instead of between life after the operation and death.

Here’s what the surgeon said, defending himself, in perfect Catch-22-ese, against the recriminations that followed the stark and dramatic postoperative decline in my mother’s “quality-of-life baseline”: “I visited your mom before the procedure and fully informed her of the risks of such a surgery to someone showing signs of dementia.”

You fully informed my demented mom?

The operation absolutely repaired my mother’s heart—“She can live for years,” according to the surgeon (who we were never to see again)—but left us longing for her level of muddle before the valve job. Where before she had been gently sinking, now we were in free fall.

She was reduced to a terrified creature—losing language skills by the minute. “She certainly appears agitated,” the psychiatrist sent to administer anti-psychotic drugs told me, “and so do you.”

Six weeks and something like $250,000 in hospital bills later (paid by Medicare—or, that is, by you), she was returned, a shadow being, to 86th Street and her assisted-living apartment.

Unmoored in time, she began to wander the halls and was returned on regular occasions to the emergency room: Each return, each ambulance, each set of restraints, each catheter, dealt her another psychic blow.

And then we were evicted. I had been pleasantly surprised when my mother moved in that only a month-to-month lease was required. Now I learned why. Dying is a series of stops, of way stations, of signposts. Home. Assisted living. Nursing care. Hospice. You are always moving on.

But before we were evicted, there was another Thanksgiving—this one at my house, my mother collected and transported, my children reassembled—and then the next day, the “event.” The big one.

We had reached, I gratefully believed, her end.

EMS arrived, and once more, we were back in the St. Luke’s emergency cubicles. My mother’s “presentation” could not have seemed bleaker. The young resident was clearly appalled that we might have strayed outside the time frame for administering the drug that could slow the effects of what surely seemed to be a stroke. Of course, they were yet game to try. But we held our ground: We elected to do nothing here (prompting much renewed scrutiny of the health-care proxy). And please note the DNR. Hours passed. I left and came back. My sister left and came back. One of my mother’s aides left and came back.

And then those words, which turn out, in some instances, not to be a relief at all: “She seems to be out of the woods.”

She had not had a stroke. She’d had a massive seizure. The differences between which being not exactly clear. And, if she had more seizures, which she likely would, this would kill her, an explanation and urgency that somehow resulted—“Did you agree to this?” I said to my sister. “I don’t think I did, did you?” “I don’t think so”—in my mother getting vast amounts of anti-seizure drugs, as well as being moved, once again, into more or less long-term hospital residence.

Coherence was completely gone. All that was left was a jumble of words and incredible anger.

Oh, yes, and here was the thing: The anti-seizure drugs were preventing further devastating and probably lethal seizures but, in themselves, were frying her brain even more.

And too, within a few weeks of lying in bed and resisting this final cataclysm, what abilities she had to walk, what slow and shambling remnant of walking, were gone.

This is where we were: immobile and incoherent. And filled with rage.

And so the first effort to directly talk about the elephant.

It happened in an interior room at the hospital, too small for much, and filled with cast-off furniture, into which fit her doctor, her neurologist, her social worker, and my sister and me. It seemed like the adult thing for us to do, to face up to where we were, and to not make these people have to tiptoe around the obvious.

I thanked everybody for what they had done, and then said reasonably: “How do we get from here … to there?”

An awkward number of beats.

NEUROLOGIST (shifting in his chair): “I think we want to define here and there ”—and tossing to the doctor.

DOCTOR: “Your mom is quite agitated. So we don’t really know what her less-agitated state will be.”

MY SISTER: “What are the chances that she will come back to anything like where she was before the seizure?”

SOCIAL WORKER: “We always have to deal with a variety of possible outcomes.”

ME: “Maybe you could outline the steps you think we might take.”

DOCTOR: “Wait and see.”

NEUROLOGIST: “Monitor.”

DOCTOR: “Change the drugs we’re using.”

MY SISTER: “Can we at least try to get a physical therapist, someone who can work her legs, at least. I mean … if she does improve, she’s left without being able to walk.”

NEUROLOGIST: “They’ll have to see if she’s a candidate.”

ME: “So … okay … where can you reasonably see this ending up?”

NEUROLOGIST: “We can help you look at the options.”

ME: “The options?”

SOCIAL WORKER (to my sister): “Where she might live. We can go over several possibilities.”

ME: “Live?”

It was my Maui brother who, with marked impatience, suggested that I obviously had no idea how the real world works. Such a conversation, treading on legal fine lines and professional practices, must be conducted in a strict code—keep saying, he advised, “quality of life.”

A week later, same uncomfortable room:

ME: “Obviously we are concerned on a quality-of-life basis.”

my sister: “She is completely transformed. Nothing is as it was. She’s suffering so much.”

DOCTOR: “The baseline has clearly dropped.”

NEUROLOGIST: “The risk is that the levels of medication that the agitation might respond to could depress her breathing.”

ME: “Again, this is a quality-of-life issue, right?”

DOCTOR: “Of course.”

ME: “The agitation seems extreme enough to warrant I would think going some distance, considering the quality-of-life issues. Even if that—”

NEUROLOGIST: “I’m not sure I’d be comfortable …”

ME (with a sudden brainstorm): “Or what happens if you just discontinue the drugs? Just cut them out.”

NEUROLOGIST: “Cold turkey could precipitate a massive seizure.”

ME: “And death?”

NEUROLOGIST: “And death. Possibly. Yes.”

ME: “Is this an option?”

NEUROLOGIST: “You have to make that decision. We can’t force her to take medication.”

Discontinuing the medication felt like both a solemn and giddy occasion. A week passed, and then the doctors began to report in a chipper way that she was doing well, all things considered. She had withstood the shock to the system. She was stable.

And then the social worker came around to say we were coming threateningly close to the maximum number of hospital days for which Medicare would pay. (We’d heaped another few hundred thousand in cost on the American taxpayer.)

“Now,” said my sister taking the straight-man role, “what do we do?”

My mother—infuriating us with her primal stubbornness—was transferred to the locked-floor dementia ward at the Atria facility in Riverdale, where the only caveat to patient behavior seemed to be a strict rule against hitting. Nine days later, after my mother socked a locked-floor aide, we were back in our room at St. Luke’s, where—because of her brief discharge, she could begin her Medicaid hospital-stay allotment from day one—she was happily received (for another couple of hundred grand).

What do you do with your mom when she can’t do anything—anything at all—for herself? This is not, first and foremost, about how you address her needs but about where you put her. No, it is first about who or what facility will take her.

No, it is first about what member of the family will actually sort through the incredibly byzantine and deadening options—or lack of options.

It is at this point that I became unreasonably mad at my Maui brother. In a way I understood the basis of his excuse: It was not a coincidence that he was living in Maui—his twenty years in paradise were in part an exercise of the modern right to distance himself from his family, a point which he was militantly maintaining now. He lived in Maui precisely to be far from all this. It was notable that among the people with whom I shared my tales-of-mother crisis, many, with far-flung ailing parents, identified themselves as the Maui brother. Of all things to escape, this might be the big one. And, too, in my Maui brother’s defense, all responsibility is relative: If he was doing less than I was doing, I was doing by a significant leap less than my sister was doing.

It is among the most reductive facts in this story: Women take care of the old. They can’t shake it because they are left with it. In the end, it is a game of musical chairs. The girl is the one almost invariably caught out.

My sister assembled the list of potential nursing homes, special elder-need facilities, and palliative-care centers in commutable distance. I grudgingly went along to the best after she’d eliminated the worst. Medicare grades each of these institutions on a five-star scale. Four stars were already charnel houses. One star therefore unimaginable. Just about the only five-star facilities in Manhattan are for HIV-positive patients.

Finely tuned into my mother’s profound fear of virtually all strange presences, touches, and noises, and yet her need for constant attention and reassurance, my sister found fault with every place. This might have finally annoyed me, except for the fact that each of these places wanted you to pay prodigiously for its depressing indifference, and, what’s more, many either excluded my mother’s condition or had waiting lists that would, it seemed reasonable to assume, outlast my mother.

Hospice was the best alternative. But while my mother was surely dying—with her doctors gladly willing to certify her in this regard—hospice, we so learned, was not for the certainly dying but the promptly dying.

Curiously, and unhelpfully, it was at this time that one of the neurologists making occasional visits took it upon himself to reevaluate my mother, declaring that her diagnosis was wrong. She did not have Alzheimer’s, as everyone seemed to assume. She had dementia, surely, but it was not going, and would not follow, the pattern of Alzheimer’s. She would not disappear; she would maintain some awareness and consciousness of her surroundings, he said, as though this were good news.

It was Marion, my mother’s aide, a woman of remarkable humor and constancy, who had shown up one day, sent by a random agency—and who has now been with my mother every day for almost eighteen months, not a day missed—who suggested just “bringing her home.” The best Manhattan approximation of “home” when there is no family homestead seemed to be the studio apartment where she is now, a short walk from my sister’s house.

My brother could only see this as a quagmire of cost and responsibility. My sister assured him, as the doctors were assuring us, that six months was a realistic outside framework. My brother did his own Google search. “Yes, yes, they’re right, six months at this stage is what you can expect. But you know what they die from? They die from neglect! Neglect ! There’s no neglect here! It’s unnatural!”

I signed the lease.

“Who can believe it’s been a year?” said Marion when I signed the lease for another year a few weeks ago.

My sister comes over every morning. She brings the groceries, plans the menu, and has a daily routine for stretching my mother’s limbs (this in addition to the administration and paying of caregivers, and the collecting of monies from the always recalcitrant John Hancock). I’m here a few times a week (for exactly 30 minutes—no more, no less). Her grandchildren, with an unalloyed combination of devotion and horror, come on a diligent basis. And we have our family events: holiday meals eaten around her bed. Her 84-year-old brother and his wife visit regularly, and so does her 89-year-old cousin and her daughter. She even has one friend left who still calls her every day (all the other friends fell away a long time ago), conducting an extremely one-sided conversation over the speaker phone.

An occasional letter arrives from retired friends in sunny climes who have somehow missed or have been unwilling to register my mother’s condition. They take up in mid-conversation, proposing lunch the next time they are in the area, and recounting details of lives still going on. They continue to regard my mother as a woman who chats, cooks, reads, gossips, and commands attention. Always, suddenly, shatteringly, reading these letters, I see her this way too.

The absurdity of where we are, here on death row, measured not just in our heartache but nationally in hundreds of billions of dollars, can only be missed by the people who have no experience with the true nature and far-flung extremes of quality of life.

A few weeks ago, my sister and I called a meeting with my mother’s doctor. As others had fallen to the wayside, the head of gerontology at St. Luke’s, Dr. Brenda Matti-Orozco, a patient, long-suffering woman had stepped up to this job.

The doctor eased into our meeting with tales of health-care-administration woes, of cuts in Medicaid, of fewer beds in fewer facilities around town—did we know, she asked, that Cabrini had closed? Some people, she said, just upped and left their old relatives in the hospital. So much for the small talk.

“It’s been a year,” I began, groping for what needed to be said: Let’s do this, close it down, end it, wanting to murder the euphemisms as much as my mom. “We’ve seen a series of incremental but marked declines.”

My sister chimed in with some vivid details.

The doctor seemed at first alarmed that we might be trying to foist my mother back on her and the hospital and relieved when we said, frankly, we planned never to return to a hospital. We just wanted to help her go where she’s going. (Was that too much? Was that too specific?)

She does seem, the doctor allowed, to have entered another stage. (These half-life stages of death, such that you never reach it.)

“Perhaps more palliative care. This can ease her suffering, but the side effect can be to depress her functions. But maybe it is time to err on the side of ease.”

Another advance of sorts in our grim descent: Over uncertain weeks or months, her functions will depress even further in this ultimate, excruciating winding down.

“Your mom, like a lot of people, is what we call a dwindler,” said the doctor.

I do not know how death panels ever got such a bad name. Perhaps they should have been called deliverance panels. What I would not do for a fair-minded body to whom I might plead for my mother’s end.

The alternative is nuts: to look forward to paying trillions and to bankrupting the nation as well as our souls as we endure the suffering of our parents and our inability to help them get where they’re going. The single greatest pressure on health care is the disproportionate resources devoted to the elderly, to not just the old, but to the old old, and yet no one says what all old children of old parents know: This is not just wrongheaded but steals the life from everyone involved.

And it seems all the more savage because there is such a simple fix: Give us the right to make provisions for when we want to go. Give families the ability to make a fair case of enough being enough, of the end’s, de facto, having come.

Not long after visiting my insurance man those few weeks ago, I sent an “eyes wide open” e-mail to my children, all in their twenties, saying this was a decision, to buy long-term-care insurance or not, they should be in on: When push came to shove, my care would be their logistical and financial problem; they needed to think about what they wanted me to do and, too, what I wanted them to do. But none of them responded—I suppose it was that kind of e-mail.

Anyway, after due consideration, I decided on my own that I plainly would never want what LTC insurance buys, and, too, that this would be a bad deal. My bet is that, even in America, even as screwed up as our health care is, we baby-boomers watching our parents’ long and agonizing deaths won’t do this to ourselves. We will surely, we must surely, find a better, cheaper, quicker, kinder way out.

Meanwhile, since, like my mother, I can’t count on someone putting a pillow over my head, I’ll be trying to work out the timing and details of a do-it-yourself exit strategy. As should we all.

Late 1940s.

Early 1960s.

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The cost of law school

Potential career paths and salaries, personal factors to consider, is law school worth it an honest look at the pros and cons.

Affiliate links for the products on this page are from partners that compensate us (see our advertiser disclosure with our list of partners for more details). However, our opinions are our own. See how we rate student loans to write unbiased product reviews.

Many law school students borrow heavily to cover high tuition and other education costs.
For some, the cost may be worth it, though it depends on the school and the career pursued after.
Potential post-law school earnings vary widely by specialty, firm size, location, and other factors.

It's no secret that law school can be pricey. But is that price tag worth it for the earning potential you could enjoy later on? That's a question many potential law school students have to ask themselves.

According to the Access Lex Institute and a US Department of Education study of 2008 graduates, only 48% say their degree was worth the cost. Are you considering a legal career? Here's how to determine if law school is worth it for you.

Tuition and fees

Average full-time tuition for law school depends on your residency status (whether you're attending an in-state school or out-of-state one), as well as the type of school you attend.

According to data and analysis from the American Bar Association and Access Lex, the average full-time tuition is:

$28,400 for residents at public law schools
$40,860 for non-residents at public law schools
$50,770 for private law schools

That's just tuition, though.

Living expenses

There are other costs to consider, too, including housing and living expenses. These vary widely by location. From fall 2022 to spring 2023, they ranged from $12,600 to $46,233, depending on the school attended.

Opportunity cost

Opportunity cost is another consideration. Since law students must spend an additional three years in school, their earning potential during that period is much lower than their peers. The average starting salary in 2022 for a graduate with a bachelor's degree was $60,028, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. That amounts to a three-year loss exceeding $180,000 for a law school student.

Loan repayment

With such high prices to deal with, law school students often graduate with large amounts of debt. According to an Access Lex analysis, law school graduates leave school with an average of $126,600 in debt.

The earning potential for a lawyer depends widely on what you do with your degree. For recent Juris Doctorate graduates, those going into private legal practice made the most, with a median salary of $131,500. Lawyers who went into academics made the least money. The median academic salary for someone with a Juris Doctorate is $38,000.

Salaries also vary by type of legal practice. See below for a list of common attorney specialties and their average salary ranges, according to job platform Indeed:


Patent law	$143,492
Corporate law	$137,364
Tax law	$134,322
Family law	$128,809
Bankruptcy law	$125,048
Intellectual property law	$119,583
Real estate law	$105,938
Civil litigation	$101,177
Personal injury law	$89,686
Employment law	$83,580
Immigration law	$67,296

The amount of time you've been working and the size of your firm matter, too. Salaries tend to increase both with tenure and with firm size. For example, a first-year associate at a firm of 100 or fewer has a median salary of $155,000. For eight-year associates at firms of 1,000 or more, it's $395,000.

"Big corporate law firms pay the most — well in the six digits, with excellent benefits," says Marina Shepelsky, founder of Shepelsky Law Group . "Working for a municipal legal aide organization or the district attorney's office may pay only in the five digits."

Alternative careers

Many lawyers don't go into legal practice at all. Recent data shows about a third of recent law school graduates went into business, academics, or government work.

Job market outlook

If you'll need student loans, calculating your potential salary-to-debt ratio can help you determine whether law school in general or, more specifically, a particular law school, is worth the cost of attendance.

Salary-to-debt ratios indicate what percentage of your expected monthly earnings you'll owe each month in student loan payments. So, lower ratios are typically better, indicating you'll need to devote a smaller amount of your pay to student loans. Higher ratios mean the opposite.

According to an analysis by Law School Transparency, salary-to-debt ratios range from 0.76% to just over 4.95% for US law schools. The school with the highest salary-to-debt ratio is the Florida Coastal School of Law, while Brigham Young University claims the lowest.

The decision to attend law school shouldn't just be financially driven. You'll also want to consider the high dropout rates of law school, particularly among minorities. Overall, dropout rates are over 6% for first-year students. For American Indian, Hawaiian native, and Black students, the dropout rate is 11% to 13%.

Burnout is also a potential problem when going into the legal industry. Some legal jobs come with long hours and stressful working conditions, which could lead to health issues. As Shepelsky notes about "big corporate" firms, "They provide no work-life balance, and you are expected to work 14 hours a day or more, work through holidays and evenings, and are under tremendous stress and huge competition to make partner."

According to the International Bar Association, lawyers have an average score of 51 on the World Health Organization's Wellbeing Index. Anyone with a score of 52 or under is encouraged to seek mental health help.

The job market is competitive, but strong grades, networking, and specialized skills can help make the job search easier.

The average lawyer salary varies widely by location, firm size, and specialty. According to Indeed.com , the average salary for a lawyer in New York City is $132,066, while the average salary for a lawyer in Oklahoma City is $84,194.

The skills learned can be valuable in other careers. If you can afford it and have an interest in studying law, it could be worth it.

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William E. Burrows, Historian of the Space Age, Is Dead at 87

In books and articles he wrote about the militarization of space and believed that investing in exploration would ultimately “protect Earth and guarantee the survival of humanity.”

A man smiles in a black-and-white portrait as he rests his chin in his palm, holding a pair of reading glasses.

By Sam Roberts

William E. Burrows, who as a journalist and author explored the promise and perils posed by outer space — including the proliferation of weapons and spy satellites and the threat of potentially earth-shattering asteroids — died on June 29 in Bridgeport, Conn. He was 87.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his former wife, Joelle Hodgson, who said the cause was kidney failure.

Presaging his career by crash-landing model airplanes in his family’s living room in Queens, near Idlewild Airport (now Kennedy International Airport), and surreptitiously taking flying lessons in a Piper Cub as a teenager, Mr. Burrows covered air travel, space technology, government secrecy and other subjects for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

He wrote 14 books and established a graduate program in science writing at New York University, where he taught journalism.

Given the growing militarization of space and the challenges posed by environmental hazards and by weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Burrows believed that investing in space exploration was crucial, if for no other reason than to potentially save the human race one day by colonizing other planets.

“The question to ask is whether the risk of traveling to space is worth the benefit,” he wrote in The Journal in 2003. “The answer is an unequivocal yes, but not only for the reasons that are usually touted by the space community: the need to explore, the scientific return, and the possibility of commercial profit.

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COMMENTS

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