coming to terms with life
by Jason Smith

his is a story about the meaning of life. No, seriously. As serious as we can be, at least, considering that most philosophers decided a long time ago that they weren't going to think about the meaning of life anymore. They had distilled those nagging little questions — Why are we here? What should we be doing with ourselves? — down to one answer: it depends. Is there a God? Well, then maybe there's a meaning to life.No God? Then life has no meaning, only causes and effects. Later someone pointed out that hey, even if there is a God, there's no reason to think God's purpose should be ours — no reason, therefore, to think God's existence could explain the meaning of life and make our lives meaningful.

.: Susan Wolf. Photo by Jo Gravely; click to enlarge. :.

And the philosophers, for the most part, have left it at that. "They feel that questions about the meaning of life may be ridiculous, unanswerable, and maybe meaningless," says Susan Wolf, a professor of philosophy who works in moral theory and likes to apply philosophy to everyday life. "Most of them have moved on to talk about other things."

But where does that leave the rest of us? How can our individual lives have meaning if life as a whole doesn't necessarily have any? Can we talk about meaning in life without rehashing the meaning of life? And what does it mean to live a meaningful life? Wolf has some ideas.

It's not necessarily clear what we want when we want a meaningful life, Wolf says. When we think of our own lives, we're subjective. Your interpretation of a meaningful life is likely to be different from your neighbor's. What satisfies you emotionally? What's fulfilling?

Yet when we think of others whose lives seem meaningful to us — Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Beethoven, Tolstoy — we're not so subjective, Wolf says. And some people we know personally seem to live more meaningful lives than others.

So maybe we should start by thinking of lives that don't seem so meaningful.

o you know someone like The Blob? That's Wolf's name for a person who spends much of his life parked in front of the TV, drinking beer and watching sitcoms. Mind you, Wolf doesn't have anything against TV or beer. But The Blob is living in a kind of "hazy passivity," she says, in a life going nowhere and achieving nothing. If you're not doing anything, Wolf says, your life probably isn't very meaningful.

But activity in itself can't make a life meaningful. What about a life wholly occupied with activity that's silly or decadent? One of the idle rich, for example, who "moves from one amusement to the other" — shopping, eating at expensive restaurants, spending money to fight off boredom. And what about the corporate executive who works ninety-hour weeks just so he can make more money? If a life's dominant activity seems pointless, useless, or empty, that life can't be very meaningful, Wolf says.

So we're getting some clues about what a meaningful life should contain. Unlike The Blob, a person who lives a meaningful life must be actively engaged. And unlike the idle rich, a person can't be engaged in any old thing. A meaningful life must be actively engaged in something that has some positive value. (We'll come back to "positive" in a minute.)

Here's a third twist: one's activities should be successful, at least to some degree, Wolf says. Imagine a woman whose life is entirely centered around a relationship that turns out to be a fraud. Or a scientist whose life's work is rendered obsolete by a new invention shortly before she retires. Each of these women is likely to find her life meaningless, even if we don't think so. So let's amend our definition to take into account these feelings: a meaningful life is one that is actively and at least somewhat successfully engaged in a project (or projects) of positive value.

We need to give "projects" a broad definition, Wolf says. We need to include hobbies, careers, relationships, and what Wolf calls accomplishments: "the producing of a proof or a poem or a pudding, the organizing of a union or a high school band."

And what does it mean to be actively engaged in a project? It's not enough that a project keep us busy, Wolf says. We can't just go through the motions. One's heart must be in one's activities; one must identify with what one is doing. The project should engage the person, and the person, ideally, should embrace the project and point to it as being part of what her life is about.

So we're supposed to be engaged in projects of positive value. But who decides what positive value is?

.: Susan Wolf. Photo by Jo Gravely; click to enlarge. :.

et's define "positive" broadly too, Wolf says. But we need to exclude merely subjective value. That is, a meaningful life can't just seem to have a positive value for the one who lives it. Wolf asks us to imagine two people: one runs a home for battered women. The other dedicates himself to winning the world's record in long distance spitting. Each is equally engaged by what he is doing; each takes pride in it. Each thinks of himself, subjectively, as living a very meaningful life.

But what do we think about the lives of those two people? "If a friend was looking for ways to find meaning in her life, would we recommend that she see whether she has any talent for distance-spitting?" Wolf asks. "I don't think so, and my hypothesis is that we don't think the one activity is as objectively worthwhile as the others." So subjective value isn't good enough.

Instead, Wolf says, part of living a meaningful life is to care that what one does is at least somewhat objectively good. That doesn't necessarily mean morally good. A life can be very meaningful even if, on the whole, immoral. Wolf uses the painter Gauguin and the composer Tchaikovsky as examples of men who may have been morally unsavory, but still lived meaningful lives. On the other hand, living a morally good life won't necessarily get you a meaningful life.

Given that a meaningful life isn't necessarily good — or good for you — then is it good for people to want one? It's not a bad desire, Wolf says. There are no moral objections to a meaningful life, and it can contribute to well-being, so it seems okay that people want it.

But we have stronger feelings than that, Wolf says. We don't just feel that it's okay that other people look for meaning in their lives. We feel that other people should look for meaning, even if they don't realize they should.

next page: "get over it."

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