It is time to turn the pursuit of a meaningful life from a comedically-complex impossibility to something we can all comprehend, aim for and succeed at. Our lives almost certainly already have some hugely meaningful sides to them, but we may well not be correctly valuing, understanding or appreciating these. Increasing the amount of meaning in our lives doesn’t have to involve any radical outward moves. The options should provide orientation, enabling us to find our own preferences or – when we dissent – to design alternatives.Īlong the way, we hope to underscore that our lives are more meaningful – and certainly more capable of meaning – than we might initially have supposed. Most are well-known the point isn’t to identify entirely new sources of meaning so much as to try to evoke and explain some familiar choices. It is anchored around a discussion of eight centrally meaningful activities: love, family, work, friendship, culture, politics, nature and philosophy.
This book considers a range of options for where meaning might lie for us. We can be relatively far into our lives before we securely identify what lends them their meaning. Whereas pleasure manifests itself immediately, our taste in meaning may be more elusive. – We have to work out, by a process of experience and introspection, what counts as meaningful in our eyes. What we call ‘crises of meaning’ are generally moments when someone else’s – perhaps very well intentioned – interpretation of what might be meaningful to us runs up against a growing realisation of our divergent tastes and interests. Others cannot be relied upon to determine what will be meaningful to us. – The question of what makes life meaningful has to be answered personally (even if our conclusions are marked by no particular idiosyncrasy). They are those we most highly value and will, from the perspective of our deaths, regret most deeply. – Meaningful activities aren’t necessarily those we do most often. Meaningful activities leave something behind, even when the emotions that once propelled us into them have passed. Projects, relationships, interests and commitments will build up cumulatively. – A meaningful life is bound up with the long-term. We may be leading a meaningful life and yet, really rather often, be in a bad mood (just as we may be having frequent surface fun while living, for the most part, meaninglessly). – A meaningful life aims not so much at day-to-day contentment as fulfilment. – A meaningful life draws upon, and exercises, a range of our higher capacities, for example, those bound up with tenderness, care, connection, self-understanding, sympathy, intelligence and creativity. This is a guidebook to it.Ī meaningful life is close to, but at points importantly different from, a happy life.
A meaningful life can be simple in structure, personal, usable, attractive and familiar. There need be nothing forbidding about the issue. Yet, in truth, the subject is for everyone it is for all of us to wonder about, and define, a meaningful existence. Without always acknowledging it, we are – in the background – operating with a remarkably ungenerous perspective on the meaning of life.
It wouldn’t be anything that could orient or illuminate our activities. If ever we did discover the meaning, it would – we suspect – in any case be incomprehensible, perhaps written in Latin or in computer code. Meaningful lives are for extraordinary people: great saints, artists, scholars, scientists, doctors, activists, explorers, national leaders…. A select few might be equipped to take on the task and discover the answer in their own lives, but such ambition isn’t for most of us.
It isn’t anything an ordinary mortal should be doing – or would get very far by doing. To wonder too openly, or intensely, about the meaning of life sounds like a peculiar, ill-fated and unintentionally comedic pastime.
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