What gives life meaning? (Continuing to address the Philosophical Questions List)

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

Here are the next two blurbs in the 20 questions list.? I am going to take them together because I am going to answer the first question No, and that puts a lot of pressure on the second.

Does life persist beyond death?

The concept of an afterlife carries spiritual and philosophical implications but lacks definitive answers that satisfy all inquiries. Many people believe in an afterlife, which is the idea that a person's consciousness or identity carries on even after their physical body has died.

What gives life meaning?

This timeless philosophical inquiry evokes a multitude of interpretations ranging from perspectives to those rooted in spirituality or personal fulfillment. Meaning, in life, as defined by researchers mentioned on this?Greater Good Magazine ?website, generally encompasses three aspects. Firstly, it involves the conviction that your existence and the things you do hold significance for both yourself and others. Secondly, it entails a sense of coherence, where your life feels meaningful and comprehensible. Lastly, it entails striving toward fulfilling objectives.?

Does life persist beyond death?

With respect to this question, I think reasonable people can choose to answer it either yes or no.? That said, the whole point of The Infinite Staircase is to build a secular narrative about how all this miraculous reality we are deeply immersed in came to be without divine intervention.? In that context, there is nothing that indicates that there is life after death.?

Instead, the most important thing to know about death is that it plays a crucial role in enabling life—specifically, the evolution of complex life.? Natural selection cannot proceed without the help of death.? That means, absent death, evolution would not occur.? You and I and everything we love and cherish simply would not exist.? At minimum, this should dissuade us from demonizing death.? Death is not evil; it is an enabler of all the emergent complexity we experience as life.?

That said, like all other living creatures, we are wired to resist death, and in that context, it is reasonable for us to fear it, both for ourselves and for our loved ones.? Timor mortis conturbat me was a constant refrain in medieval liturgy: “The fear of death disturbs me.”? In other words, we need to come to terms with death, and there is nothing to say that will be easy.? What it does entail, on the other hand, is answering the question in the second blurb.

What gives life meaning?

Before we take on this question, I think we should first ask who gives life meaning?? In a secular narrative, there is only one answer—we do.? There is simply no one else available.? We are the only species that cares about meaning or even has any idea of what meaning could be about.?

That we, on the other hand, can cover a lot of territory.? It obviously includes us individually, but just as obviously, it must include other people as well.? There is no such thing as a solitary individual that can learn language, build shelter, make clothing, find food, and develop tools all by themselves, not to mention how they would ever get an iPhone.? We evolved to be codependent social creatures, so the question is not whether we will associate with others, but rather, with whom and for what purposes.? This, as we shall see, impinges directly on what will give our life meaning.

The mechanism by which we give life meaning is story-telling.? All worldviews, religious and secular alike, are rooted in stories—stories about what is going on, how we got here, and what we ought to be doing now that we are.? These stories are artifacts of culture, created by other people, transmitted to us, giving us the option to take them up or pass them by, and if we do take them up, to modify them as we see fit.? Sooner or later we settle on a subset of these stories as representing what we think life is actually all about.? Living out these stories is what gives significance and coherence to our actions.? Violating them creates cognitive dissonance, a psychological reaction to the discomfort caused by behaving in ways that contradict what we believe, prompting us either to reform or to retreat into some form of denial.

How is it that stories can exert so much power over us?? When we hear a story, if it is well told and appeals to our interests, we imaginatively participate in it.? This participation is even more immediate if we are attending a performance, watching a film, or sitting down for a television show.? We come to such moments separate from the experience—we are here, the book or film or TV is there—but once we engage, we are transported to an imagined state where we let the story take control of our mind.? We become the hardware running its software, with our brains functioning much as they do in real-world experiences.? Indeed, these imagined experiences are real in their own right.? When we identify with the protagonist, we experience the events of the story as if we were that person. ?These experiences create real memories that, like viruses, insinuate themselves into our identity and replicate from there whenever we retell them.? That’s what makes them so powerful.

Now, to be fair, the kind of stories we have been talking about thus far have local effects.? When we leave the theater or put down the book, we step into another narrative, typically quite different from the one just experienced.? If life as a whole is to be made meaningful via a story, that story needs to be global, spanning all of our experience.? What kind of story would that be, and where could it come from?

Religions, of course, specialize in just this kind of global story.? Grounded in narratives of divinity, eternity, and creation, they are well-equipped to do so.? Secular narratives have a tougher row to hoe.? By definition our world is transient, and we especially so.? Where there is no permanence, where can we find meaning?

Given transience, our focus cannot be on everlasting.? It needs to be on coming to be.? Fortunately, that is what narratives specialize in, so we are on solid footing here.? The question is, what is something that we desire to come to be so much that we are willing to organize our whole life around it??

Children are the first thing that comes to mind.? They certainly do require their parents to organize their lives around them, especially when they are playing soccer on weekends.? And they don’t necessarily have to be our children to capture our hearts.? School teachers organize their careers around children, and aunts and uncles organize to support their nieces and nephews as well.? They are all engaged in what one might be summarized as “passing the torch,” the one we got from our parents and upbringing, the one that must not be dropped if the run is to continue.

All this feels worthy enough, but we may feel as if we are leaving our own selves too much out of the mix.? One way of bringing us back in is to reframe our lives around “climbing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.”? The idea here is to progress in life first by securing the basics of a healthy existence for ourselves, then move on to the realm of love and belonging that relationships and families can provide, then on to the domain of achievement and recognition often found in work or service of some sort, and finally to self-realization, the exercising of one’s full potential, or at least striving to do our best to do so.?

This is clearly a journey of becoming, but now it feels like we may be putting ourselves too much at the center of things, raising a couple of concerns.? The first is that we may not be having as much success in the journey as we had hoped for—we might be out of work, or in poor health, or in a negative relationship, or stuck in a job that does not fulfill us, and seeing no clear path to getting ourselves back on track.? At this point, we need the help of others, but that raises a second concern.? There is nothing in Maslow’s hierarchy that gives other people any reason to take a stake in our success.? It is too much about us; it does not include them.?

Both of these concerns can be addressed if we could find something outside ourselves that enlists and engages not only ourselves but members of our community as well.? Fortunately, there are any number of such opportunities, both local and global.?? Neighborhood projects, client engagements, scientific research, community service, support for the arts, animal welfare, global warming, gender equality, workforce reskilling, tour guidance, sports coaching, music making, communal cooking—as the song says, “Find your passion and make it happen.”

For meaning to arise from such activities, it must come from both the journey and the destination.? That is, you need to have fun while doing them, and you need to feel proud when goals are achieved.? Moreover, you need to feel good about the people you are engaging with.? That is getting your we right.? You need to operate within a community that shares your core values, the ones that brought you to the activity in the first place.?

In a secular worldview, participating in shared values is where meaning comes from.? It can lift you up in good times and pick you up in bad.? It is both a safety net and a trampoline.? To paraphrase Robert Frost’s last line from his poem “Birches,” one could do worse than be a sharer of values.

That’s what I think.? What do you think?

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