The Meaning of Life
Albert Camus did not kill himself. I started chapter 1 with his startling statement that suicide is a
philosophical problem, part of the question of why life is worth living. Camus wrote that statement in
his late twenties, but he never attempted suicide and died in his mid-forties when a car driven by a
friend crashed into a tree. His wife, however, did try to kill herself, suffering from depression caused
in part by his infidelities. Camus himself led a rich life, with a family that included two children,
strong friendships, affairs with young actresses, and great professional success as a novelist,
dramatist, and journalist. His youthful claims that life is absurd were contradicted by the many
sources of meaning in his life, from his activities in the French resistance against the Nazi occupation
to his abundant and successful writings.
Less famous people also find many kinds of meaning in their lives, through their families or
friends, workplace or hobbies, and enjoyable activities that range from playing sports to reading
books to listening to music. The meaning of life for human beings embraces love, work, and play.
Each of these needs to be construed broadly, so that love includes friendship and compassion for
others as well as romantic and family attachments. Work ranges from manual labor such as carpentry
to intellectual work such as writing a book. Play is not just children fooling around, but includes many
kinds of entertainment for adults such as music, reading, sports, and travel.
I will draw on the psychology and sociology of these activities, but also examine the emerging
understanding of how brain processes make love, work, and play sources of meaning. My descriptive
aim is to show that people seem to find meaning through such pursuits, but my normative aim is to
show that love, work, and play really do make life worth living. The normative leap to what ought to
be requires connecting these realms with people's vital needs, via an account of how brains work. I
will relate what is known about the neurophysiology of love, work, and play to the neural models of
emotions and goals presented earlier. A review and analysis of how brains function in love, work,
and play will tell us much about how and why people lead their lives, although the full normative
story about why these activities ought to matter to people will have to wait for the discussions of
needs and morals in chapters 8 and 9.
The study of brains does not tell us what to value, but it reveals how we value, as chapter 5
described. Neural activity that combines representation of situations and activities with embodied
appraisal of them attaches value to those situations and activities. Something matters to you if your
brain representation of it includes associations that generate positive emotions. I will discuss how an
aggregate of meaning can develop in a person's life through coherence of goals and actions.
I do not have an irresistible, a priori argument that the meaning of life is love, work, and play. My
defense of this claim relies on three kinds of reasoning. First, there are serious problems with
alternative answers, including the nihilistic one that life has no meaning, the theological one that
meaning is furnished by God or some other spiritual source, and the monolithic one that the meaning
of life is just happiness. Second, there is abundant psychological and sociological evidence that love,
work, and play are in fact sources of valued goals in people's lives. Third, there is emerging
neurological evidence that indicates how goals and needs related to love, work, and play operate as
part of human cognition and emotion to motivate human activities.