Conclusion
If you want to reduce my book to a slogan, it could be this: The meaning of life is love, work, and
play. A more nuanced summary would be better: People's lives have meaning to the extent that love,
work, and play provide coherent and valuable goals that they can strive for and at least partially
accomplish, yielding brain-based emotional consciousness of satisfaction and happiness.
I have tried to develop a naturalistic theory of the meaning of life, as constituted largely by love,
work, and play. Each of these provides rewarding goals, which are brain representations of possible
states of affairs imbued with emotional significance through a mixture of neural activities.
Observations of the pursuits and happiness of most people provide good reason to reject nihilism, the
view that life is meaningless or absurd. There is more to meaning than happiness, which is the result
of satisfaction of more basic goals whose pursuit and accomplishment enable human lives to flourish.
The meaning of life is multidimensional, requiring the combination and integration of various kinds of
goals, the most of important of which concern love, work, and play. Support for the importance of
these realms comes from psychological and sociological evidence about their contributions to human
well-being, and also from emerging neurological understanding of how they operate in our brains.
Successful pursuit of such goals undercuts Woody Allen's gloomy remark that life is full of misery,
loneliness, and suffering—and it's all over much too soon. One philosopher has even advocated the
dismal view that universally it is better never to have been born, on the grounds that coming into
existence is always a serious harm. Although all lives involve some pain, pain is not unconditionally
bad, as there are many cases—surgery, for instance—where it is part of a process that is good
overall. Love, work, and even play can all make us vulnerable to pain, but their pursuit and recurring
benefits ensure that life is better than nonexistence for most people. Other goals, such as beauty,
power, and social harmony, are part of the human condition; but these seem to me subordinate to play,
work, and love, respectively.
The neurological basis for romantic love is becoming particularly well understood, but we must
extrapolate to other aspects of love, such as parenting, friendship, and general compassion. Work can
also be a source of well-being, through satisfaction of goals that include money, social approval, and
intrinsic problem solving efficacy. Play might seem too trivial to be a component of the meaning of
life, but it is something that frequently occupies adults as well as children, and neuroscience is
starting to provide insights into how people enjoy such activities as music.
The major gap in this chapter concerns the normative status of claims about the meaning of life, but
these will have to wait for more discussion of ethical issues in the next two chapters. I hope,
however, to have provided some reasons for rejecting several inadequate approaches to a meaningful
life, including religion, nihilism, and slacker serenity. The realms of love, work, and play can
provide ample answers to the question of why life is worth living, but only if we have some grounds
for thinking that they furnish not merely goals that people do pursue, but also goals that people ought
to pursue. The next chapter argues that love, work, and play are normatively appropriate goals
because of their contributions to vital human needs.