Why life is worth living is indeed an urgent question, but it is rarely the question of suicide. The
question of why you don't kill yourself arises only if you think that there are reasons why you would
kill yourself, and people's lives are rarely so miserable that such reasons become prominent. If
depression, disease, and despair were the overwhelming character of everyday life, then people
would have a daily struggle about whether to go on at all. Unfortunately, such a struggle is not rare
among young adults: an American survey of university students found that 10 percent said they had
seriously considered suicide during the preceding year.
Most of us face the much less drastic question of how to go on, of how to live our lives. Then the
question of the meaning of life is not the skeptical one of whether there is any meaning at all, but
rather the constructive one that can have informative answers concerning what aspects of life make it
worth living.
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