Chapter Seven
why life is worth living
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.
Nihilism
Nihilism is the view that life has no meaning at all. In Camus' novel L'Etranger, the narrator,
Meursault, has been accused of murder. The examining magistrate is outraged by Meursault's
assertion that he does not believe in God: “[The magistrate] told me that it was impossible, that all
men believed in God, even those who wouldn't face up to Him. That was his belief, and if he should
ever doubt it, his life would become meaningless.” The magistrate's view is not just that the
nonexistence of God would make his life meaningless, but that the mere belief in the nonexistence of
God by someone such as Meursault would render life meaningless. What would it take for someone's
life to be totally devoid of meaning?
At the most extreme, your life would be meaningless if you had no mental representations at all.
This state would require you to have no conscious beliefs and experience, and no prospect of having
any. Temporarily you might have no conscious experience because of deep sleep or a medical
condition that puts you into a coma, but in these cases you have the potential of having conscious
representations when you wake up. People who suffer extensive brain damage may enter a persistent
vegetative state from which recovery is impossible. At this point, life is meaningless for them,
although it may still have some meaning for people who care about them. For example, when the
parents of Terri Schiavo resisted her husband's decision to remove her feeding tube in 2005, she was
still important to them, despite her extensive brain damage, which an autopsy revealed was as serious
as doctors had advised. Nevertheless, given her apparent inability to form any representation of
anything, it seems to me that Terri Schiavo's life really had become meaningless.
Without such severe brain damage, your life would be lacking in meaning if nothing at all was
important to you, as seems to be the case with Camus' character Meursault, who asserts: “Nothing,
nothing mattered.” It is hard to imagine someone totally lacking in goals, as even severely depressed
people usually take minimal steps to feed themselves and protect themselves from harm. But
Meursault and severe depressives lack more ambitious goals, which chapter 6 described as brain
states that combine representations of situations with emotional valuations of them. Meursault says he
had no regrets about anything, suggesting a woeful incapacity to attach emotional significance to
important events, including both his arrest for murder and the death of his mother. Unlike the state of a
temporarily depressed person whose life will be enjoyable again when things improve, Meursault's
condition appears to be chronic. Perhaps it is fair to conclude that his life really is meaningless and
that he lost little by being executed. In modern popular culture, the character who comes closest to
having a meaningless life is probably George Costanza from the television show Seinfeld, although
even he did much better than Meursault at love, work, and play.
The American essayist Roger Rosenblatt expresses nihilism in amusing form in the first of his rules
for aging:
Rule #1: It doesn't matter
Whatever you think matters-doesn't. Follow this rule, and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late, or
early; if you are here, or if you are there; if you said it, or did not say it; if you were clever, or if you were stupid; if you are having
a bad hair day, or a no hair day; if your boss looks at you cockeyed; if your girlfriend or boyfriend looks at you cockeyed; if you
don't get that promotion, or prize, or house, or if you do. It doesn't matter.
Like Rosenblatt's second rule, “Nobody is thinking about you,” his first rule is a useful antidote to
excessive worrying about small or medium-sized matters. But no one should take it as a literal
suggestion that personal relationships and work do not matter at all. Nihilism can take the form of
despair, the intensely negative emotional attitude that life is nothing but a boulevard of broken
dreams. Another, culturally popular form is ironic detachment, in which people present themselves as
not caring much about anything, even though they have deep, unmet needs.
Counting against nihilism is the empirical finding that most people are happy. On average, across
many cultures, when people are asked to rate their life satisfaction on a zero-to-ten scale, people rate
themselves around 7. Thus Camus' Meursault, Rosenblatt's rule 1, and severe depressives are
exceptional in their inability to find aspects of life that matter. Using depressives as the standard for
human meaning would be like using schizophrenics as the standard for human knowledge: in both
cases neurochemical disturbances seriously diminish brain functioning. According to Kay Jamison, an
expert on manic-depressive illness, 90 percent of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable
psychiatric illness.
Of course, the fact that most people are happy does not in itself refute nihilists, who could argue
that the common pursuit of enjoyment is no more convincing than is the prevalent endorsement of
dualism. Perhaps only depressives have an accurate view of the worthlessness of life. But the
discussion to come of how love, work, and play furnish meaning by contributing to vital human needs
will show that happy people are not delusional.
Historically, the main alternative to nihilism has been the theological view that God created the
universe and established a purpose for it. In fact, people who are religious are on average happier
than those who are not. But I argued in chapter 2 that there is no evidence for the existence of a deity
who could make life meaningful, so we must look elsewhere. Contrary to Meursault's magistrate, the
abandonment of theology does not imply nihilism without a thorough search for other sources of
significance. Few people, fortunately, have Meursault's emotional incapacity, and we can reject
Camus' suggestion that everyone's life is as absurd as that of his main character. Perhaps the meaning
of life is just happiness.