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among those who have made the biggest impacts in human history are vast numbers of vile people. Their mark is often death and destruction, as is the case with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot, for example.
It is sometimes thought that if a life is meaningless, then it also has no value. This is a mistake, although it is easy to see how it arises.
it is entirely possible for a life that objectively lacks meaning to have a good subjective quality, either because the subject does not care about meaning or mistakenly thinks that his11 life is meaningful. By contrast, when people perceive their lives to be meaningless, there are typically quite profound negative effects on the quality of life.
objectively meaningful lives can be mistakenly perceived as meaningless.
Making a mark is not identical with being recognized. Think, for example, of secret agents or quiet aid workers who can make significant contributions without attaining recognition at the broad levels at which they make a contribution. Similarly, there are those who are recognized much more widely than their contribution would warrant.
A purpose is something endowed by a being capable of having goals.
Nature, however, has no goals. It is a blind process that unfolds without any end in mind. It neither intends our existence nor has any goal at which our existence is aimed.
It is true, of course, that many (but by no means all) of us were brought into existence for a creator-endowed purpose. The relevant creators were our parents.28 They might have created us for any number of purposes—to fulfill their desires for genetic offspring, to have a child to rear, to silence their parents’ pleas for grandchildren, to pass on particular values or ways of life, or to contribute to the survival or growth of an ethnic or national group, for example. However, these are the purposes of our parents rather than of nature. Nor are they purposes of cosmic significance.
It is not infrequently the case that the significance of what we do now is influenced, if not determined by, whether it will matter later.
Imagine that you had no temporal limit—that you were immortal. Under those circumstances, the purposes internal to your life might well suffice. Because you would endure, there would be no need to seek a purpose that survived your personal extinction.
Peter Singer, for example, says that meaning is to be found in “working for … a ‘transcendent cause,’ that is, a cause that extends beyond the boundaries of the self.”
People, quite reasonably, want to matter. They do not want to be insignificant or pointless. Life is tough. It is full of striving and struggle; there is much suffering and then we die. It is entirely reasonable to want there to be some point to the entire saga.
The bits of terrestrial meaning we can attain are important, for without them, our lives would be not only meaningless but also miserable and unbearable. It would be hard to get up each day and do the things that life necessitates in order to continue.
There is no such thing as the meaning of life. Many different meanings are possible. One can transcend the self and make a positive mark on the lives of others in myriad ways. These include nurturing and teaching the young, caring for the sick, bringing relief to the suffering, improving society, creating great art or literature, and advancing knowledge.
Life feels better if it feels meaningful, and a perception that one’s life is meaningless can have deep and widespread negative effects on the quality of life.
It is a cruel irony that meaning in life can actually be enhanced by events that cause a reduction in (other aspects of) the quality of life, as was arguably the case with Mr. Mandela. His imprisonment and the associated hardships and indignities—and his response to them—made him a more potent symbol than he would have been had he escaped from South Africa and lived through the remainder of the apartheid period in exile, with a higher quality of life overall.
questions of meaning often arise when life is going badly. You are in a serious accident, or your child dies, or you are diagnosed with cancer. You then ask: “What is it all about?” or “Why me?” People do not tend to ask the same questions in response to things going (relatively) well.
The common view, however, is that the quality of some lives qualifies as bad and the quality of others qualifies as good. In contrast to this view, I believe that while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good.
No matter how much evidence one provides for psychological traits such as optimism bias, and no matter how much evidence there is that the quality of human life is very bad, most humans will adhere to their optimistic views.
There are both real and conceivable beings in which nociceptive (that is, specialized neural) pathways detect and transmit noxious stimuli, resulting in avoidance without being mediated by pain. This is true of plants and simple animal organisms, and it is also true of the reflex arc in more complex animals, such as humans.
if one’s life has some meaning because of one’s relationships with family and friends, then death typically threatens this meaning by preventing the continuation of those relationships.
Even the most expansive terrestrial meaning will eventually vanish. It may take longer, but vanish it eventually will, if only because all humans will eventually become extinct.
The lives of those who die remain cosmically insignificant, and while some terrestrial meaning is gained, other such meaning is lost, because one cannot generate the meaning that one would have generated if one had continued living.
in dying, one loses not only whatever good that would otherwise have been in one’s future, but also one’s continued existence, in which one has an independent interest.
they deny that one must exist at the time at which death is bad for one who dies. The problem is that in denying this, they must grapple with the following question: When is death bad for the person who dies?
Those of us who think that death is bad for the person who dies do not have to bow to the Epicurean insistence on the existence requirement. We can provide another account of when death is bad for the person who dies—one that does not presuppose the existence requirement.
We need to show why postmortem nonexistence is actually bad even though pre-vital nonexistence is not. The purported problem with attempting to do this is that the deprivation account seems to imply that pre-vital nonexistence is bad because it deprives one of the good that one would have had if one had come into existence earlier.
Death is a release from only some of these existential burdens. Thus, while it returns us to a state of immunity to some fates—such as physical or mental suffering—it does so at considerable cost. It can deprive us of some goods. It also thwarts the interest we have in continuing to exist. It obliterates us.
Just as Epicureans cannot think that death is bad, so they cannot think that death is good (or even less bad).
even when the quality of life has become so bad that life has ceased to be worth continuing, the Epicurean is unable to say that death is less bad than continued life.
There is a generational march from womb to grave. The oldest people are at the front. In the least bad circumstances, the Grim Reaper first cuts them down with his bloodied scythe. Their place is taken by the next generation and then by the next. One’s grandparents die, and soon one’s parents have limited remaining life expectancy. Before long, one finds oneself in the front line staring death in the face.
Old age, it is said, is where everybody wants to get but nobody wants to be.
Death is bad, but it does not follow from this that being immortal would be good. It is possible that death is bad, but that eternal life would be worse.
If one kills oneself, then there is no opportunity to change one’s mind later and choose one of the other options instead. By contrast, if one chooses one of the nonlethal alternatives, one can at any time reverse one’s decision and choose another course, including suicide.
If the norm is to have an inflated sense of how well one’s life goes, then those who have either an accurate view of their wellbeing or merely a view that is less exaggerated than the norm will appear to most people as underestimating the quality of their lives.
Many of those who are pessimistic, depressed, or otherwise unhappy may actually have a much more accurate view of the quality of their lives than the cheery optimists who constitute the bulk of humanity.
When somebody truly underestimates, we should try to convince him that his life is not as bad as he thinks it is, particularly if his being convinced would prevent his suicide. By contrast, in the case when somebody overestimates the quality of his life, we should not try to convince him that he is deluded and his life is actually not worth continuing.
In coming into existence, we are guaranteed to suffer harms.
we are involuntarily brought into a cosmically insignificant existence that bears considerable risk of serious harm.
once we have come into existence, life’s hardships are only avoidable at a cost. (Life’s cosmic meaningless is unavoidable even by death.) Thus, if suicide is to be reasonable, the hardships need to be bad enough to offset that cost.
Suicides tend to shock. This is not merely because the deaths they bring about are often unexpected by those who hear of them. It is also because they run counter to the deep-seated, natural instinct for self-preservation.
once the burdens of life reach a certain level of severity (determined, in part, by the relevant person’s own assessment of his life’s value and quality), it becomes indecent to expect him to remain alive for the benefit of others.
All the great human achievements—the buildings, monuments, roads, machines, knowledge, arts—will crumble, erode, or vanish. Some remnants may remain, but only until the earth itself is destroyed. It will be as if we never were.
Most of us make very small and local impacts. We shall be forgotten within a generation (or two) of our deaths, once those few on whom we have made an impact have also died.
we are caught between a rock and a hard place. Life is bad, but so is death.
It is unconscionable for a person upon whom existence was thrust not to have the option to exit if continued existence becomes unbearable.
Some things matter even though they do not matter sub specie aeternitatis. One should not desist from loving one’s family, caring for the sick, educating the young, bringing criminals to justice, or cleaning the kitchen merely because these undertakings do not matter from the perspective of the universe. They matter to particular people now. Without such undertakings, lives now and in the near future will be much worse than they would otherwise be.
When one hears of a birth, one must know that it is but a matter of time before that new human dies. Sandwiched between birth and death is a struggle for meaning and a desperate attempt to ward off life’s suffering.
The absence of any—even terrestrial—meaning is best addressed not by taking one’s own life, but by attempting to invest one’s life with some meaning.
It is possible to be an unequivocal pessimist but not dwell on these thoughts all the time. They may surface regularly, but it is possible to busy oneself with projects that create terrestrial meaning, enhance the quality of life (for oneself, other humans, and other animals), and “save” lives11 (but not create them!). This strategy, which I call pragmatic pessimism, also enables one to cope.
