Johnson’s Life View
I’ve been going through the book “Designing Your Life” over the last few months, which has been a joy. In my opinion, it is the straight up correct way to work through what to do in your life.
Chapter 2 asks you to describe your impression of the meaning of life, with a number of prompts (pictured at the end of this post). I thought I’d post mine:
I see no reliable evidence that humanity, or any individual, has any objective purpose for existence. I see no strong reason to believe that we’re more than the improbable result of the interaction of atoms and subatomic particles coming together to form people. I see that within the system of life, we have a defacto purpose, evolutionarily speaking, to spread and advance our genes, as well as those of loved ones, and more loosely, humanity. However, there’s nothing objective about this purpose — there’s no reason that more of us is good, beyond the evolutionary context.
So in my view, there’s no good reason for us to be here, yet here we are. Seems like there’s a few options for how to approach this. We could 1) die, seems like a pretty shitty option, but if there’s no reason to be here, there’s also no reason not to be here. We could 2) mindlessly adopt/fulfill an existing purpose defined by someone or something, whether that’s to spread genes, make money, serve a god, etc. Accepting something so foundational so mindlessly/frivolously doesn’t seem right though. Or, we can 3) create our own meaning in life. This is the only one that doesn’t intuitively repulse me, so it’s the one I roll with.
So what is a “holistically good life”? Can you measure it? Questions humanity has grappled with since the beginning of time (maybe less the second one). The most straightforward mechanism would be biological — count of happiness hormones (dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphin). However, this measure feels incomplete, and doesn’t capture the higher order joys and satisfaction of life. Just because creating meaning in life is personal, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consult with the best minds throughout history and contemporary times to find critical common threads. I think the world’s current leading authority on this matter is Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program.
According to Harvard, the domains that comprise a good life are: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability. So as far as the meaning of life is concerned, I think these are basically the only things that matter — things that contribute to (your interpretation of) these are good, things that take away from them are bad.
The other questions flow quite naturally from the above domains. Regarding the relationship between the individual and others, another Harvard longitudinal study shows that the single biggest factor in long term life satisfaction is the strength of close relationships, so this one is particularly important to me, especially in today’s social climate. Beyond this, I think altruism is an obvious source of meaning, if you believe in fairness and that all people (not just yourself), should have “equal access” to holistic well being.
If you’ve gone through this exercise before, I’d love to read what you wrote! Drop me a line.
