Someone you love is sitting across the kitchen table from you, and they are not all right.
It does not much matter what has happened. A job has ended, or a marriage has, or nothing in particular has ended and yet they are not all right all the same — and they have come to you, because you are the person they come to. They are holding a mug they are not drinking from. And at some point, not quite asking you, they say it: what is the point of any of it.
You want to help. So you reach for the answer everyone reaches for now — the one that is simply in the air — and you say some version of this: you have to find your own meaning. No one is going to hand you a purpose; you make it. It is whatever you decide it is. You choose what matters to you, and that is the freedom of it.
And here is where I want to begin tonight. You can hear that the answer does not land.
You can see it has not reached them — and, worse, you can hear that it has not reached you either. It comes out as a slogan: the kind of thing a person says to keep a hard conversation moving, not something you actually believe could support a person at the worst moment of their year. We say make your own meaning. We would not say make your own health, or make your own luck, and offer it as consolation. And for a moment, before you cover it over with more talking, you have the uneasy sense that you have handed your friend a phrase in the shape of an answer.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the third of eight episodes on whether a life can be worth having without God — without a plan, and without anyone keeping score. Last time I argued that the flat, scoreless world you find yourself in — the one with no meaning in it except the meaning you bring — is not simply the neutral truth left behind when the old religious stories stopped being believed. It is a particular position, built up over centuries, that you were born inside and have mistaken for plain fact. Tonight we take up the thing you actually reach for while standing in that position. The answer you handed your friend: you make your own meaning.
I am not going to mock it. That is the easy thing to do, and the wrong one. Tonight I am going to do the opposite. I am going to take that answer and build it into the strongest, most grown-up, most genuinely humane form it can take — until you remember why you reached for it, and until it stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like the only dignified answer a thinking adult has left. And then, with it standing at full strength, I am going to show you the one place it gives way — not from the outside, and not from me, but from a reaction you already have and have been setting aside. There is an old image of a man condemned to roll a stone up a hill for ever, and by the end of the hour the question will be whether you would change places with him, given that he is perfectly content. We will get there.
Let me state the answer as its most careful defenders state it — not the version you handed your friend, but the serious position underneath it, because there is a serious position underneath it.
Begin with where it comes from, because it comes from somewhere honourable. For most of human history, someone else decided what your life was for. The priest knew what it was for. The king knew where you belonged. The village settled your work, your marriage, your place, your death; and the order of the cosmos itself was supposed to know — your single small life was one line in a story told from above, and your task was to play the part already written for you. The long and often violent work of the last few centuries — the thing we mean when we say that people came of age — was the taking back of the authority to decide it yourself. It was telling the priest and the king and the village: you do not get to say what my life is for. I do. That was not a small achievement. People died for it. The answer you reached for at the kitchen table is the descendant of that struggle, and the struggle was just.
So hear the answer in its dignity. You make your own meaning does not mean nothing matters, so choose whatever you like. It means there is no longer any authority above you issuing approved purposes. And so the question of what your life is for is not a question with an answer hidden somewhere outside you, waiting to be found. It is a question you answer, by what you give yourself to — by what you love, what you build, whom you hold on to, what you will stay up all night for. And no one — not a priest, not a philosopher, not me — is entitled to lean over your shoulder and tell you that the things you have poured your life into do not really count, that your devotions are the wrong devotions, that you have loved the wrong things. On whose authority would they say it? The authority is gone. That was the point. So the meaning of your life is yours to confer, and conferring it is neither cheating nor second best — it is the only honest thing left once you have grown up enough to stop waiting for permission.
This is a serious position, and serious philosophers stand behind it. Consider the one who put it most precisely: Harry Frankfurt, the American philosopher, in essays such as The Importance of What We Care About, published in 1988. Most of us assume there is a natural order to these things — that things have worth first, out there in the world, and that we then notice the worth and love them because of it. We love our children because they are precious. We give ourselves to the work because it is worthwhile. On this picture the worth comes first, and the caring is our response to it. Frankfurt reverses the order. It is not, he argues, that we love things because they are valuable; it is that our loving them is what makes them matter to us. Caring confers importance; it does not detect it. What you love did not have to be worth loving in advance. Your loving it is what gives it its weight for you. And so a life full of things wholeheartedly cared about is, by that fact alone, a life full of meaning — not because you were lucky enough to care about the genuinely valuable things, but because caring is what value, for a creature like you, consists in.
Now the cleanest and hardest version of the position, which I will keep at the centre of the discussion for the rest of the hour. About fifty years ago the American philosopher Richard Taylor, in an essay called "The Meaning of Life" published in 1970, took up the oldest image we have of a meaningless existence: Sisyphus. The gods condemn him to roll a boulder up a hill; at the top it rolls back down; he goes down after it and rolls it up again, for ever. Nothing is produced. Nothing is built. Nothing lasts beyond the next roll. It is the picture of a life that adds up to nothing — the picture, perhaps, that troubles you in the early hours: the same days over and over, the same journey to work, the same tasks, arriving nowhere, and then death.
Taylor asks an unexpected question. What exactly makes Sisyphus's existence so terrible? His answer is that it is not the rock, and not the repetition, and not the uselessness of the task. It is that Sisyphus does not want to be doing it. The horror lies in the distance between the man and his labour: he is made to spend eternity on something every part of him longs to escape. So Taylor proposes a thought experiment. Suppose the gods, in something like mercy, change one thing. Not the task — the task stays exactly as useless as before. They change Sisyphus. They give him a deep and unappeasable desire to roll stones up hills. Now there is nothing in existence he would rather do than precisely this. The boulder is no more useful than it was; it still rolls back down. But every push is now the thing he most wants in the world, and he gets it, again and again, for ever. He is, Taylor says, as fulfilled as any being can be.
And the question Taylor leaves with us contains the whole of subjectivism. Which Sisyphus has the meaningful existence? The world has not changed; the rock is the same rock. The only thing that has changed is inside him: the wanting. And if the second Sisyphus has something the first one lacked — and surely he does; surely the implanted desire is a mercy and not merely a crueller joke — then meaning was never in the stones. It was never out in the world at all. It was the relation between the man and what he does: the wanting, the being gripped, the wholehearted caring. Get that relation right and a life of rolling rocks is full. Get it wrong and a life of every outward success is empty. Which is to say that meaning is yours. It always was. You confer it, as the gods conferred it on Sisyphus — except that you need no gods; you do it yourself, by caring, and no one outside your own caring has any standing to overrule you.
That is the answer you handed your friend, restored to its full strength. And at its full strength it is not a slogan. It is the hard-won, grown-up, humane conviction of a person who has stopped waiting for permission. So let me do the one thing left to do with a position this strong. Let me ask whether it is true.
Here is the test. It is not mine — Taylor built it — but I am going to make you actually take it, rather than admire it from a safe distance.
The gods are standing in front of you with the syringe, the same one they used on Sisyphus. They offer you the implant. Not for rolling stones — choose your own useless task; it does not matter which. Sorting a drawer of identical screws into piles and then mixing them up again. Refreshing a page that never changes. Whatever you like. The offer is exactly the one Sisyphus received: they will reach in and rewire your wanting so that this one empty, going-nowhere thing becomes the deepest desire of your life, and you will get to do it, fulfilled, wholehearted, for ever. You will feel about the screws what you have only ever felt about the few people and projects you would have died for. Guaranteed, with no disappointment afterwards. The fullest inner life a person can have, directed at nothing.
Do you take it?
Notice what you do, because I think almost all of you refuse. Something in you does not want the syringe, and does not want it strongly — and that is strange, because on the answer we have just built to its full height, refusing the implant is irrational. It is leaving the best available life on the table out of some superstition. The implanted Sisyphus, remember, has the meaningful existence; that was the whole conclusion. Meaning is the wanting, and his wanting is at its maximum. So if meaning really is nothing more than the relation between you and whatever you happen to care about, with no further court of appeal, then the gods are offering you a guaranteed life of maximum meaning, and you would be a fool to decline. The fact that you flinch — that you would rather keep your untidy, half-satisfied, partly frustrated actual life than accept a perfect inner contentment directed at a drawer of screws — is not nothing. That flinch is you knowing something your slogan does not.
What does the flinch know? It knows that you do not, in fact, want the feeling of meaning. You want your life to be about something — and not merely about something you have been made to care about, but about something worth the caring. You want the wanting and the worth to line up. The implanted Sisyphus has the wanting with the worth removed, and when you look at him you do not see a fulfilled man; you see something terrible — a person reduced and deceived, spending the one life he has on nothing while feeling like a king. And you can only see that as terrible if you believe, somewhere beneath the slogan, that there is a difference between a life that feels full and a life that is full — that what you spend your caring on can be worthy of it or not, and that this does not depend on how hard you happen to care.
Now let me take the gods away, because you can tell yourself the syringe is science fiction and slip free of it. It is not science fiction. You know this man. You may be related to him.
He is the one who has found, in the single life he has, one thing he gives himself to completely — and the thing is the edge of his lawn. The exact right-angled cut where the grass meets the path. He is out there most evenings with the half-moon edging tool, on his knees, getting it exact, and he is not pretending, and he is not depressed, and he is not secretly miserable. By every measure the slogan offers, he is doing well. He has found his meaning. He cares, wholeheartedly, with his whole self, about the edge of his lawn, and nothing outside his own caring has any standing to tell him it does not count. That was the rule. We agreed to it an hour ago.
So I have to ask the question the rule forces, and you must answer it honestly to yourself, not to me. Is his life as meaningful as a life spent raising children, or making something people needed, or loving one person for fifty years through the worst of it? The slogan has to answer yes. In its pure form the slogan has nothing to point to except the caring, and his caring is total, so his life is as full as anyone's. If you can nod along — if you can genuinely say, all the way down, that the lawn-edge life and the child-raising life are equally meaningful, and who are you to rank them — then you are a consistent subjectivist, you are entitled to be one, and the rest of the hour will be a disagreement between us.
But I do not think you can say it. I think that when you set the lawn-edge life beside the life of love and work, and actually weigh them, something in you says: no — that is a smaller life. Not a different but equal one. A smaller one. A life that spent itself on too little.
And if you are tempted to escape by saying the lawn-edge is simply too quiet a case to judge, let me make it loud. Take the man whose one wholehearted devotion is his next dose of a drug. Not the cheerful caricature — the real one. He cares about getting high in a way most people never manage to care about anything: single-mindedly, with his whole body, every plan and relationship and ordinary Tuesday reorganised around the one thing, with no half-measures and no divided heart. If wholehearted caring is the whole of meaning, then his is among the most meaningful lives on the street, because almost no one else is caring that hard about anything. And you do not believe that for a moment. You do not look at him and see a full life; you see a life being consumed — caring at its full strength, directed at something that gives nothing back and takes everything. Which tells you that the trouble was never that the lawn man cared about something small. It is that caring can settle on the worthless, or even on the actively destructive, with exactly the same intensity it brings to the worthwhile — and the intensity, by itself, cannot tell the difference. You can.
And the moment you say so, even silently, even with a bad conscience, you have stepped outside the slogan. Because you have just judged a life by something other than how hard the man cared. You have appealed to the worth of what he cared about. You have used the court of appeal you told your friend was closed.
That is where it gives way. It is not me refuting you from the outside. It is you, contradicting yourself from the inside — holding, on one side, that no one outside your own caring gets to say what is worth caring about, and, on the other, a quiet verdict that the lawn-edge man was mistaken, that he loved too small, that there was more in the world worth his life than he spent it on. Both positions are yours. They cannot both stand. And which one you have to give up is the whole question of this series.
Now, if the lawn-edge man were here, he would have a reply, and it is a good one, and I am not going to let you skip past it — because the easy thing here is to let you feel superior to him and send everyone home pleased with themselves. That is not what we are doing.
His reply is this. Who, exactly, are you to call my life small? You looked at a man on his knees doing the one thing that gives his evenings their shape, and you decided you knew better — that your children and your causes and your fifty-year marriage are the large things and his lawn is a little thing; you ranked us, and you put yourself on top. Where did you get the measure? Is this not precisely the thing we spent four hundred years escaping — the priest, the king, the village, leaning over a man's shoulder to inform him that his devotions were the wrong ones? You have taken up the priest's authority again and called it philosophy. Perhaps the edge of the lawn is where he worships. Perhaps you are not seeing a small life at all; perhaps you are seeing a life whose size you are too coarse to read, and dressing up your snobbery as depth.
Do not lose that, because it is right about something. If all we had tonight were me ranking lives from the outside — my taste in meanings set against his — then he wins, and he should, and subjectivism leaves here undefeated. The whole strength of the answer we built is that it silences the outside judge, and it is good that it silences the outside judge, and I have no wish to reopen that question. So let me get out of the business of ranking other people entirely. Let me stop talking about his life. Let me have you run the test on the one life where your standing cannot be challenged — your own.
Here is the version with your name on it. You are at the end of it. The whole of it is behind you, and as you lived it, it felt full: you were gripped, you cared hard, you had every year of the wholehearted inner life the slogan promises. And then, at the end, you learn — never mind how — that the thing you gave it all to was not what you thought. The cause was a fraud and you were its useful instrument. The person you organised your life around never existed as you loved them; you loved a picture you had painted over a stranger. The work was busywork someone kept you doing to keep you quiet. You felt all of it as meaning, every day; the feeling was real and complete and never once faltered. And now you know what it was aimed at.
Is that a life that went well? Did the feeling being real make it a meaningful life — or did you spend the only life you had on nothing, while feeling the whole time that it was everything?
I do not think you can call that a life that went well. And notice: that is not snobbery, because there is no one to look down on — it is you, and the verdict comes from inside, and it is not about taste, it is about having been deceived. What that reaction tells you is that all along you wanted two things and only ever named one. You wanted to care wholeheartedly — yes, the slogan had that right. But you also wanted the caring to be deserved by the thing you aimed it at. You wanted it to be true that the thing was worth it, and not merely true that you felt it was. The feeling was never the prize. The feeling was meant to be your response to something that had earned it. And a feeling with nothing beneath it — a wholehearted love aimed at a fraud, a perfect inner contentment aimed at a drawer of screws — is not the meaning you were after. It is a counterfeit of it. Which means you have believed, the whole time, in a difference between the real thing and the counterfeit — the very difference the slogan said did not exist.
So the objection holds, and it holds from the inside, on your own life, with no outside judge required. In your own hands, caring is not the whole story — you have just watched yourself reach past it. You believe in a second half, a worth-half: something you need the thing to be, not merely something you need to feel about it. And you have been leaning on that belief your entire life, while telling everyone, including your grieving friend at the kitchen table, that it was not there.
And now I have to be honest with you about what we have not done, because it would be easy to stop here, satisfied, and pretend the hard part is finished. It is not. All I have shown you is that you believe in a worth-half. I have not shown you what it is. I have shown you that you want the thing you love to be worth loving — but worth by what measure, grounded in what, now that the authority that used to certify worth has been shut down for exactly the reasons we spent the last two weeks honouring? The lawn-edge man, back on his feet, has one more thing to say, and it is the hardest thing said all night. Very well. You have caught yourself wanting your loves to be deserved. But you cannot show me where "deserved" lives. You cannot point to the worth the way you can point to the caring. The caring is real — I can feel it, you can feel it. The worth is a word you need so badly that you have mistaken needing it for finding it. Perhaps the worth-half is not the thing my slogan was missing. Perhaps it is the last remnant of the God you have already given up — an external guarantor of worth, returning under a new name, because you cannot bear a world without one.
I do not have the answer to that tonight, and I am not going to cover it over with more talking — the way you covered the silence at the kitchen table. We have made you see, in your own case, that you hold a belief in worth you cannot yet defend, and that is worse, not better, than where you started. You came in able to tell your friend to make their own meaning. You cannot hand that across a table so easily now — you have felt it fail when you tried it on yourself. But I have not given you anything to say in its place. I have taken away your slogan and left you with a question you cannot yet answer. That is where we are tonight, and we do not improve it by pretending the question is not real.
Here is what has changed in the last hour — and it is real, and worth stating plainly, even though it offers no comfort.
An hour ago you had an answer you could hand across a table: make your own meaning. It is gone now — or rather, you can see that it was only ever half of what you believed, the half you could say out loud. You always believed the other half as well: that the thing you love has to be worth loving; that a wholehearted life poured into a fraud is a life taken in, not a life well spent; and that this does not depend on how hard you cared. You have believed both halves your whole life. What changed tonight is only that you can no longer pretend you believe just the first. That is the difference — not a new answer, but the end of being able to give the old one with a straight face, and the discovery of exactly where the real disagreement lies. An hour ago you thought the question was whether meaning is found or invented. Now you know there is a harder question underneath it, one you have been standing on without looking down: worth — by what measure, and is there any such thing at all, now that the old guarantor is gone.
Before next time, take this away and try it once on your own, because the part that is mine to set up is done, and the rest only works when you are the one running it.
Do not use the lawn man. Use yourself, this year. Choose the thing you are most devoted to at the moment — the work, the person, the project, the cause you would cancel other things for. Hold it in mind. Now run the two tests we ran tonight, on this, on your actual life. First, the syringe. If the gods offered to keep the exact feeling you have about this thing — the grip, the caring, all of it — but quietly replaced the thing itself with something worthless, and you would never know, would you call that the same life? If you flinch, you have just admitted that the feeling was never the point; the thing itself has to be real. Second, and harder: ask yourself what makes the thing you have chosen worth it. And watch what your mind reaches for. I expect it will not reach for because I care about it. It will reach outward, to something about the thing — something you would want to be true whether or not you felt it today. Notice that movement. It is the worth-half: the thing your slogan said did not exist, and the thing you cannot quite show is really out there. You will not be able to finish the sentence tonight — it is worth it because … and then what? That inability to finish it is the actual question.
And here is where we go next, because I owe you fair warning about what is still standing. Tonight I went after only one of your two answers. I took on the warm one — you make your own meaning — and found where it gives way. I never touched the cold one: nothing matters; the universe is fourteen billion years old and does not know your name; against that, the difference between a full life and a wasted one is exactly zero. That answer I left entirely alone — the one you fall back on in the worst hours — and you may have noticed that tonight it grew stronger, not weaker. Because if I have just taken away your power to make worth by caring, and have shown you no worth out in the world to find instead, then the cold answer is sitting there saying: I told you so. There is nothing to find. You have made my case for me. Next time we walk straight up to that answer. And I am going to treat it as I treated the warm one — not by mocking it, but by taking it more seriously than the people who repeat it at parties ever do, building it up to a strength that genuinely frightens, the version serious philosophers could not shake — and then asking whether it is as airtight as it feels in the bad hours. That is next time.
For tonight, this is where I leave you, and I am not going to soften it. You came in able to tell a hurting friend to make their own meaning. You cannot say it so easily now. And I have not handed you anything to say instead — I have handed you a worth you believe in and cannot ground, and a colder answer I have not yet faced. You arrived with a slogan; you are leaving with a question whose shape you can now make out. That trade feels like a loss, and in a way it is one. It is also the only honest place to spend a week.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.