Loving Something Worth Loving

Consider two people you know.

The first is completely absorbed in something. You can probably picture the person — most of us know one. Whatever it is, they are engaged with it all the way, more than most of us have been engaged with anything since we were children. It might be a collection. It might be a game, or a team, or an online following, or a body worked on in the mirror, or some system of points and badges and streaks that the rest of us don't even understand the rules of. When they talk about it, they come alive. They are more present inside that one thing than you are inside most of your week. And you are glad for them — genuinely. But underneath the gladness there is a second thought, one you would not say aloud because it would be unkind and you are not sure you have the standing for it: that it is something of a waste. All that energy, spent on that.

The second person does something that plainly matters. Perhaps they nurse. Perhaps they raise three children more or less alone. Perhaps they make something with their hands that other people need. No one looking at that life from the outside would call it wasted — it counts; it is the kind of life spoken of warmly at the end. And here is the difficulty: they seem barely present in it. They go through it the way you drive a route you have driven a hundred times — competently, but absently, thinking of something else. And watching them, you have caught yourself with a thought just as disloyal as the first: all that worth, and no one really there for it.

So here is the question, put plainly and before either of us has a theory to fall back on. Which of these two is living the meaningful life? The one fully alive inside something rather hollow, or the one half-absent inside something that genuinely matters?

If you are honest, you cannot answer it — and not because it is a difficult calculation. You reach for the thing you would need to settle it: some way of weighing what a life is spent on, how much that is worth, kept separate from how absorbed the person felt while spending it. And you find you have nothing to weigh it with. That measure is exactly what this series has spent four weeks removing. You cannot say the absorbed one wins because feeling is all there is — that answer was set aside two weeks ago. And you cannot say the worthy one wins because the feeling is mere decoration — because then you would be calling that absent, going-through-the-motions life a full one, and something in you will not agree to that either. You are left between two people, unable to rank them, and the reason you cannot is the gap at the centre of this whole series.

This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.

This is the fifth of eight episodes on whether a life can be worth it without God — without a plan, and without anyone keeping score. Last time we took up the cold answer — that nothing matters, that the universe is indifferent — and its strongest move failed: for something to matter, there has to be someone it matters to, and the universe was never the kind of thing anything could matter to, so its silence was never the verdict it had been read as. The question came back to the only place it could be settled — to us, the ones who can actually be moved. And that left one word owed, which the series keeps promising and has not yet paid. Worth. The cosmos cannot tell you what your life is worth; you cannot simply decide it; and last week ended with the right question in the right place and no idea what would answer it.

Tonight we look for that answer directly. What is a life actually worth spending on, once you cannot produce that worth by caring and the universe will not supply it? It turns out there are two answers still standing — two serious accounts of what makes a life worth living, both left intact after the warm answer and the cold answer fell. And what makes tonight different from a lecture where the options are lined up and one is recommended is that these two cannot both be held at once. They ask opposite things of you. One of them will sound, the moment you hear it, like exactly the relief you have been looking for — clear, firm, something definite to rely on. The other will regard that relief and call it false. I will put both at full strength, let them argue, and I will not settle it.

Let me begin by ruling out one reply, because it is the natural one to reach for, and if I don't rule it out now it will be a distraction for the rest of the episode.

The reply is this. Faced with those two people, and unable to rank them, there is a way out on offer — and it is the warm answer returning. It says: who are you to rank them at all? Meaning is whatever the person living it makes it. The absorbed one made theirs out of the collection; the worthy one, perhaps, has not made much of anything, and that is their affair; either way it is not yours to weigh. Stop grading other people's lives. And it sounds generous, and it sounds humble, and it is the make-your-own-meaning answer under a different name — and we are not going to accept it, because you have already rejected it yourself.

Recall what you did two weeks ago. The case was the implant — the device that would give you the unshakable sense that rolling a stone up a hill forever is the most fulfilling life a person could have — and you would not accept it. You would not count a life given wholeheartedly to something false as a life well spent, however good it felt from the inside. Which means you do not, in fact, hold that caring is the whole story. You hold — you demonstrated that you hold — that the thing has to be worth the caring; that there is a difference between a wholehearted life spent on something real and a wholehearted life spent on something false; and that the difference is not simply the intensity of the feeling. So when the warm answer returns tonight and says the two people cannot be ranked because feeling is all there is, you already have your reply. You do not believe it. You would withdraw it the moment the implant was offered again. That reply is closed off.

So we cannot return to the warm answer; the feeling does not settle it. And last week ruled out the opposite reply as well: we cannot hand the whole question to the universe and read its silence as the verdict, because the universe was never the place the question could be settled. Both exits are closed. That has been said twice now, and tonight I finally give you what lies beyond the two closed exits, and not merely that they are closed.

Before we can take a step, one confusion has to be cleared up — a quiet mistake that has, I think, been distorting how everything has looked for four weeks.

You have assumed that when you lost God, you lost worth — objective worth, the real kind, the kind that is not just you deciding. You have assumed the two went together: no God, therefore no one keeping score, therefore nothing is really worth anything, it is all preference now — my preference for my collection against your preference for your children, tastes all the way down, and no one to adjudicate. That is the assumption that has made the two people impossible to rank: if worth is only preference, there is nothing to rank them with.

But consider what was actually established last week, because it points the other way. The thing that made the lemon cake matter — sixty years of a family held together, a garden, the care — that worth was never coming from the cosmos in the first place. The universe was never the one keeping the family's score; the cosmos is not the kind of thing anything can matter to. Notice what follows. Losing the cosmos as your guarantor cannot have been what removed the worth, because the cosmos was never holding the worth to begin with. The worth of holding a family together for sixty years, if it has any, was never stored somewhere in fourteen billion years of physics, waiting to be collected. So when God departed and the cosmic scorekeeping stopped, the question of whether a family, or a garden, or honest work is genuinely worth a life did not get answered "no." It simply stopped being answered by the one source you had always deferred to. The "no" you have been hearing was not a verdict; it was the absence of the source you had wrongly expected to hear it from.

Let me be careful here. I am not telling you that objective worth is real. I have not established that, and there is an episode coming in which we go beneath it and test whether the whole thing holds, and I will not pretend tonight is that episode. My claim is narrower, and it is needed before anything else can move: the idea of finding meaning, rather than making it, did not die with God. "Meaning is something you find, not something you make" — you have been treating that whole idea as another casualty of the funeral, as though the only way a thing could be worth finding was for God or the cosmos to have placed it there. That was a confusion. There is a version of finding that never required the cosmos at all. The worth was supposed to lie in the things themselves — in the family, the work, the truth, the garden — not in a sky keeping count of them. And if that is right, then the answer to which of the two lives is meaningful may have been present in the world the whole time, in the difference between what each of them spent themselves on, with no God needed to underwrite it.

That is the first answer, and it is the one that will sound like relief. There is a serious philosopher who holds it in its strongest and cleanest form — who would look at the two people and say, without hesitation, exactly which one is living the meaningful life and why, and would add that the difficulty all along has been a reluctance to admit something you already half-know. Let me give that position the floor, at full strength, because it has earned it, and because the relief it offers is genuine before it is complicated.

Here is the first answer, at full height, as its most serious defender would put it. The philosopher is Thaddeus Metz, whose 2013 book Meaning in Life is about as careful a study of the question as exists; the position is the one philosophers call objectivism about meaning. I'll name Metz once and then mostly call the position the objectivist. And the objectivist looks at the two people and is not puzzled for a moment.

The objectivist says: of course you can rank them. You have been telling yourself you cannot, because you have accepted a fashionable idea that worth is only preference — and it is not, and you know it is not. Some things are genuinely worth a human life and some are not, and that is not a matter of a vote, or a feeling, and it does not require a god to be true. Love is worth more than a high score. Knowledge is worth more than a rumour. Raising a person is worth more than tending a number that goes up. Healing is worth more than winning. Making something true or beautiful or useful is worth more than collecting tokens of status that count for nothing the moment the game's servers are switched off. You did not invent that ranking and you cannot overturn it by preferring otherwise, any more than you can decide that a circle has corners. The goods are real. They are out in the world, in the actual things — the people, the work, the truth — not in your head and not in the sky. And a life is meaningful to the degree that it is spent engaged with those real goods, and wasted to the degree that it is spent on things that only resemble them.

Notice what this does to the two people, and notice that it is unsparing, and notice, too, that it is a relief. The worthy one — the nurse who is absent from the work, the parent going through the motions — the objectivist says that life is meaningful. Fully. It is spent on something genuinely worth a life, keeping people alive, raising people, and the fact that the person doing it feels flat, feels absent, feels as though they are elsewhere, does not subtract from the worth of what they are actually doing. The meaning is in the deed, and the deed is real. And the absorbed one, wholly taken up in the collection, the streak, the status game — the objectivist says, with regret, no. However intense that absorption, it is directed at nothing of worth. A wholehearted life given to something that is not worth it is not made meaningful by the wholeheartedness. It is a waste, however impressive its surface. The feeling does not redeem the object; the object was the question all along.

Now consider why that comes as a relief after four weeks. Look at what it does to the thing that has been troubling you. The worth of your life — the objectivist locates it in the world rather than in you. It no longer depends on your caring, which means it does not give out when your caring gives out at six in the morning. Recall the difficulty with the warm answer: a meaning that is real only while you feel it, that disappears on the night you cannot summon the feeling, that has to be continually produced or it dies. The objectivist says: set all of that aside. You were never the source. The worth of raising your children well does not waver because you are exhausted and resentful on a wet Tuesday and feel nothing but the weight of it. The worth is in the raising, in the real good of a person brought up, and it holds steady whether you are absorbed in it or getting through it with effort and no feeling at all. Your feelings were never carrying the meaning. That is not an insult; it is a release. You can stop monitoring how you feel. You can stop asking, at midnight, whether you still feel it strongly enough for it to count — because feeling it was never what made it count. Do the worthy thing. Be genuinely engaged in it — not a spectator, actually involved in it — and whether or not any excitement accompanies it, your life is directed at something real.

And you should weigh this fully before anyone objects to it, because the easy course — and by now you know I will not take the easy course — would be to dismiss it as obviously too cold and hurry you on to the answer I prefer. I will not. This is not a caricature, and it is not some bloodless idea of a life. It is held, in its best form, by people who have thought about this harder than you or I ever will, and it has three things in its favour that deserve real weight. First: it is the only answer so far that lets you rank the two lives at all, which is precisely what you came in needing. Second: it pays the debt — it gives you real worth, not merely your say-so, exactly the worth owed since the funeral, and it does so without smuggling God back in, because the goods were never God's to grant. And third, the one that should trouble you most: it may be correct. It may simply be true that a life spent on genuinely worthy things is a meaningful life, and that how you feel inside is none of meaning's business — that what you felt at that funeral, the love in the room, was real and good, but was your response to your grandmother's worth, and not the thing that made her sixty years count. On this account she did not make her life mean something by loving her family. Her family, her garden, her care were worth loving, worth a life, on their own — and her love was her giving them their due. Many clear, unsentimental, serious people reach this point, settle there, and stop. And I will not be able to prove to you tonight that they are wrong to stop.

But there is a second person here, and she has let the objectivist speak first because she wanted you to feel the force of it before she replied. Now she steps forward, and she says: that is almost right. It is so nearly right that the gap is easy to miss. But it leaves something out — and what it leaves out is the very thing you felt in that room at the funeral, the thing you would have argued against anyone who denied it. Let me give her the floor.

Her name is Susan Wolf, and her 2010 book Meaning in Life and Why It Matters is about exactly this, and she agrees with the objectivist about more than you might expect — which is what makes the single point where she parts from him matter so much. She agrees the worth is real. She agrees it is out in the world and not merely your preference, that some things are genuinely worth a life and some are not, that you cannot set a high score level with raising a child. She is not offering you the warm answer again. She agrees that the absorbed-in-nothing life is a waste as well. So far she and the objectivist stand together.

Here is where she parts from him. The objectivist told you the worthy nurse, absent from the work, is living a meaningful life, fully, because the deed is real and the feeling is none of meaning's business. And Wolf says: no. Not fully. That life is worthy — she grants every bit of the worth — but a life of real goods carried out by someone who is not present to them, going through the work year after year feeling nothing, engaged with none of it, is not yet a meaningful life. It is a worthy life being lived by someone who is not there for it. And something in you, she expects, moves towards that the moment she says it — because you felt it about that second person yourself, in the cold open, before either of us had a theory: all that worth, and no one really there for it. That uneasy thought was not sentimentality. It was you noticing something true that the objectivist's clean answer has no place for.

So Wolf's claim — and I'll give it to you in her own words, then in plainer ones — is that meaning in a life arises, as she puts it, when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. Two conditions, and you need both. The objective half is everything the objectivist said: it has to be something genuinely worth it, worth the spending of a life, and that is not up to you. But there is a second half the objectivist set aside, and Wolf says you cannot set it aside: you also have to be gripped by it. Not pleased with it at a distance. Not merely present out of duty. Actually taken up in it, drawn to it, engaged with the whole of yourself, and not just performing the right tasks while absent. Loving something worth loving, she says, and being able to do something with that love. Remove the worth and you have the absorbed person given wholly to nothing. Remove the being-gripped and you have the worthy work carried out by someone who is not there. Either one on its own is missing something, and the thing it is missing is what we have been calling meaning all along.

And here is why this is not the warm answer returning, even though it has put your feelings back on the table — because notice which job the feeling does. In the warm answer, your caring was the source: it produced the worth out of nothing, which is why a life given to something false could count, and why it all disappeared when the caring stopped. Wolf gives the feeling a different job entirely. It does not make the thing worth it. The worth is already there, in the world, independent of you, exactly as the objectivist said. The feeling is what makes the worth yours — what turns being near a good into a life lived in it. Your grandmother did not make her family worth holding together by loving them; they were worth it, and her loving them is how that worth became the substance of her sixty years rather than a job she merely completed. That is why the funeral affected you. Not because she produced meaning by deciding to care, but because she cared — genuinely, daily, over decades — about things that were worth the caring; and it was those two together, neither without the other, that you felt in the room and could not name.

Now consider what this costs, because Wolf is not the soft option and I will not present her as one. She has said something harder than either answer you walked in with. Half of what makes your life worth living is not up to you — that is the objectivist's point, and she keeps it: you can give your whole self to something and be wrong, because the worth was never yours to confer, and you can spend a life loving what was not worth it. But she has added a second way to fail that the objectivist let you off. You can land on something genuinely worth it and still miss a meaningful life — by not being present to it, by doing the worthy thing while absent from it, there in body and gone in every other respect. So there are now two ways to waste the only life you have. Love the wrong thing wholeheartedly. Or do the right thing while no one is present. And you can be sincerely and completely wrong about which one you are doing. The man with the implant thought he had both. The nurse going through the motions may think the worth of the work is carrying her, and it is not — not into meaning, on Wolf's account. The work is worthy and she is absent, and those do not add up to a life well lived, however the record of deeds reads.

So Wolf turns to the objectivist's relief — that your feelings were never carrying the meaning, that you can stop monitoring them — and she calls it what she takes it to be. A falsehood. A kind one, but false. She says: you cannot excuse someone into a meaningful life. Telling the absent nurse that the worth is in the deed and her absence does not count against her is telling her that a life she is passing through is going well because the tasks are good ones. And Wolf will not say that. The absence does count. Being present to your one life is not an addition on top of meaning; it is half of meaning. That is her position.

And if I stopped here, you would take her to have won. You can hear that I have made her case, you can feel the argument leaning her way, and it would be easy to let you leave tonight quietly persuaded that Wolf settled it and the objectivist was a cruder early version of her. I am not going to allow that, because it is not true. The objectivist has not finished. He has been present the whole time she was speaking, he is not convinced, and his reply is stronger than you would like.

Here is the objectivist's reply, at full strength, because it is the point at which the episode stops being an exposition and becomes a disagreement you have to settle for yourself.

He says to Wolf: where did your second requirement come from? Consider what you have just done. We agreed — you and I, against the warm answer — that the worth is real, out in the world, not produced by anyone's caring. So a life spent serving the genuinely worthy is a life spent on what is genuinely worth it. That should settle it. And then you added a further condition. You said that you must also feel it, must be gripped by it, must be present to it — and the moment you said that, you let the warm answer back in under a different guise, after claiming to have shut it out. Because now my feelings are a condition of meaning once again. Now whether my life counts depends, in part, on my inner state — on whether some excitement was present — which is exactly what these last weeks have been trying to move past. Take my nurse. Thirty years. Exhausted, joyless, turning up every single day and keeping actual human beings alive, and feeling, most mornings, nothing but the weight of it. You want to tell her that her life falls short of meaningful — that she was merely going through the motions — because she did not manage to be enraptured by it? That is not a deeper standard. It is a cruelty presented as one. Her caring being worn down to nothing does not make the thirty years count for less. If anything it is the most meaningful kind of life there is — the one that serves the good without being rewarded with any feeling for it. Your subjective-attraction condition is the last debt owed to the very subjectivism you claim to have left behind. Drop it. The worth was always enough.

And that is a real objection. I won't hurry you past it. There is something close to indecent about marking the tired nurse down for not being enthusiastic, and you feel it, and the objectivist has identified it exactly.

Wolf does not give way. Her reply stays in play, and it is not nothing either. She says: I am not marking the nurse down for being tired. Tired is not the same as absent. A person can be exhausted to the bone and still present — still, beneath the exhaustion, holding on to why this matters, gripped by it even through the grind. That person is not the one I mean. I mean the one who is genuinely absent — for whom it really is just a routine to be got through, who could be doing this or anything else and it would feel the same from the inside, who serves the good the way a machine serves it, with no one present. And about that person I will say the hard thing and not withdraw it: their life is worthy and admirable and owed our thanks, and it is also a life they were not present for. "Meaningful" was always the word for whether you were there — not whether you were happy, not whether you felt any excitement, but whether the one life you had was lived by someone present within it, or merely got through by someone who had left. That is not a further tax on the worth. It is a different question from the worth. A life can score full marks on the deeds and still be a life its owner missed. And I will not call a missed life a fully meaningful one simply because the tasks were good.

So there the two of them stand. And here is where this episode declines to do the usual thing, which would be for me to step in and award it — to say that, on balance, Wolf has the better of it, and send you off with a winner and the comfort of having been told the answer. I am not going to do that. Not out of coyness. Because I genuinely do not think it is settled, and I have read them, and the people who have spent their lives on this have not settled it either. Is being gripped a real condition of a meaningful life — a second thing you can fail even when the worth is real? Or is it the last remnant of the warm answer we set aside, a way of returning your feelings to the accounting after we had agreed to remove them? I can argue it either way, and so can you now, and that is not a failure to finish the work. That is the work. Both positions are still standing. Neither is a caricature of the other. And you will have to live with that, because no one — not I, not Wolf, not the objectivist — gets to hand you the verdict on the one question that turns out to be about how you spend your actual days.

And there is one further thing that is true of both of them, and then I'll let you go. Notice what they share, beneath the disagreement. They both rest their entire case on a single word: worth. Real worth, out in the world, not your say-so — the objectivist rests his whole case on it, and so does Wolf. And you will recall what I said on the very first night, the thing the series keeps promising and has not yet paid. There is a question beneath that word. There are serious people who hold that worth, and worthy, and worth loving do not point at anything real at all — that the whole vocabulary is a story we tell, false all the way down. I am not opening that tonight. But notice where we are: the two answers left standing both rest on ground the series has twice promised to examine and has not yet examined. Hold on to that. It is coming.

So, before next time, put this to work once with no help from me. Watching me set it up is not the same as having done it.

Do not use the two people you know. Use yourself. Take the thing you have given the most of your one life to — and you know which one it is without my listing options. Put both questions to it, the two that cannot both be satisfied at once. The objectivist's: setting aside how I feel about it, is this genuinely worth a life, worth more than the things I could have spent the time on instead — or have I merely been telling myself it is? And then Wolf's: am I actually present to it — engaged, there, with the whole of myself — or have I been doing the right thing for years now while absent from it? And notice two things as you do. Notice that you can fail either one — that you can be wrong about the worth and wrong about whether you are present, and that these are different failures. And notice that when you have done it, when you have put both questions to your own life and felt how much rides on each, there is no one behind you to tell you the score. Not the cosmos — we settled that. Not your own say-so — we settled that too. And not me. That is not a gap I am going to fill next week with a clever third answer that lets the other two relax. It is the situation you actually live in.

Because here is where we go next, and it is stranger than choosing a winner. There is a question that has felt, this whole series, like the only question there was: is meaning something you go out and find, or something you make within yourself and impose? Found, or invented. And you have spent tonight watching two serious people disagree inside the "found" half of it — and next time I am going to do something to the question itself. I am going to show you that the choice you came in holding — out in the world, or within yourself — was the wrong choice, that it was never only those two options. I will not break tonight's tie. I will do something I think you will find harder and more useful: I will show you why the question that has been keeping you awake was the wrong one to lose sleep over. That is next time.

And that is where I am leaving you tonight, and I will not tidy it, because it is not tidy. You came looking for the one answer that would let you rest — and you found two, and they are opposed, and I will not separate them. That is not withholding the answer. It is declining to fake one. You came in unable to rank two people. You are leaving able to ask the two questions that would do it — and holding the fact that the questions do not agree, and that no one is coming to settle them for you. Two sharp questions and no one to decide between them is more than you had this morning, and it weighs more too. I never promised the lighter version.

Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.