At the root of many moral and ethical enquiries is the question “What makes life worth living?” The question comes in various forms, such as “What does it mean to live a good life?” or “How can one be a good person?” In the end, if it equates something good with something worthwhile, then the question essentially seeks a rational for existence. Though on one hand, there seems to be an implicit and strongly potent cause for such question, on another hand, there does not seem to be any clear, universal answer. Philosophy offers possibilities that range from “a totalising Good” to “nothing” as reasons for existing. While that seems to be a kind of contradiction inherent in something as complex as existence, maybe we can reflect on the simpler answer that is “there is no actual answer”.
What could this mean? If there is nothing that can make life worth living, how then can we continue to exist? If there is no purpose to life, then how would things get done or life itself persist? It would seem as though without any apparent cause or reason (regardless of the truthfulness, universality, or accuracy of the reason), life as we know it would simply cease to be. Think about that for a minute: imagine a world in which there is no absolute reason, what kind of images come to mind? Maybe a world on fire, or war, the most perilous of chaos, all things breaking down, darkness.
How vastly different is that from the world as it is now?
Where did the connection between chaos and a lack of cause came from? I think it is a strange phenomenon. Let us think of an alternative: imagine a moment in which something good came up out of nowhere. Maybe a flower caught your eye while in the middle of a dreadful walk. Perhaps all of a sudden, you remember something funny as nothing else is going on. Or that a friend brings you a gift that you absolutely love though no such occasion calls for it.
Or let us dwell on that word: love. Why love? What is the cause of it? Think of something you truly love—why do you do so? Or how? How did love come up from seemingly nothing to being this whole endeavour of ‘love’?
Of the things that we love, we might be able to enumerate various reasons as to why we love it and keep it in our lives. These reasons can be juxtaposed to contradictions, arguments why those reasons are insufficient, not valid, or untrue. Thoughts agreeing to something usually come with their equal ideas of disagreement. Though we might try to put them on a scale and decide based on that outcome, a ‘true’ decision inevitably transcends any information established in frameworks of rationality. If one ‘decides’ based on what a formula tells one, is not one not merely repeating the formula instead of actually making a decision?
We have not yet even begin to think about the complexity of any kind of decision—how do we know that only such and such aspects are necessary and not the others that are left out in the equation? Or that we have gotten all the information in every aspect?
Let us say that in a decision between a and b, the formula results in ‘a’ as the choice with more positives than negatives. However, due to a plethora of possibilities (natural human ignorance as one and the ‘inherent complexity of existence’ as another), the result is only because there are information about a and b that had not been included in the calculation. More information could tip the scales to b (and maybe even more to neither of them).
What then do I mean by a ‘true decision’? I guess I mean it in the same way one can say that they truly ‘love’. To love something due to such and such reasons is to abide by those reasons, but often (if not always), ‘true love’ is inexplicable. One may do all the wrong things and no such positives may seem to come about but in a strange turn of events it is ‘what makes live worth living’. But what exactly is this love? Since if we try to make it out as something, it ceases to be that love—it is not its positives and negatives, but something else, something other in a way. It makes life worth living such that life can cease to be and so long as there is that love it would not matter.
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Life does not need to be worth living to be lived. I think it is an absurd notion to wonder what makes life of worth living and to think of that as what would guide existence into its beauty and wholeness. The implication is that life needs anything for it to be, but all has come into this world without any seeming reason. Sure, the world one had been thrown into may have brought one into the world and for a number reasons, but none of those can definitively be one’s ‘cause’ for existing. I did not choose to live, none of us at our conception did. Yet here we all are. We need not a reason to live for we are alive without us having to do anything for it.
If a more ‘productive’ question is what one seeks maybe it is the converse: what makes life not worth living? I find that when I reconcile myself with those things (whether by getting rid of them, ceasing attention towards them, or simply letting them be), I feel as though life is indeed worth something. It is the kind of feeling one might expect to get when they seek out what is worth living—only that it seems when one tries to do so (go towards that which looks to be the reason for existence), it is an ever moving goalpost, almost a pointless one actually. One might say, well, is that not the point of life? To continue to struggle, to aim for perfection knowing very well that it is an impossibility in this life but we are nonetheless beholden by it anyway?
Maybe. Or not. Love—this silly, vain endeavour, call it temporal, call it useless, call it nothing—when I am in the midst of such, when to live is to love, I feel that I have reached a goal with endless satisfaction. The goal is inexplicable—the end is the very means and so maybe one gets nothing out of it. But this nothing, even in the tempting allure of that post-life perfection, is everything—the only thing that matters in its moment, for it is real and mine and true.