It is hard to believe but I started writing this series of posts in early 2021! It is now, inexplicably, mid-2025. I have of course not been working on these non-stop, but I return to them now and then to edit and add and tinker. I am not sure I have really figured any of this stuff out – I’m not sure anyone ever fully does, but I decided it’s time to wrap these up and share them.

It’s a new year, and despite all of the craziness of 2020, I find myself in a remarkably similar mental place to where I was last year at about this time. Maybe part of growing older is that year-to-year life is more or less the same, and so my thoughts are basically the same too. I’m stuck in the same ruts, struggling with the same issues, setting the same goals every year. I’m not sure how old I have to be for my regular everyday existential crises to earn the title of “midlife crisis,” but I feel like I’m getting close.

In 2019 I wrote a pair of lengthy philosophical blog posts as I tried to work through some mental health and existential questions. As a recap, in the first post I talked about how the book Feeling Good had helped me recognize that a lot of my mental health struggles could be traced back to a need for approval and an addiction to achievement, which was getting frustrated since I’ve hit the major milestones in my career and life and am now looking ahead to basically more of the same.

In the second post, I talked about insights from some essays by Ursula LeGuin that helped me make an interesting connection between achievement addiction, the myth of the “hero” and the desire for immortality via fame/achievement, misogyny, and taoism. And I concluded that a lot of what I was struggling with was trying to shift away from the “yang”/heroic obsession that our culture prioritizes to something more balanced, more focused on the present than on future goals.

I am pretty proud of those posts. They were difficult to write, but they helped me clarify my thoughts, and they seemed to resonate with many others. They also fit with a growing movement among people of my generation, especially during the pandemic, to challenge the conventional narrative linking self-esteem to productivity. I’m seeing a lot more discussion on social media of self care, more openness about mental health, and an emphasis on simplifying life and living in the moment.

An example is this great article. The whole thing is worth reading, but the key quote is:

“Here’s a secret I tell to my students. I’m going to tell it to you. You aren’t a tool. You are an end in yourself. Meeting your personal goal, whatever that might be, won’t give you one iota more worth than you already have. The purpose you hope to serve will hopefully fulfill you, but has no effect on your worth.

Human worth is contingent upon nothing, and your dreams are separate entities from you.” – Eric Dovigi

Reading those words makes me feel like I can breathe easier for just a moment. Likewise, going back and reading my writing on related topics makes me feel better, at least briefly. 

The problem is that the relief doesn’t last. There’s something about these feel-good ideas that I can’t quite fully believe. It has been nagging at me, and rather than letting it rattle around in my head any longer, I want to pin it down and take a close look at it. So here we go:

What if all of this philosophizing is just an elaborate way to make excuses for not achieving my goals? What if I’m just seeking out affirming messages wherever I can find them to justify the lazier course of action because that’s easier? What if this is what the process of giving up and settling for mediocrity looks like? 

Ouch. With thoughts like that, no wonder I’m sometimes anxious or depressed. These thoughts sound harsh, especially writing them down like this rather than letting them remain semi-abstract in my mind. But unpleasant things can still be true, and I think there is something significant buried in these thoughts that I need to explore.

Why is there this part of me that is so fixated on achieving goals? Why does it sometimes seem like I get more stressed out when I try to follow advice telling me not to work so much, and less stressed when I manage to actually do the work? (But at the same time, trying to be productive all the time is exhausting and burns me out.) Why does being kind to myself and living in the moment and forgiving myself if I am not spending every waking moment on something “productive” feel like giving up or failure? 

As the main character in the book A Prayer for the Crown-Shy says:

“How am I supposed to tell people they’re good enough as they are when I don’t think I am?”

At some point, I became obsessed with the idea of “making the most” of my life, of “spending my life well.” There is this piece of me that is afraid of looking back at my life from my deathbed and being disappointed with what I have accomplished. In the book A Psalm for the Wild-Built (to which A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, quoted above, is the sequel), the main character perfectly articulates this idea:

“All I have is right now, and at some point, I’ll just end, and I can’t predict when that will be, and—and if I don’t use this time for something, if I don’t make the absolute most of it, then I’ll have wasted something precious.”

In a culture that values measurable achievement and exceptionalism, I am scared of being just ordinary and forgotten after I am gone. I talked about this before: the appeal of the heroic myth is that it offers a sort of immortality. If you can be a “hero” in the sense of achieving something that leaves a mark on the world, then even after you’re dead, there is something of you left.

And yet, how does that fit with what I’ve written before about the inherent value of human life? If it is true that human life has intrinsic, non-quantifiable worth that we do not need to prove through our actions, then can it also be true that those who achieve more have “better spent” their life than those who achieve little? If it is possible to “better spend” one’s life, then does that mean that those who achieve a lot in life have more worth than those who do not? Written that way it sounds pretty bad. Do I… believe that?

Part of the problem, as always when grappling with big abstract questions like this, is with definitions. Language is an imprecise tool at the best of times, and especially for conveying the ideas involved here. There are a couple of similar but distinct concepts getting blurred together. What does it mean to “achieve” something? What do we mean when we say that a life has “meaning” or “worth” or “value”? As pedantic as it may feel, it’s worth pausing for a moment to pin down some definitions of these terms. Not just the dictionary definition, but what do I actually mean when I use them? 

Value/worth

When I say that all humans have intrinsic value or worth, what I really mean is that I choose to believe that there are basic human rights that everyone deserves. Everyone should have food, shelter, health, education, love, happiness, fulfillment. By “worth” I mean that everyone is “worthy” of these things automatically. As the excerpt from the article above says, “Human worth is contingent upon nothing.” Our achievements or our benefit to society or fame or fortune or race or religion or anything else have no bearing on whether we deserve these basic things.  

This is a definition that I take as an axiom, upon which a lot of my other thinking is based. I have no evidence to support the claim that all humans have intrinsic worth and therefore have certain rights. I want to believe it, so I do. That’s an uncomfortable statement for a scientist to make. But like so much of society, human rights only really exist to the extent that enough of us agree that they exist. I choose to believe that they do because I do not want to live in a world where they do not. (This is discussed quite a bit in the book Sapiens: that human rights, along with other seemingly fundamental ideas like religion, money, and society itself, do not “really” exist, but agreeing amongst ourselves that they do is beneficial in various ways. The author argues that this ability to create and believe in and organize around these abstract concepts is the hallmark achievement of humanity.)

Good

What does it mean for something to be “good”? I try to stick with a relatively simple definition: something is good if it makes the world a better place. In other words, does it reduce the overall amount of suffering? Does it make life more pleasant, more tolerable, more meaningful? Of course the simple definition is anything but. It is easy to fall into the utilitarian trap of trying to quantify goodness and end up paralyzed trying to figure out how to weigh the pros and cons of every action, and its second- and third- and umpteenth-order effects. There is, improbably, a whole TV show about the folly of trying to tally up goodness in this way. In the end, I think you just have to not overthink it. Just do what you reasonably can to help everyone to have the basic rights listed above. Do what — as far as you can tell — is the right thing. Make life better when you can. 

Achievement

Achievement is just accomplishing a task that you set out to do, so achieving something is not in and of itself good. An achievement is only as “good” as its outcome. If you set out to do something bad and succeed, you have achieved your goal but it was not a good way to use your time.

However, there is another dimension to achievement, and that is: how fulfilling was what you did? Maybe you set a goal and achieved it, and it was pretty neutral in terms of whether it was “good” or not for the broader world, but you’re proud of what you accomplished. In other words, it was meaningful to you. I would argue that that was a good use of your time. As the quote from the article above says, achieving your goals does not alter your worth, but hopefully it fulfills you and is meaningful to you. Which leads us to “meaning.”

Meaning

I am not religious. The idea of an afterlife is wishful thinking that people cling to because the alternative is facing the fact that someday we all cease to exist and all of the richness of our internal lives will be lost without a trace. I’m also a scientist, an astronomer posing as a planetary geologist, trained to think in terms of extremely long time scales and vast distances. Humans have existed for a blink of an eye in the history of the universe. We are less than microscopic when compared to the vastness between galaxies. On the scale of the universe we are inconsequential.

With that perspective, it’s easy to jump to nihilism. Everything is meaningless. We live short, pointless lives and then we die and the universe goes on as if we never existed and eventually the universe itself will succumb to entropy and there will be nothing. So what’s the point in caring about anything? It sounds pretty grim, but it can actually be kind of liberating. If nothing matters, why not just chill out, stop writing long blog posts agonizing over existential questions with no good answers, stop worrying about your legacy, and just enjoy your stupid insignificant life while it lasts?

“Dancing through life (down at the Ozdust)
If only because dust is what we come to
Nothing matters but knowing nothing matters
It’s just life
It’s just life
So keep dancing through”

– Dancing Through Life, from the musical Wicked

This is essentially the answer put forward in A Psalm for the Wild-Built. In the book (bear with me here if you’re not a sci-fi person) robots have become sentient and have gone off to live life in the wilderness separate from humanity. The main character of the book, Dex, is having an existential crisis and wanders off into the wilderness too, where they meet a robot named Mosscap who helps them work through these existential questions. The robot’s answer is a sort of positive, comforting spin on nihilism. I’m going to put several quotes from the book here in a row. They’re all in the same section of the book and go together. (They’re also sort of the climax of the book, so if you don’t want it spoiled, scroll past…):

“You [humans] were proud of us [the robots] for transcending our purpose, and proud of yourselves for honoring our individuality. So, why, then, do you insist on having a purpose for yourself, one which you are desperate to find and miserable without? If you understand that robots’ lack of purpose—our refusal of your purpose—is the crowning mark of our intellectual maturity, why do you put so much energy in seeking the opposite?”

“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is.”

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”

“It doesn’t bother you?” Dex said. “The thought that your life might mean nothing in the end?” “That’s true for all life I’ve observed. Why would it bother me?” Mosscap’s eyes glowed brightly. “Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”

Or, put slightly differently by Ursula LeGuin in The Lathe of Heaven: 

“Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”

The attitude is actually very comforting and appealing to me, but as I have written before ultimately I can’t help thinking it’s a bit of a cop-out. It’s true that our lives are short and our significance to the universe is nil, but guess what? The universe doesn’t get to decide what matters. We do. Meaning is a human construct, and therefore it gets defined on our terms.

In the book Life is Hard, philosopher Kieran Setiya talks about this:

while we cannot prove that there is value in the world—at least, not to the nihilist’s satisfaction—that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

He then quotes polymath Frank Ramsey:

“I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities that impress me far more than size does.”

Just throwing our hands up and saying “nothing matters because the universe doesn’t care about us” is a way to avoid the responsibility and vulnerability that comes with choosing for yourself what matters, and then living your life accordingly. In a way, religion takes a different path to end up with the same result. Nihilism and religion are both ways to shift that responsibility elsewhere. Either nothing matters in the big uncaring universe, or someone over-interprets an excerpt from an old book written by ancient superstitious weirdos and tells you what matters. The important thing is that you’ve found a way to not have to choose for yourself.

If I’m not going to choose nihilism or religion, then I need to figure out my own definition for meaning. So what is it? I think Sartre gets it right:

Life has no meaning a priori…It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

Meaning is whatever we choose it to be. This definition is frustratingly imprecise, and as intimidating as the blank page before you set down the first word of a novel. Meaning is whatever inspires us with purpose, excites our imagination, whatever satisfies and fulfills us. As Victor Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at all costs, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

This, I think, gets at the heart of why I have a hard time with advice to just relax and be mindful and in the moment and stop measuring myself based on my achievements. I feel a constant conflict between the desire to take a break and relax, and the desire to achieve something meaningful to me. The key is to balance those urges. I often forget the key point that my previous posts were not about switching from one way of thinking to another, they were entitled “finding balance.” I find myself trying to overcompensate for a life spent on the achievement-oriented side of things and feel like I need to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side and focus only on living in the moment and the day to day “un-heroic” parts of life. But that’s not balanced either, and it stresses me out in its own way. I need both sides to feel fulfilled. The tension between them is not going to go away and that’s ok. 

So, if I am seeking actual balance, rather than seeking to swing the pendulum from a pure achievement focus to purely living in the present, what does that look like? How do I really “make the most” out of life?  I think about this a lot, but what does it actually mean? I’ll look at that in Part 2.