This is the second part in a series of philosophical posts that I started in early 2021, and which I have added to in fits and starts over the last few years.

In Part 1, I started with questioning my inability to fully believe all the feel-good advice about setting aside achievement and “enjoying the moment.” That quickly led down an existential rabbit hole, through some definitions of terms, to the Big Question of “How do I spend my life well?”

After thinking about this a lot (after all, this series of posts has, somehow, taken me several years to write), I find that my answer really boils down to three key points:

  • Do good
  • Create something
  • Have fun

Let’s take a look at each of these in turn. 

Do Good

If the first aspect of a life “well spent” is that we should “do good,” the immediate follow up question is: how much is good enough? Is my life wasted unless I do as much good as possible? Is it morally acceptable to do less? As the lyric from Hamilton goes: 

“And when my time is up / Have I done enough?”

I am very privileged, which means I have a lot that I could give up. If I donated all of my life savings, it could save or change many lives. Is it morally acceptable to keep that for myself? I am still relatively young and relatively healthy, so if I gave up on studying Mars and dedicated my life to service I could likewise have a big positive impact. Is it ethically acceptable to use my skills on something that does not directly address any of the many problems the world is facing? 

Heck, maybe I should run for office so that I can be in a position to enact better policies that would help tons of people. So what if I would hate it, if I could have a big positive impact, then I should do it right? (To be clear, I should not run for office. US politics is not the best place for an introverted atheist scientist.)

Should I give up everything I possibly can to maximize how much I help others? The world might indeed benefit if more of us did that, but it’s a false choice. The only choices are not: (1) Give up literally everything to make the world a better place, but live a miserable life, or (2) Give up nothing and live a comfortable but selfish life. As with everything, the goal is balance. How do we maximize both our positive impact on the world and our enjoyment of life? The optimal solution will be different for different people, but all or nothing thinking is a trap.

(As an aside, because these posts took me a long time to write, I learned long after I had written this part but before I had finished, that the philosophy term for someone who maximizes the happiness that they generate in the world at the expense of their own happiness is a “happiness pump” and it is one of the primary critiques of a purely utilitarian philosophy. There’s a whole episode of The Good Place about this.)

(And another aside: whether we are talking about giving up money, or changing behaviors, it is important to acknowledge the staggering inequality of the world. I can make some difference by donating and recycling and the like, but a billionaire or a corporation could give up proportionally far less and have a far greater positive impact.)

Kieran Setiya discusses this same question – “How do I know if I have done enough?” – in Life is Hard:

…though we know that we have limits, we don’t know where those limits are. The result is that, when I ask myself whether I am doing enough to meet my responsibility for justice, it would be an awfully neat coincidence if the answer were yes. What are the odds that I’ve hit the mark precisely, the most I can expect of myself? Close to zero, I would think. The result is that I am virtually certain that I am falling short. Perhaps it’s obvious that I am. But the same reasoning applies to almost anyone, even those who do much more, people whose lives are devoted to social change. They can’t be sure they’ve done enough. In conditions of profound injustice, we are compelled to doubt that we are living well.

There’s instruction and reassurance to be found in this. We shouldn’t feel too bad that we feel bad: our guilt is not a mistake. More important, we shouldn’t let it put us off, condemning our own efforts as too small. They may be small—but it’s perverse to deal with that by throwing up our hands and doing less. There is value in a single step toward justice, and one step leads to another.

[…]

You may not do enough, but the difference you make when you save a life is the same whether you save one of two or one of two million. A protest may not change the world, but it adds its fraction to the odds of change. It’s wrong to disregard the increments.

It’s easy to tell stories about heroic individuals, and it’s good to take inspiration from those who go above and beyond and do great works, but we don’t all need to be heroes. More to the point, we can’t. As I discussed in my second “Finding Balance” post, we are taught by our very individualistic culture that problems are always solved by heroes: remarkable people who, through sheer force of will, single-handedly change the world. The thing is, most of the problems in the world cannot (and never have been) solved by one person, no matter how passionate or brilliant, no matter how much they sacrifice. If there is a boulder blocking your path, you can recklessly dash yourself against it and have no effect other than hurting yourself. That doesn’t mean don’t try to make things better, it means we need to prioritize sustainable, collective efforts rather than martyring ourselves to a cause in an attempt to single-handedly fix the world.

It does feel like this sometimes…

My conclusion on this question is that the goal is not to do the most good we can at the expense of everything else. The goal is to do good when we can, and avoid bad when we can. Yes, push the limits of what we’re comfortable sacrificing (whether it’s time, effort, money, etc.) but it is ethically acceptable to not be a “happiness pump.” We cannot reasonably expect ourselves or others to be purely dedicated to improving the world every moment of every day. It is ok to do things that make us feel happy and fulfilled, not just things that have a measurable positive impact. Ideally, we can find ways to both have a positive impact and feel happy and fulfilled while doing so. Which leads to…

Create Something

The second aspect of my definition of a life “well spent” is to create something. To quote Hamilton again:

God help and forgive me, I wanna build something that’s gonna outlive me.

I talked about this already in my second Finding Balance post and probably in other places too: as someone who doesn’t believe in an afterlife, I want to put something of myself into the world so that when I am gone, some part of me remains. Is this a self-centered, ego-driven impulse? Absolutely. But it’s there, and I don’t think I’m unusual in feeling this way. There is a reason that one of the most famous stories ever told focuses on the choice between living a long, ordinary, but forgettable life or dying young but living forever in legend. The appeal of being remembered is so strong that dying young to achieve it has been a compelling choice for thousands of years:

“My mother Thetis tells me that there are two ways in which I may meet my end. If I stay here and fight, I shall not return alive but my name will live forever: whereas if I go home my name will die, but it will be long ere death shall take me.” – Achilles, The Iliad

The Achilles dilemma is not the whole picture though. While there is certainly some amount of ego in the desire to “make a mark,” there is also more to it than just being remembered. It doesn’t have to be about being remembered at all. It can also manifest as contributing to something bigger than yourself, or taking actions that will have effects long after you are gone, even if those actions are known only to yourself.

Writing, raising a loving child, painting, planting a tree, teaching, building. These all are ways to satisfy this aspect of a life well-spent. This quote from Fahrenheit 451 sums it up well:

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

While it would be nice to be remembered, that’s not really something I can control. What I can control is whether and what I create. I want to put something of myself out into the world in a way that satisfies me and hopefully connects with others. This will manifest in many different ways, it doesn’t have to be (and probably shouldn’t) be just one big project. Writing is certainly one aspect of this, but so is my scientific work, and so is raising my kids, and many other things as well.

Writing this section has been kind of tricky because this inevitably blends with the other two aspects: Do Good and Have Fun. When we do good, the impact of that action may “ripple” out into the future, having unexpected and unknown effects. Knowing that our good actions propagate is satisfying in much the same way that creating something is, and sometimes Doing Good and Creating Something can go hand in hand. 

But, importantly, Create Something does not have to be explicitly tied up with Doing Good. It often goes the other way and blends with Have Fun. We’re allowed to put a part of ourselves out into the world, even if it doesn’t seem like it benefits anyone. It is ok to create just for the sake of creating something. It doesn’t have to be done to achieve some noble goal. Creation is worthwhile in and of itself because it allows us to share — even in some small, inadequate way — the richness of thoughts and feelings and experiences inside our head with someone else.

Of course at its best, Create Something blends with both Do Good and Have Fun and binds the three together. By creating something, we can enjoy ourselves and (deliberately or not) have a positive effect on the world. Maybe that effect is to tell a story that lets someone escape when they have a bad day, maybe our art inspires others to imagine a world better than this one and work to make that world a reality, maybe it shows someone that someone else out there is going through the same things they are. Maybe by creating something we “just” make ourselves happier and more fulfilled. That’s still a win.

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” – Carl Sagan

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” – James Baldwin

(Don’t just scroll past this video, at least save it to watch later. It’s a really great reflection on creativity.)

Have Fun

“Name one hero who was happy.” – Achilles, Song of Achilles

The third facet of my definition of a life well-spent is to just enjoy life when you can. Life is tragically short, often painful or unpleasant, and ends in sadness and death. The curse of being human is that the same big brains that let us do all sorts of wonderful things also make us aware of future tragedy. 

Eleanor: All humans are aware of death. So we’re all a little bit sad… all the time. That’s just the deal.

Michael: Sounds like a crappy deal.

Eleanor: Well, yeah. It is. But we don’t get offered any other ones. 

– The Good Place

Sibling Dex, to Mosscap the robot: “Your kind, you chose death. You didn’t have to. You could live forever. But you chose this. You chose to be impermanent. People didn’t, and we spend our whole lives trying to come to grips with that.”

– A Psalm for the Wild Built

As I get older, and especially over the last few years as cruelty and pain and suffering in the world have become increasingly impossible to ignore, I have come to appreciate more and more the value of escapism, mindless entertainment, and generally anything that makes people happy. Good food, engrossing stories, games, music, art, watching sunsets, traveling the world, anything that is done for no other purpose than to enjoy it: embrace those things. People talk about “guilty pleasures.” Never feel guilty for finding joy in something. Life is hard enough without punishing ourselves for the things we enjoy.

The closest I have found to escaping the existential dread that is part of being human is to do things that absorb you in the moment and sweep you up in a “flow” state. Things that are so engaging that you can, at least for a little while, shut up the doom-and-gloom voice of the prefrontal cortex and enjoy the present moment.

One of the most reliable ways to end up in a flow state that I have found is to Create Something. Painting, writing, building something, whatever your preferred creative outlet, as long as it can engage your mind fully, it is fun and rewarding.

The other sure-fire way to enter a flow state is through entertainment. In particular, the kind that is often seen as a distraction or self-indulgent escapism. Video games, “guilty pleasure” novels, silly TV shows, sports, movies, etc.

Yeah, life is short and you’re spending some of that precious time watching reruns of that sitcom instead of solving world hunger or whatever. But you know what? You’re not a happiness pump, you’re a human being and you are allowed to relax sometimes. 

Kieran Setiya agrees:

How can we listen to music, or work on the more speculative questions of philosophy and science, while the planet burns? But while political action is urgent, it’s not the only thing that matters. In fact, it couldn’t be. If the best we could do was to minimize injustice and human suffering, so that life was not positively bad, there would be no point in living life at all. If human life is not a mistake, there must be things that matter not because they solve a problem or address a need that we would rather do without but because they make life positively good. They would have what I’ve called “existential value.” Art, pure science, theoretical philosophy: they have value of this kind. But so do mundane activities like telling funny stories, amateur painting, swimming or sailing, carpentry or cooking, playing games with family and friends—what the philosopher Zena Hitz has called “the little human things.” It’s not just that we need them in order to recharge so that we can get back to work, but that they are the point of being alive. A future without art or science or philosophy, or the little human things, would be utterly bleak. Since they will not survive unless we nurture them, that is our responsibility, too.

Or, to put it more concisely:

To be alive: not just the carcass

But the spark.

That’s crudely put, but…

If we’re not supposed to dance,

Why all this music?

– “To Be Alive” by Gregory Orr from Concerning the Book That Is the Body Of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)