Susan Wolf on How to Live a Meaningful Life

We often talk of living meaningful lives, or of needing more meaning in our lives, but what does that actually entail? What makes a life meaningful? Is meaning reducible down to another quality like happiness or morality, or does it offer its own distinctive contribution to the good life?

Contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf explores such questions across two brilliant lectures, captured in her 2010 work Meaning in Life and Why It Matters.

To be clear, Wolf is not so interested in discussing the grand question of ultimate meaning in the universe, of whether humanity is part of some wider cosmic story, as many religions suggest, and existentialist philosophers tend to deny; she more wants to consider the nature of meaningfulness within our individual lives, regardless of the narrative (or lack of one) behind the wider cosmos.

So, not what is the meaning of life?, but: what is it that we’re getting at when we describe something as meaningful? What are people conveying when they say their lives lack meaning? Is it uncontroversial to judge some lives as more meaningful than others? How do people cultivate meaning in their lives?

Wolf begins her explorations by drawing attention to how common psychological models tend to base our motives not around meaning, but around self-interest or morality. I eat a nice meal to bring myself joy; I donate to charity out of a sense of duty.

This dichotomy between self-interest and morality feeds into our broader pictures of the good life, too: a good life is one that’s happy, ethical, or both.

But Wolf thinks these simplistic pictures miss many of our actual reasons for doing things in day-to-day life.

If I visit a friend in hospital, for instance, I am not doing so for self-interested reasons (it might actually be a huge inconvenience), but neither am I driven by some noble sense of impartial moral duty (it’s not necessarily the maximum good I could do). Rather, I visit my friend because I love them, want them to be okay, and am committed to our friendship.

Perhaps we could try to force my reasons into the buckets of ‘self-interest’ or ‘morality’ here, but Wolf thinks a more natural fit is to call them what they are: reasons of love.

Our loves for certain people, pets, places, objects, and activities give us all sorts of reasons for acting that cannot be easily reduced down to self-interest or morality.

The parent’s elaborate meal preparation, the poet’s relentless rewrites, the pianist’s obsessive practice, the teacher’s intricate lesson planning, the gardener’s long pursuit of beauty…

“My claim then is that reasons of love,” Wolf writes,

have a distinctive and important role in our lives. They are not to be assimilated to reasons of self-interest or reasons of morality.

In fact, Wolf proposes it is reasons of love that give our lives meaning:

[M]eaning arises from loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a positive way.

For Wolf, then, meaning is a distinctive category of the good life, one that explains and motivates many of our reasons for acting.

We don’t just want our lives to be happy or moral, we also want our lives to feel meaningful, and meaning arises through our loving commitment to people, places, and projects.

The formula for a meaningful life

If we agree with Wolf that meaning is a distinctive element in what makes a good life, then it naturally follows to wonder how we might procure it. What is the exact formula that results in meaning? What’s actually involved in ‘loving objects worthy of love?’

To make progress here, Wolf begins by critiquing two standard approaches for cultivating meaning in life:

1. Follow your passion. Here the idea is simply to discover what drives you, to establish what gets you out of bed in the morning, and then to build your life around it. It could be big or small, so long as you love what you do, you will live a meaningful life.
2. Commit to something larger than you are. Here the idea is that meaning comes from dedicating yourself to something worthwhile. It’s not so much about your subjective love for the cause; it’s about the cause itself. If you’re committed to a worthy cause, you will live a meaningful life.

Each of these hits on something important, we might think; but Wolf suggests that on their own neither is quite right.

If we follow our passion, for example, what if that passion is counting individual blades of grass in different fields? What if it’s sitting on the sofa and watching repeats of The Office on TV all day? What if it’s pushing a boulder up a mountain, only for it to roll back down when we reach the top?

Though perhaps personally engaging, could lives dedicated to such pursuits really be described as significantly meaningful?

But then, on the other hand, say we commit to a cause larger than we are, like reducing global poverty.

What if our particular role in doing so involves repetitive administrative work we find utterly mind numbing? Is feeling alienated from our daily work redeemed by the larger cause? Does the larger cause suddenly render the daily drudgery meaningful, even if we are forever bored and going through the motions?

Wolf thinks not: attaching ourselves to larger causes does not guarantee meaning, but nor does meaning come from passion alone.

Rather, meaningfulness arises through a combination of the two: our lives are meaningful when we lovingly, actively engage with worthwhile projects, when subjective passion meets objective worth.

On Wolf’s view, then, there is both a personal qualitative aspect and an impersonal objective component to meaning. A meaningful life is filled with projects that offer both. She writes:

a life is meaningful insofar as its subjective attractions are to things or goals that are objectively worthwhile. That is, one’s life is meaningful insofar as one finds oneself loving things worthy of love and able to do something positive about it. A life is meaningful… insofar as it is actively and lovingly engaged in projects of worth.

For Wolf, meaning thus comes from “active engagement in projects of worth, which links us to the world in a positive way.”

Our lives are meaningful when we love what we do and when what we do matters.

Who gets to decide which projects have ‘objective worth’?

But who’s to say what matters? Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Wolf’s view is that it requires an objective standard of ‘worth’. If we enjoy deep engagement with a particular job, project, or activity, we don’t want some jury of philosophers coming along to tell us that, actually, our pursuits are all meaningless, and we should try doing something worthwhile instead.

And, really, is it even appropriate to talk of ‘objective worth’ if we do not also have a theory for the meaning of the cosmos as a whole? Weren’t the existentialists right in declaring that ​meaning is simply what we each make it​?

Wolf discusses both these concerns at length. Of course we don’t want some elitist brigade declaring that everyone’s life but their own is meaningless. Wolf is just suggesting that, in principle, some pursuits are a lot more worthwhile than others; she is not declaring precisely which.

There are probably some general guidelines we could propose, however.

The more meaningful side is likely to include a tremendous range of things, from sport, music, and art to communities, care, and relationships: anything that is legitimately useful or enhancing in some way, or that brings people together, or that allows people to fully develop, challenge, or fulfill their potential, or that honors a particular tradition or practice, or preserves a particular place or way of life.

Less meaningful activities, on the other hand, wouldn’t display any of these characteristics. Like spending all day alone counting blades of grass, or rolling a boulder up a mountain, or doomscrolling.

Wolf’s point is simply that something feeling meaningful isn’t necessarily a good guide to it being so. To really distinguish meaningful activities we need a constraint beyond ‘what personally engages me’.

Consider cases of deceit. If people participate in relationships involving betrayal, or become gripped by a conspiracy or cult, they may look back on such times as wasted or ‘meaningless’, even if they felt enormously meaningful at the time.

This suggests there is a standard by which we can judge the genuine meaningfulness of our activities, and we should be open to questioning whether what grips us truly is the real deal.

But by ‘real deal’, Wolf doesn’t have in mind some kind of eternal Platonic form of Meaning. While she thinks the activity’s source of value must be independent of our engagement with it, that doesn’t mean such value is forever set in stone. What we as a society consider to be valuable, and thus meaningful, can change and evolve.

If I were to spend all my time counting blades of grass, for instance, there probably wouldn’t be too many people today who’d find this to be a meaningful activity.

But if in the coming decades a huge lore were to develop around grass counting, if a worldwide community were to suddenly engage and develop institutions, histories, and competitions based upon the storied tradition of grass counting, then the value of the activity would be established outside my personal engagement with it.

Like any particular sport, artform, or subculture: it may start as a rather arbitrary and eccentric pastime, but emerge to become a genuine source of meaning, steeped in drama and intrigue, for millions of individuals around the world. Perhaps all those people would be delusional about its meaningfulness; perhaps not.

The takeaway is that, for Wolf, meaning arises when our activity connects to something worthwhile, when it goes beyond the occupation of the self, when it makes contact with a reality outside us, be it other beings, traditions, or values.

Of course, not everything has to be deeply meaningful. Sometimes we do things just to relax or have fun; sometimes we do things because it’s the right thing to do; sometimes we do things because we have to do them to survive, or to enable us to do other, more interesting things. A balanced life will include a whole range of activities and commitments, and probably won’t optimize for a single metric.

But if we do long for more meaning in our lives, if we feel a little alienated or bored, then Wolf suggests the formula for a remedy is relatively simple: find something to love, ensure its value does not come only from your love, and try to contribute something positive towards it.

What do you make of Wolf’s conception of meaning?

• Do you agree that meaning is a distinctive category of the good life, not reducible to happiness or morality?
• Does Wolf’s formula for meaning — lovingly engaging in projects of worth — ring true for you?
• What do you think makes an activity objectively ‘worthwhile’?
• What gives you meaning in life?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Kierkegaard On Finding the Meaning of Life
• On Living Meaningfully in a Vast Universe: Robert Nozick
• Albert Camus on Coping with Life’s Absurdity
• Thomas Nagel On Why Humor is the Best Response to Life's Absurdity
• Existence Precedes Essence: What Sartre Really Meant
• Übermensch Explained: the Meaning of Nietzsche’s ‘Superman’

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