The meaning of life is preparing to die. You want to die well. It’s the last thing you’ll ever do, so don’t screw it up. But dying well requires living well. And this leads us into the next question which, in my mind, is much more interesting because the answer is harder to get: what does it mean to live well?
The answer to that question involves a lot of jumping back and forth between how you want to live and how you want to die, because each of those informs the other. This is highly personal, won’t work for everybody, everyone’s different, etc., but you might enjoy it.
If you look at ancient philosophy, you’ll see that it’s preoccupied with “the good life”. This is in sharp contrast to modern philosophy. In modern philosophy, ethics is about conceptual analysis. The idea is that you write hundreds of pages where you fart around trying to define definitions that will define other definitions that let you define what right and wrong are so you can argue about their definitions. This is due to the professionalization of philosophy, which, in turn, is due to the trend toward specialization that has been evident since the scientific revolution. We have specialists for condensed matter physics and organic chemistry. We have specialists for welding and training German shepherd dogs. We have specialists for therapy and counseling. So surely, surely, we should also have specialists who can tell you what right and wrong are.
Ancient philosophy, however, occurred in a period when the world was less abstract. The idea that you could solve every single problem by breaking it down into a subfields and assigning experts to each subfield was unheard of. Instead, ancient ethics asked this: what is “the good life”? It’s hard to define exactly what they meant by “the good life”. Any definition I would produce would certainly not be precise enough for analytic philosophers (nothing ever is), so I’m not gonna try to be rigorous here. But I can take a vague stab at it: the good life is the life that adequately prepares you for death. This is either a tautology or close to one, but tautologies can be elucidative even if they’re logically trivial.
This leads back into how I want to die. So, what kind of life best prepares me for death? That depends on what state one wants to die in. I, personally, would like to die in a state of serenity where I feel that everything makes sense. Before I die, I want to make sure that I “get it”. That serenity is not entirely an internal thing. It’s also external, because it largely comes from the feeling of having fully expended my potential, and having done what I’m supposed to do.
This leads back into how I should live. If I winnow down that last paragraph into two heads, I get two important things. First, my life has to involve a lot of learning, deep thought, and contemplation. Second, I need to have experiences that are transformative — and “transformative experience” doesn’t necessarily mean meditating in the woods or speaking with wizened old monks or traveling some place exotic. It can also mean having a worthwhile career that demands personal growth, or raising children, or taking care of my health.
This leads back into how I want to die. I want to feel as if I no longer “owe” anything when I die. I’m still young and feel that I carry a lot on my shoulders. When I die, I want that weight to be gone. I want to feel that I said everything I should have said and did everything I should have done.
This leads back into how I should live. We come into this life with a lot of debt, in some sense. The position I am in affords me certain opportunities. We all have natural capabilities, and some people have certain gifts. If I don’t use whatever meager capabilities I have, then I wasted my life. However, there is a danger here: it is possible to become so absorbed in day-to-day coping that I lose sight of the transcendent horizon at the end of my life, which means I won’t die well.
This leads back into how I want to die. There are a lot of questions in me that need to be addressed, either by finding answers, or by making observations that dissolve the questions. The latter, ironically, turns out to happen more frequently. It is what it is. I’m a cerebral sort of person, so a big part of my energy goes into study. Little tidbits of meaning can emerge from studying computer science, or from being out and about identifying mushrooms. Insight can come from anywhere. When I die, I need those questions to be mostly answered. There must be silence in here, and the echoes must all have ceased.
You may have sensed by now that this process can go on indefinitely. I could jump back and forth between “How shall I live?” and “What state do I want to die in?” as long as I want without ever coming to a final resolution. But that’s the key: this very process of jumping back and forth from where I am now and where I’ll be when I die has to form a big part of my life, until I’m ready to die.
Thank you for your insight. I have been searching for "the meaning of life" for quite some time now and although I don't fully agree that the meaning of life is "preparing to die", reading this was beneficial to my understanding of life.
Thanks for sharing .
Mind blowing!!