Life Worth Living

Life Worth Living is a guide to finding your own answers to life’s biggest questions, based on a popular Yale class, drawing on a wide variety of examples, religions, philosophies, and historical individuals, so you can discover how you should live for maximum meaning and significance.

At a friend’s birthday party when I was 10, I was too scared to jump off the 10-meter tower in the public pool. I did, however, graduate from the 1-meter to the 3-meter diving board! Engaging with life’s big questions works in a similar way, the authors suggest. You can’t jump right from the 10-meter tower!

“What matters most? What is a good life? Which kind of life is worthy of our humanity? What [even] is true life?” These questions can make your head spin.

Equating the journey of discovering meaning to a deep-sea dive, the authors suggest a 4-layer model of life:

The autopilot level is where we take action according to our habits. “We do what we do because that’s what we do,” we might say. At the effectiveness level, we reflect on our strategies when our habits aren’t helping us reach our goals. “Is what we do getting us what we want?” we might ask. The self-awareness level is where we contrast the outside world with what we truly want on the inside and form a vision of how to unite the two. “What do we really want?” is the question. At the self-transcendence level, we assess the validity of our vision in hopes of finding truth. We muse about the question, “What is worth wanting?”

The first level happens on the plane of taking action. The other 3 are forms of reflection. To not lose our wits, we must slowly descend through the stages, then come back up with our findings, the authors suggest. So stay aware of which of the 4 stages you’re in at any given time, and gather your findings as you go along.

Having arrived at the bottom of the meaning-ocean of life, we encounter what the authors call “the Question.” It’s an umbrella term for all inquiries related to purpose. In the book, however, they offer 6 main components, each a big question in its own right: What’s worth wanting? This is about not just satisfying our own desires but making sure our vision aligns with our values, truth, and what’s right. Where are we starting from? Is what the authors call “the Walgreens vision of happiness” — living a long, healthy, happy life — really the end-all, be-all? Or might other things be more important? Who do we answer to? What are our responsibilities? Who else are we responsible for, and how big is…