What is life really about?

There is great pleasure and great pain. It makes one wonder, what can we recommend, for which part of life can we say, this is the one to live for, this is not. In moments of suffering, sometimes there comes a moment to step back and say this is not only ok, but that this is the richness of life. Something unique to life, and strongly and deeply of life, that sort of suffering is very real.

We wish no suffering on our friends. We wish no suffering on others. Yet it feels inextricable. Is there more there than meets the eye? Should we be reducing suffering?

It seems to me like a first idea that can be crossed off the list is that of life or death. Death feels too permanent, too definite in a world of such uncertainty to hold a place of value above life. And that would only be an important consideration if we had doubts about the value of living a life in the first place. Only for those with endless suffering do we tend to deeply question whether life is worth living. It seems like, generally, more life is better. I will take that as an assumption.

Then we next move to the question of how to construct this life, of which we want as much of as possible. We have already mentioned that endless suffering is the first kind of life we want to avoid. This seems intuitive, but may be worth a closer look. A life of complete suffering involves none of the (traditionally considered) benefits of joy and happiness. But how much happiness turns this switch? Does someone who lives in immense pain every day but can still the experience the love of family live a life worth living?

These questions are not meant to pry unnecessarily at hypotheticals. Rather these questions are aimed to find where our confidence lies. What life is worth living? What life should we aim to live? These two questions seem tied closely together. Interestingly enough, since the purpose here is not to find a line between lives worth and not worth living, we can focus on the positive end of the scale. What life are we sure is worth living? That answer then can give us a starting point regarding what life we should be striving for.

A reasonable next step may be to think of the farthest end of the positive spectrum. Is a life of endless joy worth living?

It is worth pausing here to think about what we mean by positive and negative. I mean here initial intuitions about lives for worthy of living and not worthy of living. These intuitions I believe to be commonly held, but may not be.

The life of endless joy seems harder to characterize than the life of endless suffering (and this may be because we underestimate the difficulty of characterizing the life of endless suffering). What would endless joy look like? The feeling of holding your child in your arms, extended infinitely? A bite of your favorite food that lasts forever? A life long orgasm?

Perhaps we can imagine that there exists a way to feel all the variety of joys in life all at once, and extended endlessly. This imagination is fine, but it gives us pause because it’s not what our intuition thinks of when it imagines its best life.

Here I jump to what I believe are a few shared intuitions. When we imagine our own best life, we think of the moments that would make up this life, and not of a general narrative of our life (I’m not sure about this one as much). (Do we think about our worst life this way? I’m not sure.). Our best life does not feel like it could have such a density of joyous moments without some relativity of feeling, without some moments that weren’t so joyous. Our best life does not feel like it could have endless joy. And the last intuition is that our best life does not feel like it should have endless joy.