how to think about the meaning of life

a philosophical long-read on consciousness, value, and being alone in the darkness forever

I’m always amused by the cliché that we philosophers spend our time thinking up answers to “What’s the meaning of life?”. I’ve met many philosophers, working on many questions, but I’ve never met one working on that! Anyway, I thought I’d have a try. You’ll have to bear with me, though, because I’m going to start with a much darker question — one of the darkest questions of all — about eternal disembodied solitude. After discussing several versions of this question, I’m going to argue that you probably aren’t taking the risk of eternal disembodied solitude seriously enough. Then, I’ll propose a strategy for insuring yourself against this risk, which I think offers insight into the meaning of life.

Several versions of the question

The clearest version of the eternal disembodied solitude question is: “How would I cope if death meant finding myself alone in the darkness forever?”. I bet you don’t think about this too often. There’s another version of the question, however, which children think about a lot: “What would I do if I were buried alive?”. At least, I assume this remains a central feature of childhood, alongside thoughts of quicksand and runaway steamrollers.

The ‘alone in the darkness’ scenario and the ‘buried alive’ scenario have their differences. But the point I want to make is that they track the same fear: the fear of eternal disembodied solitude. After all, anxiety about being buried alive isn’t really motivated by concerns about insufficient food and water. And even when you were a kid, you probably realised that if you were going to suffocate in the coffin, then that would’ve already happened, before you ‘woke up’ and found yourself there. As with the alone in the darkness scenario, therefore, it’s not so much that you’re afraid you wouldn’t survive being buried alive. You’re afraid you would — alone forever.

The two scenarios share more than a frightening social aspect (alone) and a frightening temporal aspect (forever). They also share a frightening locational aspect. That is, the question isn’t how you’d cope, alone forever, on a beautiful desert island. Or in the world’s best library. It’s how you’d cope, alone forever, in a place with nothing but your own thoughts to keep you occupied. As with the alone in the darkness scenario, therefore, the buried alive scenario effectively involves a fear of disembodiment.

But you might be getting annoyed. You started reading this piece hoping to find meaning in your life, and now you’re feeling claustrophobic about coffins. Maybe you think I’m being cruel, putting these thoughts in your head. If so, then we likely agree about the terror of eternal disembodied solitude. Beyond that, my guess is you think there’s some chance of it happening to you — and one reason you’re annoyed is you’d rather ignore this.

I’m not referring to the likelihood of finding yourself in a coma or solitary confinement. Neither of those meets the conditions of eternal disembodied solitude. I’m referring to my assumption that eternal disembodied solitude appears on almost everyone’s mental list of things that might happen after bodily death. This isn’t to deny that many religious people are pretty convinced they’ll be hanging out with their friends up in the clouds. Or that many other people are pretty convinced that death amounts to nothingness. Rather, it’s to assume that even the most convinced of these people wouldn’t totally discount the possibility of finding themselves alone in the darkness forever.

In part, I assume this because it’s hard to conceive of your subjective experience coming to an end. Doing so means thinking about not being able to think! This reminds me of the time my grandmother, who was a bit of a solipsist, said to me, “I’ll miss you when I die”. At the time, I found this amusing as well as moving. On reflection, however, perhaps the thing that amused me about her comment — its seemingly contradictory nature — simply reflected a standard belief about mental persistence after bodily death.

At this point, you might be tempted to mention dreamless sleep, to try to persuade me that you can conceive of going out of existence. But I don’t think this helps. Sure, you’re convinced that you sleep. And sure, you’re convinced that, at least sometimes, when you sleep, you don’t dream. But are you really willing to depend on that, here? That is, are you willing to ignore the possibility that maybe you’re forgetting your dreams — and that any machines that would tell you otherwise might lack full insight into your subjective experience? And are you willing to accept dreamless sleep as a sufficiently relevant analogy here? I mean, maybe you are convinced that your subjective experience can sometimes be ‘paused’, but is that enough to convince you it can be ended, forever?¹

Perhaps it is enough, for you. Perhaps it is for most people. If my assumptions are off, then remember I’m a philosopher, rather than a poker player or an experimental thanatologist! But if you think there is some likelihood that bodily death leads to eternal disembodied solitude, then don’t you think it’s reckless to ignore that? Do you really want to bury your head in the sand about the risk of having your head buried in the sand, forever?

In this context, I’m going to turn to three strategies for coping with eternal disembodied solitude. And if you think I’m crazy for continuing to obsess about this, I promise we’ll get to the meaning of life soon.

Two negative strategies for coping with eternal disembodied solitude

I’ll begin by dismissing two obvious ‘negative’ strategies: 1) planning your escape; and 2) planning your suicide. These are negative strategies in that they accept the premise that there’s no good way of experiencing eternal disembodied solitude. They also, however, miss the target. Take the first strategy. Why not spend a little time on Earth gaming out some escape options? Nice thought, but the question rules it out. We’re not asking, “How would I cope if death meant finding myself alone with only my own thoughts, until I managed to escape this scenario?”. Perhaps you think that’s a better question! But it can’t be eternal disembodied solitude, if it’s not eternal. And it’s eternal disembodied solitude we’re talking about.

The same applies to the ‘planning your suicide’ option. Indeed, in the context of eternal disembodied solitude, suicide is probably best conceived as a form of escape. A further problem arises, however. What would it mean to kill yourself if you’d already experienced bodily death? To rephrase Harlan Ellison, if you have no mouth, you cannot scream.² What about mental suicide, then? Perhaps the closest thing would be putting yourself in a persistently oblivious mental state. And perhaps you think this would be a valuable option for someone experiencing eternal disembodied solitude. After all, the ‘nice’ way this strategy plays out involves finding yourself in a shallow zen-like existence, in which deep concerns about your nightmarish situation simply don’t arise. And you spend eternity swamped in the soft somewhat-awareness of perpetual peace.

Many people who experience a ‘shallow’ existence during their bodily lives do not find themselves lost in perpetual softness, however. I know little about the range of disorders that compromise the sense of self, but I know I wouldn’t want to suffer one. Not all such disorders come with the traumatic distress that typically accompanies schizophrenia, but it seems clear that, minimally, disorders that involve a ‘shallowing’ of personhood generally give rise to deep anxiety. Therefore, if you’re persuaded that a mental suicide strategy is coherent and feasible, then you’d better account for the risk of a torturous outcome.

A more positive strategy for coping with eternal disembodied solitude

I’m now going to advance a more positive strategy, however. This strategy sets aside the goal of a shallow existence, in favour of the goal of a deeper one. It hinges on the idea that an obvious way of preparing for an existence in which you have only your own thoughts for company, is to make your thoughts as interesting as possible.

This strategy is more positive, therefore, than the previous strategies, in that it doesn’t depend on the premise that there’s no good way of experiencing eternal disembodied solitude. It’s also more practicable, and less risky. It’s more practicable in that it’s difficult to know what steps you could take to put yourself in a persistently oblivious mental state. Whereas to make your thoughts as interesting as possible, you simply start by reading the works of Aristotle, then go on from there.³ And regarding riskiness: sure, it’s possible you could cause yourself traumatic distress by studying too hard, but that seems like the side effect of a poor studying technique, rather than a constitutive feature of the end-state the technique is targeted at.

So far, this strategy is in line with Adam Smith’s argument that all children should receive a good enough education to ensure that, even if they end up doing drudge work, their adult minds remain agile and resilient to the dangers of monotony. There’s a problematic difference, however, between spending some of your limited bodily lifetime in an unstimulating job, and being alone with your own thoughts forever. Remember, in the case of eternal disembodied solitude, you wouldn’t be on the island, and you wouldn’t be in the library! You wouldn’t be able to go home from the production line, at the end of a shift, to top up your knowledge by reading a new book. No: in the eternal darkness, you’d never have access to any new external information. At best, you’d have the content of your mind as it was just before your body died.

I say, “at best”, because if it were the case that the mind could survive bodily death, then that wouldn’t rule out the possibility of bodily death causing damage to the persisting mind. Thankfully, however, that possibility has limited relevance here. The scenario we’re dealing with is one in which your mind is working sufficiently well to be terrified by eternal disembodied solitude. And it must be sufficiently ‘your mind’ that has survived, because if it isn’t, then that’s a separate matter for a separate dark question. Let’s work, therefore, from the baseline that, in the situation of eternal disembodied solitude, you retain a significant amount of the pre-death content of your mind — whilst accepting that any new mental content you can access, in this situation, must have been generated by you.

Perhaps this doesn’t seem too problematic. We generate new mental content every waking minute! If you were to read this sentence a hundred times, then each time you’d generate new mental content, even if only in the sense of having thoughts that you couldn’t have had previously, because they are ‘new’ in a temporal sense. But the kind of content we’re looking for here — the kind of content that would enable you to cope with eternal disembodied solitude — requires much greater richness. In short, I’m arguing that to insure yourself against the risk of eternal disembodied solitude, it’s not only that you need to take in a vast quantity of interesting information, during your time on Earth. You also need to work hard on how to think about such information, such that it can generate ongoing interest for you.

Now, some people worry that AIs would ‘stagnate’ if they ran out of training data. That if there came a time in which AIs had been trained on all the existing human-generated text, then the only option would be turn to AI-generated text — but that the loop-like nature of such an approach would lead to a debasement of AI capacities. I don’t know enough about AIs to know how much of a problem this is for them. But I’m confident that humans don’t have this problem. This is because humans clearly have the natural capacity to generate and access emergent value from existing mental content. And also because we can work on getting better at this.

Consider the additional value a child can derive from a poem, when they realise that its depiction of a running horse represents the passing of time. Then, consider the additional value the child can derive from the poem, when they learn that the inclusion of what feels like an ‘extra’ line at the end of third stanza revolutionised previous poetry-writing practice. Finally, consider the additional value the child can derive from the poem, when they go on to write their own multi-layered horse poem. In other words, even children have the capacities to perceive, to parse, to deliberate, to theorise, to innovate, to combine, to create, and to do so again and again, even on limited input. These capacities combine to form a distinctive human gift! And the application value of this gift isn’t restricted to deriving additional experiential value from previous acquaintance with complex aesthetic goods, like poems, or with deep philosophical texts, like those by Aristotle. It also works with sports scores, and soap operas, and squares, and trees, and hats, and the colour red.

This gift isn’t simply a distinctive feature of being human, therefore. It’s a deeply valuable one. It can enable us to access knowledge and achievement, and other basic things that are objectively and irreducibly good for humankind. It can enable us to access valuable subjective feelings like happiness and satisfaction and fulfilment. I’ve argued here that it can provide us with insurance against the risk of eternal disembodied solitude. And I’m now going to argue that it also can give us insight into the meaning of life.

Towards a theory of the meaning of life

I’ll admit I’ve always had problems with the “What’s the meaning of life?” question. One of these problems is that its obvious interpretations seem overly reductive. I mean, you can interpret the question as “Why are we here?”, and offer some scientific or religious answer. And you can interpret it as “What gives human life its moral value?”, and offer whatever ‘other-regarding’ answer you usually offer when someone asks why murder is wrong. But neither of these interpretations seems quite right, partly because they reduce the question away from its ordinary implications.

A more ordinary interpretation, by contrast, could take the ‘meaning’ of life to refer to the ‘point’ of life — in the teleological sense of some requirement everyone should meet before bodily death. On a liberal pluralist view, the question could therefore be aimed at determining all the many different sufficient ways a person can spend their life, as to make it ‘well spent’. This is a big question! But I’m happy to argue that making your thoughts interesting enough to cope with eternal disembodied solitude — and maybe even just trying hard to achieve this — counts as one of these ways.

One route to concluding this would be to argue that Earthly life can viewed as a puzzle or game, which we need to interpret and solve. On this argument, ‘making your thoughts interesting enough to cope with eternal disembodied solitude’ is analogous to the religious take on which the aim of Earthly life is to become fit for heaven. As someone who loves games, I’m drawn to this idea.

But it’s a much broader argument I want to advance here, on which ‘making your thoughts as interesting as possible’ is simply a good enough way to spend your days. What’s more, it seems as if this might be a way that’s open to most of us, regardless of our skills and dispositions, and the conditions in which we find ourselves. That is, not everyone can succeed in one of the more obvious ways of making a life count as ‘well spent’: raising a child, for instance, or finding a cure for a disease.⁴ But surely most of us can make our thoughts more interesting — and maybe even, perhaps by definition, as interesting as possible.

There are wide Earthly benefits to living your life in such a way, too. First, making your thoughts as interesting as possible would surely come with immeasurable positive externalities: such a project could benefit almost everyone you met! Ok, what’s interesting to you might not be so interesting to me. But people who are interested in things are enthusiastic and innovative and fun. Moreover, the subjective focus of ‘making your thoughts sufficiently interesting to cope with eternal disembodied solitude’ doesn’t rule out the idea that, for your thoughts to count as ‘interesting’, some minimal objective conditions must be met.

That is, if the outcome of your attempt is that you are myopic or incoherent, or that you are obsessed with mundane or evil matters, then your attempt has failed! It has failed because whatever these thoughts are that occupy you, ‘interesting’ seems a relevant description only in a flimsy sense. But also because it seems likely that, over eternity, such thoughts would be of less use — to anyone — than thoughts that are ‘interesting’ in the thicker sense of tracking some objective value, whether scientific or moral or aesthetic. Now, this isn’t to renege on my liberal-pluralist acknowledgement of the many different ways of making a life ‘well spent’! Or my implication that there are many different ways for existence to seem ‘interesting’ to people experiencing it. It’s simply to accept that being human comes with some limitations, both bad and good, which set prerequisites on the value of our chosen activities.

Second, such a strategy could also provide you with increased personal strength against Earthly challenges. I don’t want to make the insensitive suggestion that making your thoughts as interesting as possible could provide insulation against suicidal tendencies. But Adam Smith’s argument surely holds, and it applies whether you’re in a queue or solitary confinement. Perhaps it’s a caricature that innovative thinkers cope better in prison — whether this caricature depends on the idea that such people are drawn to using their time productively in the creation of art objects or philosophical texts, or on the idea that contemplation provides space for escape. But it’s good to know interesting things, and it’s good to know how to think about them! Spending your days cultivating such a way of being doesn’t just make for a good life, it makes for a more satisfying one.

I’ll finish by acknowledging that, of course, making your thoughts as interesting as possible might not suffice to make eternal disembodied solitude bearable. In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Immortal, the people who’ve drunk the elixir of life are found slumped in the sand, mute and slug-like. Although these ‘immortals’ concluded many centuries ago that “there is no more complex pleasure than thought,” and although they are completely lost in their own minds, the only thing they want is an ending to their existence. And I don’t deny that you would long for an ending, too — at least sometimes — if you found yourself alone in the darkness.

I also don’t deny the likelihood that most people would, eventually, be driven mad by such an existence. This doesn’t diminish the value of searching out a strategy to prevent such an outcome, however. Neither does it diminish the value of the temporary ‘success’ of such a strategy, even if its genuine success could not be temporary. That is, whether madness is staved off for a day, or for a millennium, the temporary continuation of a person’s healthy mental life is valuable in itself. It’s valuable in a way analogous to the way in which torture is made no less bad by the fact that the tortured person eventually dies. These things matter, in large part, because we are conscious beings; they matter because our value, in large part, derives from our consciousness.

Regardless, therefore, of whether we will experience eternal disembodied solitude, and regardless of whether we will cope with it, there’s something to be taken from the way in which the ‘making your thoughts interesting’ strategy is aimed at defanging the horror of such a scenario. It’s a strategy that celebrates the difficult idea that, even in the worst conditions, being self-aware can be more than bearable. Perhaps it’s what we should want.

1. A further strong objection lies in the seeming truth that you didn’t have subjective experience before you were born. To the extent that my ‘dreamless sleep’ response requires a top-up to deal with this objection, I’m happy to depend on another ‘non-relevant analogy’ claim, and argue that subjective experience being bounded at one end doesn’t suffice to necessitate it also being bounded at the other.

2. In this piece, I’m happy to depend on the idea that it’s hard to rule out the possibility that, naturally, our minds persist after bodily death. But Ellison’s short story, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, leads us to consider the possibility of such a situation (and other related nightmarish situations) being imposed on us by a powerful bad actor.

3. I’m aware that another cliché associated with philosophers is that we always argue that doing philosophy is the answer to all problems! But don’t worry, I’ll qualify my mention of Aristotle, below.

4. Of course, my hope is that helping to protect you against the risk of eternal disembodied solitude is a way in which I can make my own life ‘well spent’.