“He who seeks meaning finds nothing but contradiction and nonsense,” Hanley writes. “Don’t think about the person [you] want to be, just be that person.”21 Don’t try to find the meaning of life—just create your own meaning.

We want to find meaning in things but the universe does not cooperate. We are all like Sisyphus in the Greek myth, rolling the rock up the hill only to see it inevitably roll back. We try to do good for the people we love, but what we do never lasts, nor do they. To Camus, death is not a gateway into another life but a “closed door.”

To get at our condition more accurately, we should ask about joy, fulfillment, and satisfaction in life. Are we achieving those things? The thesis of this chapter is that we have much thinner life satisfaction than we want to admit to researchers or even to ourselves. On the whole, we are in denial about the depth and magnitude of our discontent.

In hospitals the seriously ill are, not surprisingly, quite willing to talk to the clergy. Even those who have no belief in God or the afterlife feel compelled to examine themselves, to ask, “Have I been loving enough to my friends and family? Have I been generous enough with my money? Have I continually postponed changes I knew should be made in m

At the end of his book What Does It All Mean? philosopher Thomas Nagel wonders if the “Meaning-capital-M” question comes from too great a sense of our own importance.1 He proposes that since “the grave is [life’s only] goal, perhaps it’s ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously.” It should be enough to simply take life as it comes and enjoy it as

If you see a large sailboat out on the water moving swiftly, it is because the sailor is honoring the boat’s design. If she tries to take it into water too shallow for it, the boat will be ruined. The sailor experiences the freedom of speed sailing only when she limits her boat to the proper depth of water and faces the wind at the proper angle. In

given the secular view of the universe, the conclusion of love or social justice is no more logical than the conclusion to hate or destroy. These two sets of beliefs—in a thorough-going scientific materialism and in a liberal humanism—simply do not fit with one another. Each set of beliefs is evidence against the other. Many would call this a deepl

Theses and propositions should be rationally tested for both inner consistency and alignment with what we know about reality. We should have as many good reasons for what we believe as possible. However, there is both an objective pole and a subjective pole to knowledge.

How, then, can we tell if a human being is good or bad? Only if we know our purpose, what human life is for. If you don’t know the answer to that, then you can never determine “good” and “bad” human behavior. If, as in the secular view, we have not been made for a purpose, then it is futile to even try to talk about moral good and evil.