How a meaningless life could make you happier in 2022

I want to look at the role that an awareness of death might play in our project of living more happily. Whilst self-help books typically focus on setting goals to fill your life with everything you want in order to find happiness, you’ll understand by now my approach foregoes such questionable methods. We’ll aim for something richer and less neurot

And this realization isn’t merely calming but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a “life well spent,” you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time.

Nagel agrees that if you have this expectation that there ought to be meaning, then you might experience life as absurdity. But if you stopped railing at the world for simply being what it is, the sense of angst and absurdity would go away. Life is meaningless only if you insist it be meaningful, he concludes.16 In fact, say some, “only by breaking