YOU Make Life Worth Living

In the 1950s Fulton J. Sheen, a Roman Catholic bishop, had a popular TV series called, Life is Worth Living. Pretty lame stuff by contemporary standards but in the ‘50s we were glued to our 14 inch black and white boob tubes.

In our current, more nihilistic age, it may be worth revisiting the bishop’s theme. Absent some sort of transcendent standard, e.g. Scripture, or some extrinsic system of rewards and punishments, e.g. Heaven & Hell, what would it mean to say, “Life is worth living?”

I propose a thought experiment. Admittedly, it’s flawed, perhaps you can improve upon it (suggestions welcome), but in the interim,  it may be good enough to throw some light in our direction:

Your life is near its natural end when you are visited by an angel. Bear with me! You are given an option. You can ‘go gentle into that good night’ or you can relive your present life from the moment of conception on. 

However, there are some ground rules:

1. You will not be aware that you have lived before; everything will seem brand new to you…although you may have déjà vu moments.

2. While you will have the illusion of making free choices, in fact you will repeat every decision and relive every experience exactly as you did before. Sorry, it’s not a ‘do over’; it’s just a ‘be-over’.

After a moment’s reflection, you realize that you are being asked, not to choose a future, but to evaluate the past. Overall, did life’s joys outweigh its sorrows? 

Perhaps not. Life’s joys are fleeting, sorrows endure forever. Time is not the physician it’s been cracked up to be. Think of the 3 worst things that have happened to you in your lifetime – the pain, the fear, the loss, the sorrow, the regret.  Is there any reward on earth that would make you live through those horrors again?  

Now, you may chime in, “I got through it once. Why wouldn’t I get through it again?” You got through it because you never ceased to hope, “This too will pass, better days are coming!” You are motivated by FOMO, so you’ll climb one more mountain, you’ll ford one more stream, you’ll follow one more rainbow, until you find your dream (Sound of Music)…or not!

Then you hoped but now you know. Then you saw through a glass darkly; now you see it face to face and it ain’t pretty. Better days are not coming and what will pass is life itself. The dream you’ll find is death, oblivion. Still curious? Didn’t think so! So thank you, angel -  I’ll pass.

Then fate ups the ante: “If you think so little of the life you’ve lived, why not just erase it? That way you’ll never have experienced any of that dreaded pain, and everything will be as though you’d never lived.”

“You can do that?”

“Yes, I can. I can erase your existence retroactively. No need to have suffered. So do we have a deal?”

Hmm, this is starting to sound like the plot of a certain ‘Christmas movie’. Suddenly, you don’t feel so confident in your choice. But why? If you wouldn’t choose to relive your life, why would you choose to live it in the first place? What changed?

Ignoring the possibility of some sort of continued existence after death, you know how your present story will end. So why go through everything you’ve gone through only to end up in an urn on someone’s mantlepiece…if you’re lucky?

Yet it only takes a few seconds before you’re shouting, “No deal!”

Again, what changed? Other people. You added other people (or other sentient beings) to the consideration mix. You think about the spouse you once loved, before your divorce, and still feel affection for. You think about the children you had together. And their children. And theirs. You wouldn’t erase any of that for all the world. I mean who are you to rob these people of their own chance to suffer?

What about all the other young people you had the privilege of preparing for life in the ‘real world’? What about the folks whose needs you met though your chosen occupation? What about the friend you helped out in a crisis? The homeless man you heedlessly sp’anged? The endless bartenders and wait staff you over tipped? The struggling artist whose early work you purchased? The folks who enjoy reading your blog?

Now let’s be clear. I am not saying that any of this ‘made the world a better place; there’s no way  we could know that. We can neither control nor predict the long term consequences of our actions. A butterfly flaps it swings in Borneo…but does that make it morally liable for the weather at O’Hare?

All I’m saying is that you made certain peoples’ lives marginally better in the immediate term. Of course, you cannot know what their lives would have been like, especially longer term, if you had not interfered. Perhaps your well intentioned ‘helping hand’ kept them from ‘helping themselves’. Or maybe it enabled them to take the first tentative steps toward a better future. You’ll never know. Nor does it matter. You had to do what was right at the time.

That’s all you can control. You did what you thought best…and you would do so again…and again, and again. To quote a certain itinerant preacher (1^st century CE), “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, would give him a stone?” (Matthew 7: 9) Nor are you willing to withhold your intervention, control-group style, to see what would have happened without you. 

So while hope may be in short supply these days, we still have faith…and love. You care about the welfare of others even though you can neither control nor predict it. At most you can influence it and then only over a very, very short term.

“So no, Mr. Angel, you cannot annul my life. I’ll keep it, pain and all.” I retain the ‘naïve, childish’ faith that good intentions lead to good actions which in turn are somehow, almost magically, correlated with good ends.

I can document the myriad ways I seemed to make the world better, locally, but I have no way of knowing how my actions impacted things globally. But naïve faith, plus love, more than makes up for the loss of hope, even in this age of cynicism. 

We’re not done yet! This insight, should you choose to accept it, has philosophical implications. For one thing, it reveals the long sought-after ‘meaning of life’. Sartre said that Hell was ‘other people’; he was wrong…at least in the context of this essay.

‘Other people’ are precisely what gives life its meaning, its purpose, its value. Other people is why no ‘sane’ person would ever agree to have their life expunged. 

We all do things for ourselves every day and there’s nothing wrong with that. We enjoy them; why shouldn’t we? But we mustn’t mistake enjoyment for meaning. Enjoyment is fleeting: pleasure passes. Not so, meaning! Meaning, by definition, is atemporal, eternal. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be meaning, would it?

Being is ephemeral. Meaning is forever. ‘A’ comes and goes; so does ‘B’. But if ‘A means B’ that relationship is eternal. Of course, meanings too evolve with time, but the original meaning is never erased; new meanings are just added – as in the OED. Once A means B, A means B forever…even if later on it comes to mean C. 

In the lingo of the age, ‘enjoyment’ is a reinforcing token; it means ‘keep going’. ‘Meaning’ says ‘Stop!’ – you’re there now! Once something has ‘meaning’, it’s locked in. This is the sematic equivalent of the collapse of Schrödinger’s wave function: Meaning is measurement. Meaning is an ‘energy sink’. It is what it is, now…and evermore. No matter what the future brings, “We’ll always have Paris!” (Casablanca)

So my life is very much worth living, and yes, I’d do it all again, but what makes it worthwhile is you… i.e. everyone I’ve been able to serve, if only briefly, and oh how insufficiently and imperfectly, along the way. Thank you for the opportunity!

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Vincent van Gogh. The Red Vineyard. 1888, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. The painting mirrors the essay’s central idea that life’s value lies not in personal pleasure but in the meaning created through shared experience and service to others, even amid hardship.