Principles Behind The Meaning of Life Book

When anyone writes a book, the first thing to figure out is what the book should be about. The second part is to figure out how to tell the story. When it comes to non-fiction specifically, that entails understanding what information to include, how to convey the information, and what you want the reader to take away from the information. As with any attempt to inform and education (e.g., journalism, teaching), the conveyor has to establish a set of rules, principles, or ethics for how to approach their work.

In The Meaning of Life: A guide to finding your life’s purpose, my goal was to help people understand how and why someone feels a sense of meaning and purpose in their life by breaking down the idea and feeling of meaning into their eight principle drivers. This would entail explaining how and why life works the way that it does so that anyone could take that information and apply it to their lives to live a more fulfilled existence.

However, this is far from the first attempt to do this: The Bible, The Torah, The Quran, and other religious, philosophy, and self-help books perform similar functions. Therefore, I wanted to set rules for how to articulate this information that differentiated it from other attempts in important ways. Here are the principles that I followed when writing the book to give life advice that I believe is superior to most other books around finding your meaning and purpose in life:

• I Cannot Impart My Personal Ethics or Goals – The biggest issue with most books about life is that the author imparts his or her own personal ethics or goals into the recommendations. Of course, the goals of those books might include helping people behave in the optimal way, which would require them to recommend ethics for people’s behavior. But the problem with many recommendations is that they do not openly state the assumed ethics or goals when they make recommendations, so they might tell you to get married at a certain age, eat certain foods, or sleep for a certain amount of time under the assumption that you are living in a way that they would. So you might do the wrong thing for you because you perform the action but are not in the same situation or don’t have the same beliefs. So my first principle was not to subtly impart my own beliefs on what people should do with their life—either what they should be aiming for or how to behave.
• I Cannot Tell People How to Live – As a result of the first one, that creates a second one that I can’t, therefore, tell people how they should live their lives. Since I don’t know what their goals and ethics are, I can’t recommend the optimal behaviors for them. That means that the book will be focused on how life works so you can apply those insights to your life and see an increase in fulfillment without a specific list of actions. Yes, this does mean that the information will require someone to do some work in applying the recommendations to their situation vs. just following a list of exact steps I provide for them, but that is the trade-off entailed in not accidentally misleading someone into taking actions that won’t work for them.
• I Have to Have Evidence/Proof of All Claims – Many books on life invoke non-physical aspects, such as God, heaven/hell, the afterlife, and other aspects that cannot be scientifically proven. Because it cannot be proven, the reader would have to trust the advice on faith. I didn’t want my advice to lack evidence, so I cited over 150 sources to ensure that there was a scientific basis to all claims made. This also means that I had to explain a lot of evolutionary biology and psychology to give the backstory as to why/how each driver has an influencing factor on one’s sense of meaning and purpose in life. Yes, I was criticized by reviewers for not just telling the reader what to do, but doing that, of course, would’ve violated the first three principles. There are thousands of books promising to turn around someone’s life in a few simple steps; this was about truly understanding the meaning of life and then using the information to improve your sense of meaning.
• I Have to Be Able to Explain the Concept Completely – To master a concept, you need to know where it came from or how it came about, how it works, how you can use it, and what you can do if you run into problems. Also, you have to be able to know what life would be like without having the concept in your life. That is how each chapter became five sections: the concept’s role in all life forms, how it evolved in humans, how you can use it, what happens without it, and what happens if you are having trouble applying it. Again, not everyone might want or need an evolutionary psychology lesson, but it is necessary to help someone truly understand why they need to manage ideas like growth, experience, desire, and belief in their lives.
• I Have to Separate the Absolute from the Relative – Many things in life are relative. Someone might think something is good or right, while another person might think that it’s not. So I can’t try to be the arbiter of absolute truth in terms of things like laws, systems, etc. Life involves many, many trade-offs. So instead of acting like some things are absolutely true or right or important to you in every situation, I talk about what elements of our universe are scientifically true and separate it out from things that are open to variation, trade-offs, or subjectivity, such as ethics, goals, values, and behaviors. For example, growth is a universal characteristic of life, whereas a specific goal such as having offspring might not be a goal for you. So I had to be clear about what is universal and what will be unique to your situation.
• I Have to Be as Literal as Possible – Many books about life use stories to help convey their points, but often times they get into non-literal language that can be misinterpreted. Parables, jokes, metaphors, and other examples of non-literal language can be helpful for people who understand the meaning behind them but can confuse or mislead people who do not. So this should be written as literally as possible so someone 5,000 years from now couldn’t try to take a word I wrote and make it mean something that I did not intend. While it’s impossible to do that perfectly (because the meanings of words change over time and people interpret things differently), the goal is to be as literal as possible to minimize misunderstandings and misuse.
• I Have to Use As Simple of Terms as Possible – On the other side of a metaphor or story is technical jargon that may or may not make sense to someone new. While I am prone to specific, detailed explanations and long sentences, I knew that I had to keep the core points as simple as possible before elaborating. As such, I imparted rules like each concept had to be one word (as they became the chapter titles) and each sentence couldn’t be more than four lines of the book. I used technical terms only to allow people to be able to look up the term for more information (as part of the credibility/proof principle), but then I went back to explaining things in plain terms. Even when I coined new terms like “Positive Ethics”, I defined them as simple as possible (in that case, rules of what to do for a positive outcome—vs. “Negative Ethics” or what not to do to avoid a negative outcome).

These principles shaped the book as I wrote it—a list of eight life concepts, a detailed explanation of how they work, and then specific recommendations for how to use them in your life. The book does not tell you have to live your life, what goals to have, or what is right or wrong. It is backed by over 150 sources. It is written in plain, literal terms, and it is thorough and precise as to what is absolutely true about life and what is different for each person or depending on the situation.

So if you are looking for a book about how life works and how you can use that information to live with meaning and purpose, The Meaning of Life: A guide to finding your life’s purpose is a pretty good one to read for learning about the science of meaning instead of having a person or group impart their life philosophy onto you only for you to hope that it is right for you. It is a good option that helps you figure your life out for yourself instead of relying on someone else to know what’s best for you or telling you what worked for them. It is not a light read nor is it meant to persuade you into a way of thinking or to have a certain attitude about life; it is simply meant to explain how it works so you can succeed in your life journey.