A big question on the internet—especially between the religious and atheist communities—is where morality comes from. The debate stems from the fact that the former think that you need religion/God to have morality and the latter think it comes from not wanting to hurt people. But, from my research for the book, The Meaning of Life: A guide to finding your life’s purpose, I found an underlying question: what are values, and how do they affect meaning?
The reason for this underlying question is that ethics are rules for how to behave in relation to yourself and others. To be exact, they are rules to live cooperatively in society by minimizing harm. Interestingly, I disagree with both sides of the above argument because ethics evolved from life becoming social as a means to increase their survivability, meaning to live cooperatively you had to not harm each other. It’s neither something divine per se nor something logically derived per se (though both are still possible to be the source of anyone’s specific set of ethics; it’s just that neither are where they directly came from). But there are more complex ethics in modern times than just, “Don’t kill each other,” so unpacking the whole story is important to understanding them but also to understanding meaning in life.
As discussed in the book and across this blog, in a single word, the meaning of life is growth. Every living organism’s existence is defined by growth, whether it be by cell division, reproduction, physical growth, or other forms such as social or spiritual growth. The reason is that, as Darwin so eloquently explained, survival is defined as not dying long enough to reproduce and carry on your genes. But the point is to grow, reproduce, and keep growing (through your kin) as long as you can until you (and, possibly, your blood line) die. That’s the point, and so your entire meaning in existence comes from the various forms of growth you can experience, from getting taller, faster, and stronger to attracting a mate, growing your family, making new friends, improving your skills, or have more life experiences like traveling around the world or eating new foods. It’s the growth in your life that gives it meaning and significance to you.
So that’s meaning, which dovetails into values. Values are anything that you deem to be significant or important in your life. The most important thing in your life—assuming mental health and no threats to close relatives or friends—is your own life. That’s why harm to yourself is generally a bad thing and you seek to avoid harm and pain as much as humanly possible. And, as I mentioned, you value growth because growth makes you better. Whether it’s the next life event or even the next YouTube video (yes, unfortunately your dopamine can be “hacked” and you can get addicted to experiencing a flurry of new visual experiences through social media), you’re looking for ways that expand or improve your life experience. So you value things that are beneficial to you and don’t value things that do nothing or, worse, harm you. Money, fame, love, resources, friends, family, etc. are all things that people can or do value, while things like death, theft, etc. are things that people do not value very much.
And that’s where ethics come from: if you value something, you want to set rules in social situation where those things are protected and their existence maintained or fostered/improved. And that’s how we get rules—I value my life, so I set a rule that you can’t kill me. You value your life, so you want a rule that I can’t kill you. Humans evolved the biological ethic of fairness so that we could live together, therefore we agree to not kill each other as a rule that’s fair to both parties. And that’s how ethics evolved. They come from values, which represent the significance, importance, and meaning we assign to anything and everything in our reality.
So how do you use this information to live a more meaningful life? It might be obvious, but step one is to figure out what you like and/or what you deem to be important or significant. If you love your family, you will want to uphold family values. If you like your bike or car, you will spend time, money, and effort to maintain it and possibly have rules for how to treat it like not having a friend consume food around it. You set the rules to protect what you value so that your life experience is more optimal.
This technique is just one of many you can use to find where your meaning in life comes from, but it’s a very useful one. It has some flaws, specifically when used by people with low self-esteem, as they do not value themselves as much as they do others and so they may conclude that their life is meaningless. Now, you can help that person break that negative thinking using the fairness ethic I mentioned earlier because if they think that everyone has value, then why are they the one exception? That’s not fair. It’s a good way to break that train of thought. But outside of that, the values you hold are good indicators of what gives you meaning because it’s an indicator that you assign meaning to it. If you like cars, world travel, your job, and your child, they are what you value and, therefore, you can spend time having experiences related to them to foster more meaning in your life. If, however, you hate your job, your acquaintances (it’s hard to call them your friends if you hate them!), your place of residence, and your diet, then it seems like you are living against your values and you should figure out how to change your life circumstances to live more in line with them so that you can feel happier and more fulfilled.
And that’s the point of this post: your life will be better if you find what you value in life and live in accordance with those values so that you do not fall prey to nihilistic thoughts about what the point of anything is since you are miserable all the time experiencing things that you don’t like. Remember that if you don’t like your life, it’s up to you to change it. Move, get another job, make new friends, try new hobbies…there are literally an infinite number of changes you can make large and small to get your life closer to the way you want it to be. Some people value novelty and so they change their hairstyle regularly and are always looking for new movies and music. Others value time with family and so they’ll work hard to provide and then get home as soon as possible to be with them. You need to ask yourself what you value and spend your life in ways that you deem to be significant and valuable so that you feel that sense of meaning in your life. When you feel that what you’ve done with your life has value, then you’ll feel like your life was worth living. Using the word “worth” in that context is no coincidence—you spend your life on what has value to you so that it is worth it. So find what you value, and live a valuable life!