So Durant decided to write to the great literary, philosophical, and scientific luminaries of his day, from Mohandas Gandhi and Mary E. Woolley to H. L. Mencken and Edwin Arlington Robinson, to ask them how they found significance and fulfillment in their own lives during that tumultuous period of history. “Will you interrupt your work for a moment,” Durant begins his letter, “and play the game of philosophy with me? I am attempting to face a question which our generation, perhaps more than any, seems always ready to ask and never able to answer—What is the meaning or worth of human life?” He compiled their answers into a book, On the Meaning of Life, which was published in 1932.
Durant’s letter explores why many people of his time felt like they were living in an existential vacuum. For thousands of years, after all, human beings have believed in the existence of a transcendent and supernatural realm, populated by gods and spirits, that lies beyond the sensory world of everyday experiences. They regularly felt the presence of this spiritual realm, which infused the ordinary world with meaning. But, Durant argued, modern philosophy and science have shown that the belief in such a world—a world that cannot be seen or touched—is naïve at best and superstitious at worst. In doing so, they have led to widespread disenchantment.
In his letter, he explains why the loss of those traditional sources of meaning is so tragic. “Astronomers have told us that human affairs constitute but a moment in the trajectory of a star,” Durant writes; “geologists have told us that civilization is but a precarious interlude between ice ages; biologists have told us that all life is war, a struggle for existence among individuals, groups, nations, alliances, and species; historians have told us that ‘progress’ is delusion, whose glory ends in inevitable decay; psychologists have told us that the will and the self are the helpless instruments of heredity and environment, and that the once incorruptible soul is but a transient incandescence of the brain.” Philosophers, meanwhile, with their emphasis on reasoning their way to the truth, have reasoned their way to the truth that life is meaningless: “Life has become, in that total perspective which is philosophy, a fitful pullulation of human insects on the earth, a planetary eczema that may soon be cured.”
In his book, Durant relates the old story of a police officer who attempted to stop a suicidal man from jumping off a bridge. The two talked. Then they both jumped off the ledge. “This is the pass to which science and philosophy have brought us,” Durant says. Writing to these great minds, he sought a response to the nihilism of his time—a response to the despondent stranger who had left him speechless. Durant begged them for an answer to what makes life worth living—what drives them forward, what gives them inspiration and energy, hope and consolation.
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Durant’s questions matter today more than ever. Hopelessness and misery are not simply on the rise; they have become epidemic. In the United States, the rate of people suffering from depression has risen dramatically since 1960, and between 1988 and 2008 the use of antidepressants rose 400 percent. These figures can’t just be attributed to the increasing availability of mental health care. According to the World Health Organization, global suicide rates have spiked 60 percent since World War II. Some populations have been particularly vulnerable. In the United States, the incidence of suicide among 15- to 24-year-olds tripled in the last half of the twentieth century. In 2016, the suicide rate reached its highest point in nearly thirty years in the general population, and for middle-aged adults, it has increased by over 40 percent since 1999. Each year, forty thousand Americans take their lives, and worldwide that number is closer to a million.
What is going on?
A 2014 study by Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia and Ed Diener of Gallup offers an answer to this question. Though the study was enormous, involving nearly 140,000 people across 132 countries, it was also straightforward. A few years earlier, researchers from Gallup had asked respondents whether they were satisfied with their lives, and whether they felt their lives had an important purpose or meaning. Oishi and Diener analyzed that data by country, correlating the levels of happiness and meaning with variables like wealth, rates of suicides, and other social factors.
Their findings were surprising. People in wealthier regions, like Scandinavia, reported being happier than those in poorer ones, like sub-Saharan Africa. But when it came to meaning, it was a different story. Wealthy places like France and Hong Kong had some of the lowest levels of meaning, while the poor nations of Togo and Niger had among the highest, even though people living there were some of the unhappiest in the study. One of the most disturbing findings involved suicide rates. Wealthier nations, it turns out, had significantly higher suicide rates than poorer ones. For example, the suicide rate of Japan, where per-capita GDP was $34,000, was more than twice as high as that of Sierra Leone, where per-capita GDP was $400. This trend, on its face, didn’t seem to make sense. People in wealthier countries tend to be happier, and their living conditions are practically heavenly compared with places like Sierra Leone, which is racked by endemic disease, dire poverty, and the legacy of a devastating civil war. So what reason would they have to kill themselves?
The strange relationship between happiness and suicide has been confirmed in other research, too. Happy countries like Denmark and Finland also have some high rates of suicide. Some social scientists believe that this is because it is particularly distressing to be unhappy in a country where so many others are happy—while others suggest that the happiness levels of these countries are being inflated because the unhappiest people are taking themselves out of the population.
But Oishi and Diener’s study suggests another explanation. When they crunched the numbers, they discovered a striking trend: happiness and unhappiness did not predict suicide. The variable that did, they found, was meaning—or, more precisely, the lack of it. The countries with the lowest rates of meaning, like Japan, also had some of the highest suicide rates.
The problem many of these people face is the same one the suicidal man struggled with over eighty years ago when he asked Durant for a reason to go on. Though the conditions of his life were generally good, he nonetheless believed life was not worth living. Today, there are millions of people who join him in that belief. Four in ten Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. And nearly a quarter of Americans—about one hundred million people—do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful.
The solution to this problem, obviously, is not for the United States to become more like Sierra Leone. Modernity, though it can sap life of meaning, has its benefits. But how can people living in modern societies find fulfillment? If we do not bridge the chasm between living a meaningful life and living a modern life, our drift will continue to come at a major cost. “Everyone at times,” wrote the religious scholar Huston Smith, “finds himself or herself asking whether life is worthwhile, which amounts to asking whether, when the going gets rough, it makes sense to continue to live. Those who conclude that it does not make sense give up, if not once and for all by suicide, then piecemeal, by surrendering daily to the encroaching desolation of the years”—by surrendering, in other words, to depression, weariness, and despair.
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Such was the case with the famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. In the 1870s, around the time he turned fifty, Tolstoy fell into an existential depression so severe and debilitating that he was seized by the constant desire to kill himself. His life, he had concluded, was utterly meaningless, and this thought filled him with horror.
To an outsider, the novelist’s depression might have seemed peculiar. Tolstoy, an aristocrat, had everything: he was wealthy; he was famous; he was married with several children; and his two masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, had been published to great acclaim in 1869 and 1878, respectively. Internationally recognized as one of the greatest novelists of his time, Tolstoy had little doubt that his works would be canonized as classics of world literature.
Most people would set
tle for far less. But at the height of his fame, Tolstoy concluded that these accomplishments were merely the trappings of a meaningless life—which is to say that they were nothing at all to him.
In 1879, a despairing Tolstoy started writing A Confession, an autobiographical account of his spiritual crisis. He begins A Confession by chronicling how, as a university student and later a soldier, he had lived a debauched life. “Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder—there was not a crime I did not commit,” he writes, perhaps with some exaggeration, “yet in spite of it all I was praised, and my colleagues considered me and still do consider me a relatively moral man.” It was during this period of his life that Tolstoy began writing, motivated, he claims, by “vanity, self-interest, and pride”—the desire to acquire fame and money.
He soon fell in with the literary and intellectual circles of Russia and Europe, which had built a secular church around the idea of progress. Tolstoy became one of its adherents. But then two dramatic experiences revealed to him the hollowness of believing in the perfectibility of man and society. The first was witnessing the execution by guillotine of a man in Paris in 1857. “When I saw how the head was severed from the body and heard the thud of each part as it fell into the box,” he writes, “I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act.” The second was the senseless death of his brother, Nikolai, from tuberculosis. “He suffered for over a year,” Tolstoy writes, “and died an agonizing death without ever understanding why he lived and understanding even less why he was dying.”
These events shook Tolstoy, but they did not shatter him. In 1862, he got married, and family life distracted him from his doubts. So did writing War and Peace, which he started working on soon after his wedding.
Tolstoy had always been interested in the question of what gives life meaning, a theme that runs through his writings. Levin, who is widely considered an autobiographical representation of Tolstoy, famously wrestles with the problem in Anna Karenina. He eventually concludes that his life is not pointless: “my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.”
But soon after he completed Anna Karenina, Tolstoy took a bleaker view. The question of meaning cast a shadow over everything he did. A voice inside his head started asking—Why? Why am I here? What is the purpose of all that I do? Why do I exist? And, as the years went on, that voice grew louder and more insistent: “Before I could be occupied with my Samara estate, with the education of my son, or with the writing of books,” he writes in A Confession, “I had to know why I was doing these things.” Elsewhere in A Confession he puts the question in other ways: “What will come of what I do today and tomorrow? What will come of my entire life…Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything or do anything? Or to put it still differently: Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?” Because he could not answer the “why” of his existence, he concluded that his life was meaningless.
“Very well,” he writes, “you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière, more famous than all the writers in the world—so what?” Tolstoy felt like the prophet of Ecclesiastes, who wrote, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity! What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” The only truth we can absolutely know, Tolstoy believed, is that life ends with death and is punctuated by suffering and sorrow. We and all that we hold dear—our loved ones, our accomplishments, our identities—will eventually perish.
Tolstoy eventually found his way out of nihilism. He began by searching for people who were at peace with their lives to see where they found meaning. Most people in his own milieu—aristocrats and the literary elite—were leading superficial lives and knew nothing about life’s meaning, Tolstoy argued. So he looked beyond his own social set and was struck to realize that millions of ordinary people around him had found, it seemed, a solution to the problem that had consumed him. These “simple people,” as Tolstoy called them, the uneducated peasants, derived meaning from faith—faith in God and the teachings of Christianity.
Though Tolstoy had fallen away from religion by the time he was in university, his midlife search for meaning led him back to it. Curious about the faith that was so indispensable to the peasants, he studied various religious and spiritual traditions, including Islam and Buddhism. During that spiritual voyage, he became a practicing Christian. He first found a home in his native Russian Orthodox church, but he eventually broke away and started living according to his own stripped-down version of Christianity, which focused on adhering to Christ’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.
Tolstoy’s definition of “faith” is vague: he sees it as a fundamentally irrational “knowledge of the meaning of human life.” What’s clear, though, is his belief that faith ties an individual to something larger or even “infinite” that lies beyond the self. “No matter what answers a given faith might provide for us,” he writes, “every answer of faith gives infinite meaning to the finite existence of man, meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation, and death.” Though Tolstoy did not believe in the miracles or sacraments of the church, he found meaning in living “a life as it was meant by God to be led,” as one of his biographers puts it—which, to Tolstoy, meant a Christ-like devotion to others, especially the poor.
Completing A Confession did not mark the end of Tolstoy’s search for meaning. He continued his quest in the final decades of his life. He adopted a simple lifestyle, giving up alcohol and meat, rejecting his aristocratic titles of “Sir” and “Count,” and learning the craft of shoemaking, believing that manual labor was virtuous. He devoted much of his time to improving the plight of the peasants in his community, and even tried to give all of his property to the poor (a plan his wife bitterly rejected). He also advocated progressive ideas like the abolition of private property, pacifism, and the doctrine of nonresistance to evil. With these beliefs, Tolstoy attracted a group of disciples who followed his teachings as they would a guru’s.
At the same time, his final years were not easy. His attempt to live meaningfully upended his life. The Russian government denounced him as a radical; the Russian Orthodox church excommunicated him; and his marriage was left in ruins. Weary of constantly fighting with his wife, and yearning for an even more spiritual life, he fled their estate in October 1910, journeying by train to the Caucasus. He hoped to live the remaining years of his life in religious solitude. It was not to be: he died of pneumonia during the journey. His ideas, though, continued to make their mark on the world—and not just through his novels. His doctrine of nonresistance to evil inspired Gandhi’s political campaign in India—which, in turn, helped spark Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement.
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For Tolstoy, the meaning of life was found in faith. But many people do not believe in God or are unmoved by religious teachings. Others have faith, but are still searching for answers about how to live meaningfully here on earth. These people may not be satisfied by religion alone. Is it possible to find meaning in life without relying on faith in something infinite that gives our finite existence meaning, to paraphrase Tolstoy? For many people today, this is the question.
Tolstoy, it seems, would have answered no. But maybe there are other routes to meaning that either complement those offered by faith or, for nonbelievers, help to replace them. Maybe we can live meaningful lives even if everything for which we labor, everything and everyone we love, and everything we are and hope to be—our legacy—will one day perish and be forgotten. This is what the French novelist and intellectual Albert Camus set out to prove in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.”
It is not surpris
ing that Camus, who wrote that essay in his late twenties, would have been drawn to the problem of meaning. Unlike Tolstoy, Camus was not born into a wealthy family. His father, Lucien Camus, was a farmworker. His mother, a partially deaf and illiterate woman named Catherine, worked in a factory during World War I and later as a house cleaner. They married in 1910, the same year Tolstoy died. Three years later, Catherine gave birth to Albert in a small coastal town in Algeria called Mondovi (today Dréan). After World War I broke out, Lucien was drafted into the French army. He did not fight for long: one month later, he was wounded in the carnage of the Battle of the Marne, and soon succumbed to his injuries. Albert Camus had been alive for less than a year when his father was killed in the war.
Some sixteen years later, Camus’s life was once again interrupted. In 1930, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which in his poor Algiers neighborhood often meant death. Still a teenager, Camus was forced to grapple with his mortality and with the fragile, arbitrary hold each of us has on life. From bed, he read the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who meditated frequently on the subject—“For it is not death or pain that is to be feared,” Epictetus wrote, “but the fear of pain or death”—and, as he recovered, tried to find some significance in what he was enduring. The upside of his illness, he concluded, was that it was preparing him for the inevitable end that awaited him, that awaits us all.
By the time he returned to school, Camus had decided that life had no meaning, a position he expressed in an autobiographical story published in a literary journal called Sud: “I haven’t got anything anymore, I don’t believe in anything, and it’s impossible to live like this, having killed morality inside me. I have no more purpose, no more reason to live, and I will die.” After he enrolled at the University of Algiers, his writing improved, and he continued exploring the question of meaning by studying philosophy. He graduated in 1936. That spring, he wrote a note in his journal expressing interest in writing a “philosophical work” on “absurdity.”
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