The Meaning of Life

by The School Of Life

  Although nepotism is genuinely misplaced at work, some version of nepotism is extremely important in our emotional lives. However competent and impressive we might be in some areas, there will inevitably be many points at which we are distinctly feeble, and where we urgently need at least a few people to be patient with our failings and follies; to give us a second chance (and a third and a fourth) and to stay on our side even though we don’t really deserve it. Good families aren’t blind to our faults; they just don’t use these faults too harshly against us.

  Knowledge

  Our family members are probably the only people in the world who ever deeply understand key parts of us. Perhaps we don’t always get on better with them than with other people. They might not know the details of our current friendships or the precise state of our finances. But they have a knowledge of the underlying atmosphere of our lives that others will almost certainly lack.

  When we make new acquaintances in adult life, we are necessarily meeting relatively late on in our respective developments. We might learn the broad outline of their childhood, but we won’t know what the holiday caravan or the beach house were really like; we won’t understand the details of the jokes, the smells, the textures of the carpets or the favourite foods, or the finer-grained aspects of the emotions in circulation.

  With family members, the knowledge tends to be the other way round. They might not know too much about our present and they weren’t necessarily ideally wise or intelligent witnesses, but they were there – which gives them a definitive edge in grasping a great share of who we might be. Relationships in adult life are often complicated by a lack of intimate knowledge of the past. If we had been the brother or sister of the loud, domineering figure we meet for the first time over dinner, we would have understood that they were still, at root, trying to be heard by their inattentive mother. As a result, we would know the perfect response (‘I’m listening now’) that would instantly have calmed them down. If we had shared a bath with the tough, exacting chief financial officer at work when we were three, we would know that his highly rigorous, inquisitorial approach (which is so off-putting) was an attempt to stave off the chaos that surrounded him at home after his parents’ messy divorce. The full facts would make us much more ready to be patient and generous.

  Safe strangeness

  One of the reliable horrors, but also profound advantages, of families is that they force us to spend time around people we would otherwise never know about, thought we wanted to meet, or imagined we could get along with.

  Our friendships and professional networks are hugely but harmfully efficient at keeping us closely tied to a particular age, income and ideological bracket. We subtly yet firmly expel all those who do not flatter our world view. Family life does the opposite. It is because of the unique structure of a family that an 82-year-old woman and a 4-year-old boy can become friends or that a 56-year-old dentist and an 11-year-old schoolgirl can have an in-depth conversation about tyre pressure or splash each other at the beach.

  The family creates an environment in which there is enough safety to allow for encounters with radical strangeness. A brother-in-law will bring us into contact with life in the Russian diamond market; the university researcher who has just published a paper on the carbon cycle in the Takayama forests of Japan gets to sit down for lunch with an accountant specialising in insolvency cases. And in family settings, points of connection end up being found despite all the obvious differences. We do the dishes with someone whose political views are pretty much the opposite of our own but discover we agree about how to rinse glasses properly. We rescue the picnic from an unexpected downpour with someone who earns 83 times more than us serving as our loyal assistant. Prompted by our nieces and nephews, we get into an adult vs. child water gun fight, supported by a cousin whom our friends would dismiss as a long-haired loser but whom we realise is great at spotting an opportunity for an ambush.

  Families, at their best, hold out against generational segregation: we get to hear the political views of a great-aunt and encounter convictions that were widespread in 1973. We receive an update on the dramas of the junior hockey league; a younger cousin is agonising over school exams and tentatively exploring what they might like to do after turning 21; an uncle has recently retired and is trying to come to terms with a life without work; at the funeral of a grandparent there is an 18-month-old niece crawling around, and we are temporarily connected with the world of changing nappies and messy spoon feeding.

  So often, otherness – other stages of life, other attitudes, other outlooks – are presented to us in tricky guises that make it hard for us to engage with them confidently. It is not surprising, or intrinsically shameful, that we are often awkward around people who seem to be quite unlike us, but our picture of them (and hence of ourselves) is thereby drastically impoverished and inaccurate. When family life goes well, on the other hand, we are exposed – at first hand, and in a warm way – to ranges of human experience that might otherwise only be presented to us in caricatured and frightening styles in the course of our independent lives.

  Parenthood

  Most of our lives are spent in situations of numbing sterility. There is usually no option but to conform and obey impersonal rules. In our work, we don’t generally create anything of particular wonder or interest. We don’t know how to paint or to play Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 in B flat minor. We can’t personally manufacture an iPhone; we don’t know how to extract oil from the ground.

  And yet, without being conscious of the specifics, we are at points capable of doing something properly miraculous: we can make another person. We can conjure up the limbs and organs of a fellow creature. We can create a liver; we can design someone else’s brain; we can – by ingesting a mixed diet perhaps including bananas, cheese sandwiches and ginger biscuits – make fingers; we can connect neurons that will transmit thoughts about the history of the Ancient Persians or the workings of the dishwasher. We can choreograph the birth of an organic machine that might still be going close to a hundred years from now. We can be the master coordinator and chief designer of a product more advanced than any technology and more complex and interesting than the greatest work of art.

  Having a child definitively refutes any worry about our lack of creativity and dismantles (at least for a while) the envy we might otherwise feel about the inventiveness of others. They may have written a stirring song, started and sold a bioengineering company or plotted an engaging novel. But we will have created the oddest yet most inspiring work of art and science around: one that is alive; one that will develop its own centres of happiness and secrecy; one that will one day do its homework, get a job, hate us, forgive us, end up being, despite itself, a bit like us and, eventually, make humans of its own who can spawn themselves into perpetuity.

  However much they may resent one another, grow apart or be worn down by the humdrum nature of family life, parents and children are never entirely able to get past the supernatural sequence of events that connects creators and created. Because two people met fifteen years ago in a friend’s kitchen, liked the look of one another, swapped phone numbers and went out for dinner, there is now – across the table – a being with a particular sort of nose, a distinctive emotional temperament and a way of smiling that (as everyone remarks) strikingly echoes that of a dead maternal grandfather.

  Parenting demands that one address the greatest, founding philosophical question: what is a good life? As we go about answering it in our words and actions over long years, we will know that we have been spared the one great fear that otherwise haunts us and usually manifests itself around work: that of not being able to make a difference. There will be no danger of lacking impact, only of unwittingly exerting the wrong kind. We will be the biographers, coaches, teachers, chefs, photographers, masters and slaves of our new charges.

  Our parental work will lend us the opportunity to show our worst, but also our best, selves in action. It is the particular words we find, the touch o
f our hands, the encouraging look only we will be able to give, the swerve towards lenience or the brave defence of principles that will make a decisive difference to the sorrows and joys of another human being. Who we are every day, the specific individuals we will have matured into, will have an unparalleled power to exert a beneficial influence on somebody else’s life. In our roles as parents, we will be terrified, exhausted, resentful, enchanted, but forever spared the slightest doubt as to our significance or our role on the earth.

  iii. Work

  Authenticity

  The goal of professional life is to do work that is deeply in line with our real selves, that isn’t merely about earning our way; that – although it may sometimes be hard and filled with frustrations – answers to the distinctive movements and characters of our own souls. Work that, as we put it, feels properly authentic.

  There can be no generalisations about what authentic work will actually require us to do. A job may, for instance, ask us to stick with a set of almost intractable mathematical problems for a long time. This might sound awful to some people, but we may powerfully enjoy the long, slow sense of nibbling away at a major task, trying out many options before landing on an especially good solution. But perhaps authentic work will involve making many urgent and decisive financial interventions in a fast-moving, somewhat chaotic, environment. While this might induce panic in some, for others, calmer circumstances would be hellish. Or it could be that, to feel authentic, we need our work to involve a subordinate, supportive role where we can be admiring of, and loyal to, someone else who is in command – a pleasure stemming back, possibly, to the satisfaction we had as a child around an older, quite bossy, but very impressive sibling.

  What makes work authentic is not a particular kind of task; it has nothing to do with making pots or being a carpenter (jobs often superficially associated with the idea of authenticity). What makes work authentic is the deeply individual fit between the nature of our role and our own aptitudes and sources of pleasure.

  One of the benefits of having identified authentic work is that we will substantially be freed from envy. There will always be someone doing a job that pays better, that has higher public status or more glamorous fringe benefits. But, we stand to realise, there is no point yearning for such a role, because it would not fit what we know of the distinctive timbre of our own character.

  The other benefit to finding work that feels authentic is that it changes our relationship to the modern ideal of achieving work–life balance. There is a degree of pessimism about work within this fashionable concept, for it implies a need to shield life, the precious bit, from the demands of work, the onerous force. But work connected in quite profound ways to who we really are is not the enemy of life: it is the place where we naturally find ourselves wanting to go in order to derive some of our deepest satisfactions.

  Meaningful work

  We are taught by economics to think of ourselves as, for the most part, selfish creatures. It can seem as if what we primarily want from work is money. What is far more striking is the extent to which we require work to be – as we put it – ‘meaningful’. A job can pay well and offer immense prestige, but, unless it is meaningful, it may eventually stifle us and crush our spirits.

  What do we mean by ‘meaningful’ work? It is work that helps others; that has a role to play in making strangers happy. For all that we think of ourselves in darkly egoistic terms, we long for our labours either to reduce the suffering or to increase the pleasure of an audience. We crave a sense that we have left a little corner of the world in slightly better shape as a result of our intelligence and strength. Some jobs fit this requirement with ease; the nurse and the cardiac surgeon are in no doubt as to the meaningful impact of their tasks. But there are less dramatic yet equally soul-warming forms of meaning to be found in a range of less obvious jobs: in sanding someone’s floor; in making efficient toothpaste dispensers; in clearing up the accounts; in delivering letters; in teaching someone backhand.

  For most of our lives, we are helpless to change circumstances for the better. We are at the mercy of vast impersonal forces over which we have no say. We cannot change the outcome of an election; we cannot prevent a friend making an unfortunate marriage; we cannot resolve the tensions of global politics. But at its best, work pushes against this. In a limited arena, we have agency. We can ensure that someone receives a package on time, understands calculus, eats a well-grilled chicken or sleeps in crisply ironed bedlinen. We can trace a connection between the things we have to do in the coming hours and an eventual modest but real contribution to the improvement of humankind.

  What separates a good day from a bad one is not necessarily that we have been without stress or have returned home early. It is that we have derived a tangible impression of having made a difference to the lives of others. It turns out that it is simply not enough to make only ourselves happy.

  Teamwork

  We are all severely limited creatures. We can only ever become good at a few things, and we can only apply ourselves properly for a certain number of hours each day; we can keep just a select number of issues in view at any point. And although a working life can feel quite long, we only have three or four decades of high-quality effort in us – a blink of an eye in the larger sweep of history.

  Ideally, however, the structure within which we do our work moves the balance in an opposite direction: it radically expands upon individual strength and capacity. When we work alongside others (either as the director of combined labour or as a member of a team), our collective powers are extended way beyond anything that one fragile being could ever achieve.

  The team is far stronger, wiser, more intelligent and more capable than the people involved within it can ever be, considered one by one. We massively exceed our own strength. In the ideal team, we grasp exactly what we contribute but also how much the project benefits from what others bring to it. However annoying our colleagues may be, our irritation with them is soothed by an awareness that it is precisely their differences that make them adept at particular moves we would be incapable of, and that justifies the unusual efforts we have to make to get along with them. We accept that it is no surprise when we don’t like certain types at the office, yet it is via work that we can learn to appreciate their merits in a way we never would in a purely social setting. Through teamwork, our egoism is submerged within a bigger loyalty: we are held together by a shared goal that everyone knows they could never accomplish in isolation.

  Our efforts are not even constrained by the limitations of a single working lifespan. In an important sense we cheat death, because our contribution lives on in the efforts and ambitions of our successor members. The best teams reverse the baneful fundamentals of the human condition: through collaboration, they replace the competitive war of all against all; they substitute collective strength for individual weakness; they turn the brevity of our lives into endeavours that outlast us.

  Professionalism

  One of the most welcome aspects of work is that we do not, in its vicinity, need to be fully ourselves. Most work demands that those who participate in it behave ‘professionally’, which means that we are not asked to bring the entirety of our characters to the fore. Even though we may be tempted by all kinds of emotions internally, we know we must handle ourselves with calm and reserve – which is not the limitation it may sound like. Sometimes it can be the greatest freedom to have to repress some of what we are.

  PAUL CÉZANNE, Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, c. 1887.

  The fact that Cezanne could be a rude and difficult person does not detract from his beautiful, harmonious paintings: work gives us all the opportunity to sublimate the trickier parts of our personalities.

  A certain collective lack of honesty at work can be an intense relief after too long in a domestic atmosphere where everyone feels it is their duty to be the frank and uncensored correspondent of every passing whim. We have the chance to edit ourselves. Our work need not bear the imprin
t of too much of our human reality.

  According to his closest companions, Paul Cézanne was often prickly, irritable and rude. Under the sway of depressed moods, he could grow tyrannical and mean. But none of this was obvious from his work. If we were to judge him from his labours alone, we would see him as deeply patient, confident and mature, with a powerful sense of harmony and balance and a constant empathy for other humans and for nature itself. In a sense, Cézanne’s work was better than he was. This is perhaps a definition of what all work can be when it goes well: a more elevated version of the person who created it.

  This does not just hold true of artistic work. The legal documents sent around the office may bear none of the panic, emotional turmoil and questionable habits of the person who put them together. The shoe shop, with its hushed atmosphere and elegant logo, shows none of the unreasonableness and peculiarity of those who serve in and designed it. The dentist, in her white jacket, is no longer the awkward person she felt herself becoming over the weekend. Work gives us a chance, rare within the overall economy of our lives, to give precedence to our better natures.

  Order

  The wider world will always be a mess. But around work, we can sometimes have a radically different kind of experience: we get on top of a problem and finally resolve it. We bring order to chaos in a way that we rarely can in any other area of life.

  The order and harmony of a Zen Buddhist garden. Work can offer the sort of structure and discipline that can give us some refuge from the chaos of the wider world.

  The Zen Buddhist monks of medieval Japan had an intuitive understanding of this kind of benefit to work. They recommended that, in order to achieve peace of mind, members of a monastery regularly rake the gravel of their intricately plotted and bounded temple gardens around Kyoto. Within the confines of a large courtyard space, the monks could bring total coherence and beauty to fruition. It wasn’t completely easy. The monks loved to make ambitious patterns of swirls and circles. The lines were often on a very small scale; they might inadvertently tread on a bit they’d already done. They might struggle to keep the rake at just the right angle. It was sometimes maddening, especially when it was autumn and there were leaves everywhere. But it could all be put right eventually. With time, a bit of careful correction and a well-trained hand, they could get everything just as it should be. The problems were real, but they were bounded, and they could be solved.