In September 2015, I was unemployed, heartbroken and living alone in my dead grandad’s caravan, wondering what the meaning of life was. Where was I going to find happiness, or purpose, or meaning? What was the point to all of this?
Like any millennial, I turned to Google for the answers. I trawled through essays, newspaper articles, countless YouTube videos, various dictionary definitions and numerous references to the number 42, before I discovered an intriguing project carried out by the philosopher Will Durant during the 1930s. Durant had written to Ivy League presidents, Nobel prize winners, psychologists, novelists, professors, poets, scientists, artists and athletes to ask for their take on the meaning of life. His findings were collated in the book On the Meaning of Life, published in 1932.
I decided that I should recreate Durant’s experiment and seek my own answers. I scoured websites searching for contact details, and spent hours carefully writing the letters, neatly sealing them inside envelopes and licking the stamps. Then I dropped them all into the postbox and waited …
Days, and then weeks, passed with no responses. I began to worry that I’d blown what little money I had on stamps and stationery. Surely, at least one person would respond?
When someone finally did, it turned out to be a rejection. My heart continued to sink as I received a spate of letters returned to sender. Eventually, rather excitingly, replies started to drop through my letterbox.
During the three months I spent living in the holiday park, walking the cliffs and trying to figure out my life, these responses greatly inspired me. Perhaps, as Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel alluded to in her answer, meaning had emerged through the practice of the quest.
What follows is a small selection of the responses, from philosophers to politicians, prisoners to playwrights. Some were handwritten, some typed, some emailed. Some were scrawled on scrap paper, some on parchment. Some are pithy one-liners, some are lengthy memoirs. I sincerely hope you can take something from these letters, just as I did.
My letter
In 1931, the philosopher Will Durant wrote to 100 luminaries in the arts, politics, religion and sciences, challenging them to respond not only to the fundamental question of life’s meaning but also to relate how they each found meaning, purpose and fulfilment in their own lives. I am currently replicating Durant’s study, and I’d be most appreciative if you could tell me what you think the meaning of life is, and how you find meaning, purpose and fulfilment in your own life?
As Durant originally instructed, “Write briefly if you must; write at length and at leisure if you possibly can.”
‘It’s like alchemy’: Hilary Mantel, late author
I’ve had your letter for a fortnight, but I had to think about it a bit. You use two terms interchangeably: “meaning” and “purpose”. I don’t think they’re the same. I’m not sure life has a meaning, in the abstract. But it can have a definite purpose if you decide so – and the carrying through, the effort to realise the purpose, makes the meaning for you.
It’s like alchemy. The alchemists were on a futile quest, we think. There wasn’t a philosopher’s stone, and they couldn’t make gold. But after many years of patience exercised, the alchemist saw he had developed tenacity, vision, patience, hope, precision – a range of subtle virtues. He had the spiritual gold, and he understood his life in the light of it. Meaning had emerged.
‘It might be an idea to find meaning with something smaller, say a pickled walnut’: Michael Frayn, playwright and novelist
Thank you for inviting me to contribute to your anthology of views on the meaning of life. It’s not something I can respond to, I’m afraid, because it’s not clear to me how “life” can have a “meaning” in any ordinary sense of either word. It might be an idea to start with something smaller, say a pickled walnut. Once we’ve got it clear how a pickled walnut could have a “meaning”, we might move on to something larger – the borough of Haringey, say, or influenza – and work our way up.
‘I’ve seen death many times. What matters most isn’t success, or wealth’: Kathryn Mannix, palliative care consultant
Every moment is precious – even the terrible moments. That’s what I’ve learned from spending 40 years caring for people with incurable illnesses, gleaning insights into what gives our lives meaning. Watching people living their dying has been an enormous privilege, especially as it’s shown me that it isn’t until we really grasp the truth of our own mortality that we awaken to the preciousness of being alive.
Every life is a journey from innocence to wisdom. Fairy stories and folk myths, philosophers and poets all tell us this. Our innocence is chipped away, often gently but sometimes brutally, by what happens to us. Gradually, innocence is transformed to experience, and we begin to understand who we are, how the world is, and what matters most to us.
The threat of having our very existence taken away by death brings a mighty focus to the idea of what matters most to us. I’ve seen it so many times, and even though it’s unique for everyone, there are some universal patterns. What matters most isn’t success, or wealth, or stuff. It’s connection and relationships and love. Reaching an understanding like this is the beginning of wisdom: a wisdom that recognises the pricelessness of this moment. Instead of yearning for the lost past, or leaning in to the unguaranteed future, we are most truly alive when we give our full attention to what is here, right now.
Whatever is happening, experiencing it fully means both being present and being aware of being present. The only moment in our lives that we can ever have any choice about is this one. Even then, we cannot choose our circumstances, but we can choose how we respond: we can rejoice in the good things, relax into the delightful, be intrigued by the unexpected, and we can inhabit our own emotions, from joy to fear to sorrow, as part of our experience of being fully alive.
I’ve observed that serenity is both precious and evanescent. It’s a state of flow that comes from relaxing into what is, without becoming distracted by what might follow. It’s a state of mind that rests in appreciation of what we have, rather than resisting it or disparaging it. The wisest people I have met have often been those who live the most simply, whose serenity radiates loving kindness to those around them, who have understood that all they have is this present moment.
That’s what I’ve learned so far, but it’s still a work in progress. Because it turns out that every moment of our lives is still a work in progress, right to our final breath.
‘It means, above all, preserving the board on which we play this game’: Bill McKibben, author and environmentalist
I’ve thought about this a good deal since you wrote.
I think the meaning of life is to keep the remarkable game of being human going forward. In the past, this meant reproducing, above all. But, now, it means, above all, preserving the board on which we play this game. And since we’re now setting that board on fire, it’s our job to put that fire out. In our time, that’s the most important task we can undertake, since all depends on it. The best thing about the human game is that it, potentially, can stretch far out into the future – but only if we act now.
‘Reading is my cubicle and my treehouse’: Gretchen Rubin, author and happiness expert
In my study of happiness and human nature, and in my own experiences, I have found that the meaning of life comes through love. In the end, it is love – all kinds of love – that makes meaning.
In my own life, I find meaning, purpose and fulfilment by connecting to other people – my family, my friends, my community, the world. In some cases, I make these connections face-to-face, and in others, I do it through reading. Reading is my cubicle and my treehouse; reading allows me better to understand both myself and other people.
‘The secret of life is a very simple thing’: Matt Ridley, science writer
There never has been and never will be a scientific discovery as surprising, unexpected and significant as that which happened on 28 February 1953 in Cambridge, when James Watson and Francis Crick found the double-helix structure of DNA and realised that the secret of life is actually a very simple thing: it’s infinite possibilities of information spelled out in a four-letter alphabet in a form that copies itself.
‘The first awareness, in Bergen-Belsen, was that kindness and goodwill had survived’: Susan Pollack, Holocaust survivor
In response to your letter, here are a few thoughts that assisted me to look forward in my youth after those bleak, horrendous times in 1944. I am a camp survivor from Auschwitz and was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. I was totally dehumanised, fearful, distrustful, lost to contemplate the future, all alone, unable to comprehend the values for a life in a modern civilisation.
Fourteen years old – unable to walk, to express the latent, suppressed anguish – the realisation I only speak Hungarian, no skills, no education, no finance, no support system, no knowledge.
The first awareness, in Bergen-Belsen, was the discovery that kindness and goodwill had also survived. When the British soldier lifted me up from the mud hole – seeing a twitch in my body – he gently placed me in one of the small ambulances. From that experience, miraculous goodwill is one of the guiding lights to this day. I often think of that moment and ask, “What part of that goodness with your heart do you take from that soldier?”
Kindness, generosity comes in small everyday events. Small measures of goodness have an enormous impact – to this day I take nothing for granted. I remember the effect and appreciation this first helpfulness had on my life – it gradually removed the heavy iron cover on me, and sparks of “I can do” and “I want to do” gradually came into my existence.
In Sweden, where I was taken for recuperation for my devastated physical corpse-like being, one of the facilitators had a large collection of classical records. These he played every evening, and we sat around and listened in awe to Beethoven symphonies and other pieces. In my interpretation, I could feel the energy of the music, from sorrow and despair to the drive of supreme human effort to rise above those destructive memories. I must say not completely – personally, I don’t want to let it go completely – but I am free of the chains which deprived me in the camps. Music, generally, has an enormous effect on my life.
I moved on. I became a Samaritan helper for some eight years. I took a degree at the age of 60 and then a diploma in psychology. For me, life is full of possibilities, like a search engine – find your meaning for existence that makes me feel worthy – self-esteem is the reward.
I was fortunate in having a family and could play with my grandchildren, reclaiming those years of persecution.
I remember the doctor in Sweden who took me in his arms to teach me walking, and turned to me saying: “I have a little girl like you.” What a discovery about myself – powerful words that still ring in my ears long after 70 years – I cherish kind words. These are the propelling force to continue our journey and many more small events that had a huge impact on my life.
‘I could not be happy if the only things that motivated me were purely mercenary’: John Major, former prime minister
It is not easy to respond to this, except perhaps in the negative: life would have no meaning without family and friends, nor without an incentive for getting out of bed each morning. I could not be happy if I were idle, nor if the only things that motivated me were purely mercenary, with no personal interest or connection. We all need a purpose – large or small – and that, to me, is what gives life its meaning.
‘I want to show up fully, or as fully as possible, for my time on Earth’: Oliver Burkeman, author and journalist
I agree with the scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, that it makes more sense to say that what we’re seeking isn’t a meaning for life, so much as the experience of feeling fully alive. There are experiences that I know, in my bones, are “why I’m here” – unhurried time with my son, or deep conversations with my wife, hikes in the North York Moors, writing and communicating with people who’ve found liberation in something I have written. I would struggle, though, if I were to try to argue that any of these will “mean something” in some kind of timeless way, for example, 500 years from now.
What’s changed for me is that I no longer feel these experiences need this particular kind of justification. I want to show up fully, or as fully as possible, for my time on Earth. That’s all – but, then again, I think that is everything. And so I try, on a daily basis, to navigate more and more by that feeling of aliveness – rather than by the feeling of wanting to be in control of things, which is alluring, but deadening in the end.
‘The meaningless cruelty of my niece’s death taught me about life’s purpose’: Monica Heisey, author, essayist and screenwriter
Yours is a big question, certainly, and one I have been thinking about a lot this year. Last spring, my niece Rosemary was born, squirming and healthy and pink, with my sister’s big blue eyes and my brother-in-law’s button nose. Nine days later, she died in her sleep. On the phone with my sobbing mother, I realised my sense of life’s meaning had been undefined, or at least had never been tested. I’d been chugging along, untouched by capital-T tragedy, oblivion feeling blissfully abstract.
Confronted for the first time with the Real Deal, I searched for meaning, and found none. There had been no warning, would turn out to be no cause, and of course it had not happened “for a reason”. Something terrible had occurred from nowhere, and now our lives were changed for ever, and Rosie would not get to have one. I felt nihilism like a riptide, swirling around me and tugging at my ankles. It would have been easy to go under.
But the days and weeks after the meaningless cruelty of Rosie’s death also taught me about life’s purpose, or at least showed me a way I might define it. I had anticipated a week of quiet mourning punctuated by a kind of depressed chaos as everyone scrambled to arrange a funeral and perform grim and foreign administrative tasks. I assumed tragedy on this scale would feel lonely. But my memories from that period are densely populated: old friends rallying, travelling long distances to hold my sister and her husband and look at pictures and remember a person they would never get to know; my long-divorced parents coming together to provide a soft place to land for their three long-grown children; distant relatives with stories we’d never heard about cousins we’d also never be able to meet; a cluster of colleagues surrounding my sister, huddling like a football team about to break for a challenging second half; the unlikely presence of my divorce lawyer with a box of homemade scones and clotted cream.
Instead of numb or adrift, I felt almost painfully alive. We were surrounded, I realised, by Rosie’s community, who were, of course, ours too. There were faces I hadn’t seen in years – due to life and geography and the pandemic – and I saw then that they had not been gone, not really. We hadn’t “lost touch”, we had just been busy, all of us, with work and children and the business of living, but now they were needed, and so here they were. Increasingly, I think this is the only purpose we have: to be in connection with each other, to batten down our collective hatches against life’s many and various brutalities. To me, everything else that feels like purpose – making and consuming art, engaging in collective efforts to better society or the planet, listening deeply to loved ones – is really an avenue to connection, providing it and being enriched by it, too.
In terms of happiness, many people more intelligent than I have suggested shooting for contentment instead, and I think they are right. Still, there are some things that make me reliably happy, and I have found much contentment in cultivating opportunities to experience them. These include: friends’ laughter, reading at the bar, unrealistically flattering denim, good gossip, morning sex, coffee and a walk with a slight hangover, a sunny day experienced from a safely shaded area, cornbread, cats, the exhilaration of being bad at something new, boxing (relatedly), and making a sauce for three to five hours. There are more, of course – the list grows all the time – and keeping track of them feels important.
I suppose happiness is knowing what is personally meaningful to you, and engaging with it, which is kind of a nice full circle to come to in this letter. A natural conclusion that returns to the beginning makes me happy, too. Another for the list.
‘Four and a half decades of my life have been in a hole, but I’ve still enjoyed it’: Charles Salvador, aka Charles Bronson, one of Britain’s longest-serving prisoners
Life is, to me, a gift.
You have to respect it.
Appreciate it.
Hold on to it for as long as possible.
People who let go don’t deserve it.
Four and a half decades of my life have been in a hole, But I’ve still enjoyed it.
I made it work for me.
Coz I found “myself”.
[Overleaf] Never piss on a rattlesnake!
‘Failure is fine. It’s how you respond to it that makes all the difference’: Fatima Whitbread, retired British javelin thrower
If you add value to other people’s lives, you’ll never be at a loss for living a life of purpose. The purpose is what ultimately leads to happiness. Society emphasises success a great deal, and some people overreact to it by being overly harsh on themselves, on their perceptions of what success is. Rather, ask yourself, how can I add value today? And then do it.
My learning is that you’re going to fail. If you do anything at all in life that is noteworthy. On the other hand, if you play it safe you might not fail. But then you probably didn’t reach your fullest potential, either. Failure is fine. It’s how you respond to it that makes all the difference in the world.
Don’t blame anyone for the failure, least of all yourself. Simply acknowledge what has happened, note what you’ve learned and how you’d do it differently next time, and move on. Make no excuses. They are simply a waste of everybody’s time. Worst comes to worst, you’ve learned something new that makes you a more multi-dimensional person, an interesting person. After all, it’s not failing that matters, but learning from our failures.
And if you don’t try, how can you possibly fail in the first place?
‘I asked my mother what she thought it was, from her now frail vantage point’: Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience
It feels strange to be writing to you about the meaning of life while my mother is struggling to hold on to hers. At the age of 89 she’s had a long life by the standards of human history, but any human life is the briefest glimmer in the vastness of time. The inconceivable brevity of human existence brings questions about meaning, purpose and fulfilment into sharp relief.
My mother was born in York in 1934, on Christmas Day, and grew up playing in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. She was a teacher, and later an artist and a landscape photographer. Lately, before her recent illness, she would wonder to me at the prospect of nonexistence. She knows she will die, as most of us do at some level, but she cannot imagine not existing. As the horizons of her life have contracted, she has been able to find contentment in simpler and simpler things: the rhythms of the garden, the play of light on the leaves of a tree. This flexibility suggests to me that meaning, purpose and fulfilment are not only different things, but moving targets, if they are targets at all.
I’ve spent my career trying to understand more about the mystery of consciousness. About how the mess of neural wetware inside our heads can give rise to the everyday miracle of experience. Consciousness is intimately familiar to each of us. We all know what it’s like to be conscious, and what it’s like to lose consciousness when we fall into a dreamless sleep. The nature of consciousness is also endlessly perplexing, confounding scientists and thinkers for thousands of years.
Some people worry that pursuing a scientific perspective on conscious experience might drain life of meaning by reducing us to mere biological machinery. I have found the opposite to be the case. There is no reduction. There is rather a continuity with the natural world, and with this continuity comes an expansion, a wider and deeper perspective. As we gradually pull back the curtains on the biological basis of conscious experience in all its richness, there are new opportunities to take ourselves and our conscious lives less for granted. We can see ourselves more as part of, and less apart from, the rest of nature. Our brief moments in the light of existence become more remarkable for having happened at all.
A recognition of the precarity of consciousness can help defuse some of our existential fears. We do not usually worry much about the oblivion that preceded our birth, so why should we worry about the equivalent oblivion that will follow our death? Oblivion isn’t the experience of absence, it is the absence of experience. As the novelist Julian Barnes put it, in his meditation on mortality, there is “nothing to be frightened of”.
I’ve come to think of consciousness as the precondition for meaning. An argument can be made that without consciousness, nothing would matter at all. Meaning, purpose and fulfilment can take many forms against this backdrop. The Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia best captures what I have in mind here. Eudaimonia means living well, flourishing, doing that which is worth doing. It is not about pleasure or hedonic satisfaction, nor is it about selfless sacrifice for some greater good. It involves realising one’s potential through cultivating virtues such as reason, courage and wisdom. Fundamentally, it comes down to doing a bit of good and feeling good about doing so.
For me, participating in some small way in the scientific and philosophical journey to understand ourselves and our place in nature, and communicating some of this journey to others, offers the promise of a slice of eudaimonia. In practice, frustration lurks at every turn. There is the risk of hubris when dealing with such apparently grand matters. And the dramas of everyday life get in the way.
Which brings me back to my mother. Today she has rallied, unexpectedly confounding the prognosis of the doctors. I asked her what she thought the meaning of life was, from her now frail vantage point. She told me it was about relationships with other people, and who can argue with that.
‘My brief answer: what the hell?’: Alan Ayckbourn, playwright and director
Sixty years ago, with a burgeoning career, on the verge of being a professional playwright and director, I would probably have readily answered your question. I felt, as they say, that the world was at my feet. These days, alas, I sense very much it is on my back. I have no idea why I write, nor indeed why I’m still alive. Probably the writing is as much a reflex for me as breathing. That’s all I can say.
Sorry, but you caught me at the wrong end of my existence. My brief answer: what the hell?
‘I do not need to know it’: Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit
What is the meaning of life? I can honestly say: I have no idea. But I write this in London, where I am visiting with my wife and two boys. And they are healthy and safe, and (mostly) happy, and there’s joy in watching their delights: a clothing stall with a jacket they’ve long wanted; the way the double-decker bus carries us above the fray; a monument to scientific discoveries beside a flower garden and goats.
I’m surrounded by evidence – of the blitz, D-day, colonies despoiled, JFK and MLK and 9/11 – that all could be otherwise. I hear about bombs falling on innocents, an uncertain election, a faltering climate, and many of us lacking the will (or charity) to change.
Yet still I marvel that we flew here in under 12 hours – while my ancestors required months and tragedies to transit in reverse – and that I will send this note simply by hitting a button, and we can love whomever we want, and see and speak to them at any hour, and a pandemic did not end my life, did not kill my children’s dreams, did not make society selfish and cruel.
And, for now, that’s enough. I do not need to know the meaning of life. I do not need to know the purpose of it all. Simply breathing while healthy and safe, and (mostly) happy is such a surprising, awe-inducing, humbling gift that I have no right to question it. I won’t tempt fate. I won’t look that gift horse in the mouth. I’ll simply hope my good fortune continues, work hard to share it with others, and pray I will remember this day, this moment, if my luck fades .
