A Wonderful Life by Frank Martela PhD

Author:Frank Martela, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Part Three:

Paths to a More Meaningful Life

9

Invest in Your Relationships

“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, and compassion.”

—SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, The Coming of Age, 1970

A philosopher walks into a bar, and a barfly asks him, “What’s the meaning of life?” That philosopher is me, and it’s an inevitable question once people find out what I do. I’ve had this happen enough times to have a one-liner ready. I’ll first explain that it is not about the meaning of life but the meaning in life, before delivering the punch line. It has two parts, the first of which is the following: meaning in life is about making yourself meaningful to other people. It’s that simple. Forget the meaning of life. Your life becomes meaningful to you when you’re meaningful to other people: by helping a friend, for example, by sharing a special moment with someone you love, or, more simply, by connecting with a well-intentioned philosopher through buying him a much-needed beer.

When we sense that our lives are meaningful to other people, we’re able to see the value in our own lives. The Universe may be silent, but our friends and family, our colleagues and community fill our lives with their voices, energy, and vitality. And the people to whom we are most meaningful are those who care most about us. As philosopher Antti Kauppinen has argued, for those who love us, we are irreplaceable: even though anyone can buy a present for a particular child, “it will not have the same significance as a handmade gift from a parent,” as he writes.134 In close relationships, we play a unique and irreplaceable role for the other person often simply by being there.

If we know anything about human nature, it’s that we’re social animals. In “The Need to Belong,” an influential review article published in Psychological Bulletin in 1995, Professors Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary made a claim that has since become a broadly accepted—and seemingly obvious—thesis in psychology: “A need to belong is a fundamental human motivation.”135 We evolved to live in groups and to care for each other; the instinct to build strong social relationships lies deep within our humanity.

Our social nature, however, goes deeper than merely caring about others: it’s in our nature to have, as the locus of one’s life, not me but we. Being in a close relationship has been described by psychologists as a state of “including other in the self.”136 Indeed, neurological research has demonstrated that thinking about oneself and thinking about a loved one activate certain regions in the brain that aren’t activated when thinking about a stranger.137 The brain is wired to be social, and humans are designed to live together with others. As the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty has beautifully explained: “We are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we coexist through a common world.”138 Although our Western,

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