That is my short version of a passage from a Dutch newspaper column I kept. The psychologist who wrote it was dealing with a question most people ask at some point, often late at night: what is the point of life if we all die anyway?
And what then?
When he was around fifty, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, had what most people would call a full life. In his own words: a good wife who loved him, good children, a large estate and a famous name.
Then he couldn’t get a question out of his head. While he was planning work on his land, he would suddenly think: fine, so you will own some 16,000 acres and three hundred horses, and what then? When he thought about the fame his books would bring him, more than the English playwright William Shakespeare ever had, the question came back in another form: and what of it?
He wrote it all down in A Confession, a short book about those years. In it he asks his question in several ways. One of them is the question this article is about: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”
He also wrote that he had to know why he was doing something before he could do it. The estate, his son’s education, the next book: as long as he didn’t know why, he could do nothing.
Why does death make life feel pointless?
Because you measure what you do by what lasts. Tolstoy did that with his land, his horses and his fame, and each time he saw that none of it would survive his death. If meaning has to outlast you, nothing you do will ever count. Asked that way, the question has no answer.
Scraps of an answer
René Diekstra, a Dutch psychologist, wrote a newspaper column whose Dutch title translates as Scraps of Being Human. In it he admits that he still has no final answer to what it takes to be a human being. At most, he has scraps of an answer.
One scrap is about the universe. As a human being, he writes, you have to be willing to live in a universe that is utterly cold and utterly indifferent to you. Whatever warmth or goodness there is has to come from you and from the people around you.
In my copy of the clipping, three passages have a short pen stroke in the margin. The middle one is his passage about death: living well with it means bearing the tension between wanting to go on existing and knowing that you can’t. I wrote about that one in an earlier article, The Part of You That Wants to Stay.
The last passage I marked reads, in my translation:
And above all, realizing that facing the fundamental meaninglessness of life means we have to draw meaning mainly from whatever we actively commit ourselves to.
Diekstra starts where Tolstoy got stuck. He accepts that life has no meaning built in. Then he looks for it in what you do.
That turns Tolstoy’s order around. Tolstoy wanted the reason first and the work after it. In Diekstra’s passage the work comes first, and that is where you find the reason.
What does it mean to actively commit yourself to something?
Diekstra doesn’t spell it out in the column. The Dutch words he uses describe putting real time and effort into something: a person, a piece of work, a cause. His passage says nothing about how that feels. It is about what you do with your days, and that is where he places the meaning.
What 397 people said about their days
Is that only a nice thought? In 2013, the American psychologist Roy Baumeister and three colleagues published a study that comes close to measuring it. They wanted to know how a meaningful life differs from a happy one.
Their participants were 397 adults between 18 and 78. Over one month, they filled out three online questionnaires: one at the start, one a week later, and one a month after the first. They rated statements such as “In general I consider my life to be meaningful” and “In general I consider myself happy” on a scale from 1 to 7.
They also answered questions about their lives. How healthy were they? Did they have enough money for what they needed? How often did they worry? Did they see themselves more as a giver or as a taker? And how much time did they spend taking care of children?
Happiness and meaning often go together, so the researchers looked at each one separately.
Some things went only with happiness. People who felt healthier were happier. How healthy they felt made no difference to how meaningful they found their lives. Having enough money for what they needed showed the same pattern.
Meaning went with other things. People who saw themselves as givers rated their lives as more meaningful. For parents, the more time they spent caring for their children, the more meaningful their lives were. That time had no link with how happy they were.
Worry and stress went with meaning too. People who worried more often and recalled more stress rated their lives as more meaningful, and were less happy. The researchers’ reading: when you are deeply involved in something difficult that reaches beyond yourself, you have more to worry about.
A questionnaire shows what goes together. It can’t show what causes what. Still, the pattern fits Diekstra’s passage. Meaning turned up where people put effort into something beyond themselves, whether or not it felt good at the time.
What did the survey find about health, money and giving?
In Baumeister’s survey of 397 adults, feeling healthy and having enough money went with being happier, and made little difference to how meaningful people found their lives. Seeing yourself as a giver, helping others and, for parents, time spent caring for children went with a more meaningful life.
A pen and last week
The next exercise comes from Diekstra’s passage, and no study has tested it. You need a pen and your calendar.
How do I find meaning in life if I don’t feel any?
Start with what you do, since that is where Diekstra puts it. Go through the past seven days in your calendar or on your phone. Make a short pen mark next to every hour you spent on someone or something beyond your own comfort. Don’t judge those hours yet. Just count the marks.
What do I do with the marks once I’ve counted them?
Pick the hour that took the most out of you, and ask whether you would do it again. If you would, give it one more hour this week, on purpose. If your week has no marks at all, choose one person or one piece of work and give that hour to them.
It doesn’t have to feel good. In Baumeister’s survey, how often people felt good had no link with how meaningful they found their lives.
Where the hour comes in
I built Last Hour Experience as a single hour you spend alone, with headphones, as if it were your last. In that hour you face fifteen questions you have never asked yourself out loud, and near the end you can write a farewell letter, to whoever you choose. The name you put at the top of that letter tells you something about what you have thrown yourself into. Who would yours be for?
Questions people ask. One of them is me.
Can you find meaning in life without religion?
René Diekstra, a Dutch psychologist, gives an answer that needs none. His newspaper passage about meaning doesn’t mention faith or God. He places meaning in whatever you actively commit yourself to, and anyone can do that, religious or not. Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, found his own answer in religious faith.
Are givers happier than takers?
Not in a 2013 survey of 397 adults by the American psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues. People who saw themselves as givers rated their lives as more meaningful. On happiness, the trend went slightly the other way, toward takers, though not by enough to be sure.
Is the point of life different for everyone?
If you follow Diekstra, it has to be, because what you actively commit yourself to differs from one life to the next. Baumeister’s survey worked the same way. The researchers let people decide for themselves what a meaningful life was, instead of handing them a definition.
Why would worry go with a meaningful life?
In Baumeister’s survey, people who worried more often rated their lives as more meaningful and themselves as less happy. The researchers think worry comes from being deeply involved in things that reach beyond yourself and into the future. The more you care about, the more there is that can go wrong.
Sources
A column about being human by René Diekstra, a Dutch psychologist, published online by Haarlems Dagblad, a Dutch newspaper. The quotes and the pen strokes come from the clipping in my own collection, and the English translations are mine.
A Confession by Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, in the English translation by Aylmer Maude. You can read it online at Standard Ebooks, a volunteer project that publishes old books whose copyright has run out.
The 2013 survey of 397 adults on happiness and meaning by Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky, in The Journal of Positive Psychology, a research journal about what makes a life go well.
The Part of You That Wants to Stay, my earlier article about the passage on death in the same column.