The Meaning of Life by The School of Life

As per me, if anyone wants to live a meaningful life, this book is must. One my favourite books of all time. Everytime I go through the pages, I learn something new. This book gives a very different perspective towards the meaning of life, instead of making stories, this book focuses on finding meanings in day to day life, in common things.

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Below are my highlights from the book: I. Introduction

A meaningful life can be simple in structure, personal, usable, attractive and familiar. This is a guidebook to it. A meaningful life is close to, but at points importantly different from, a happy life.Here are some of its ingredients: - A meaningful life draws upon, and exercises, a range of our higher capacities; for example, those bound up with tenderness, care, connection, self - understanding, sympathy, intelligence and creativity. - A meaningful life aims not so much at day-to-day contentment as fulfilment. We may be leading a meaningful life and yet often be in a bad mood – just as we may be having frequent superficial fun while living, for the most part, meaninglessly. - A meaningful life is bound up with the long term. Projects, relationships, interests and commitments will build up cumulatively. Meaningful activities leave something behind, even when the emotions that once propelled us into them have passed. - Meaningful activities aren’t necessarily those we do most often. They are those we value most highly and will, from the perspective of our deaths, miss most deeply. - The question of what makes life meaningful has to be answered personally, even if our conclusions are marked by no particular idiosyncrasy. Others cannot be relied upon to determine what will be meaningful to us. What we call ‘crises of meaning’ are generally moments when someone else’s – perhaps very well-intentioned-interpretation of what might be meaningful to us runs up against a growing realisation of our divergent tastes and interests. - We have to work out, by a process of experience and introspection, what counts as meaningful in our eyes. Pleasure may manifest itself immediately, but our taste in meaning may be more elusive. We can be relatively far into our lives before we securely identify what imbues them with meaning..

II. Sources of Meaning

i. Love

One way to get a sense of why love should so often be considered close to the meaning of life is to look at the challenges of loneliness. Unwittingly, loneliness gives us the most eloquent insights into why love matters so much. It is hard to know quite what all the fuss around love might be about until and unless one has, somewhere along the way, spent some bitter, unwanted passages in one’s own company. No one finds rage or obsession, peculiarity or bitterness especially charming. We can’t act up or rant. A radical editing of our true selves is the price we must pay for conviviality. We have to accept too that much of who we are won’t readily be understood. Some of our deepest concerns will be met with blank incomprehension, boredom or fear. Most people won’t care. Our deeper thoughts will be of scant interest. We will have to subsist as pleasant but radically abbreviated paragraphs in the minds of almost everyone. In the presence of the lover, evaluation will no longer be so swift and cynical. We will have escaped from that otherwise dominant and devastating sense that the only way to get people to like us is to conceal most of who we are. Surrounded on all sides by lesser or greater varieties of coldness, we will at last know that, in the arms of one extraordinary, patient and kindly being worthy of infinite gratitude, we truly matter.
We fall in love with people who promise that they will, in some way, help to make us whole. We do not all fall in love with the same people because we are not all missing the same things. The aspects that we find desirable in our partners speak of what we admire but do not have secure possession of in ourselves. We love in part in the hope of being helped and redeemed by our lovers. There is an underlying desire for education and growth. We hope to change a little in their presence, becoming, through their help, better versions of ourselves. Just below the surface, love contains a hope for reparation and education. We usually think of education as something harsh imposed upon us against our will, but love promises to educate us in a more gentle and seductive way. This is what parents, artists or a God might do. We can’t necessarily continue in this vein forever, and the rapture may not be entirely sane, but it is a hugely redemptive pastime – and a kind of art all of its own – to give ourselves over to properly appreciating the real complexity, beauty and virtue of another human being.
A lot of our delight has its origin in the idea of being allowed to do a very private thing to and with another person. Another person’s body is usually a highly protected and private zone. We’re implicitly saying to another person through our unclothing that they have been placed in a tiny, intensely policed, category of people; that we have granted them an extraordinary privilege. Therefore, it is not so much what our bodies do in sex that generates our excitement; it is what happens in our brains. Acceptance is at the centre of the kinds of experiences we collectively refer to as ‘getting turned on’. It feels physical: the blood pumps faster, the metabolism shifts gear, the skin gets hot. But behind all this lies a very different kind of pleasure rooted in the mind: a sense of an end to our isolation.

ii. Family

We are all, more or less, emotional nepotists.We have all already been the beneficiaries of the starkest, grossest nepotism. We wouldn’t have got here without it. That’s because when we were born, despite the millions of other children in the world, irrespective of our merits ( we didn’t really have any ), our parents and wider family made the decision to take care of us and to devote huge amounts of time, love and money to our well-being. This was not because we had done anything to deserve it–at that time, we were barely capable of holding a spoon, let alone saying hello – but simply because we were related to them. Because of the existence of family, we’ve all experienced belonging, not based on our beliefs, accomplishments or efforts (all of which may change or fail), but on something purer and more irrevocable: the fact of our birth. Given how fragile our standing generally is in the eyes of others, this is a source of huge ongoing emotional relief. Within families, there is often a welcome disregard not just for demerit but for merit as well. Within the family, it may not really matter how badly, or how well, you are doing in the world of money and work. The daughter who becomes a high court judge will probably not be loved any more than the son who has a stall in the market selling origami dragons; the steely negotiator and demanding boss in charge of the livelihoods of thousands may be teased endlessly by their relatives for their poor taste in jumpers or tendency to belch at inopportune moments. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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

The goal of professional life is to do work that is deeply in line with our real selves. Work that, as we put it, feels properly authentic. 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 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.
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. 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.
Sometimes it can be the greatest freedom to have to repress some of what we are. 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.Work gives us a chance, rare within the overall economy of our lives, to give precedence to our better natures.
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. We are not wrong to love perfection, but it brings us a lot of pain. At its best, our work offers us a patch of gravel that we can rake, a limited space we can make ideally tidy and via which we can fulfil our powerful inner need for order and control–so often thwarted in a wider world beset by defiant unruliness. Our lives have to be lived in appalling ignorance: we know nothing of when and how we will die; the thoughts of others remain largely hidden from us; we often can’t make sense of our own moods; we are driven by excitements and fears we can barely make sense of. But in work, we can build up a very accurate and extensive field of understanding. We can amaze with the precision of our explanations.
Profit, ultimately, is based on insight: it requires identifying the genuine needs of others more clearly and sooner than one’s competitors, and meeting them more effectively. Profit is a sign that one’s insights have been on track and that the products and services one is offering are truly valued by clients and customers. It is a symptom of having understood the world slightly better than others. Money is simply a resource that extends the powers of its possessor. Wealth is what Aristotle called an ‘executive’ virtue: like physical strength or good looks, it increases an individual’s sway in the world. Via money, our kindness can be amplified, our wisdom made more consequential, and our ambitions trained on the long term.
A basic premise of creativity: the recombination of unlikely elements into something new and unfamiliar. The key initiative was that he rearranged them to make each part more valuable than it had been in its previous role. As the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson ( 1803 – 1882 ) put it: ‘ In the minds of geniuses, we find–once more–our own neglected thoughts.’ Creative people don’t have thoughts fundamentally different from ours; they just don’t neglect them as readily. Very little is entirely new under the sun, but to be creative is to learn to see how apparently unlikely elements might fit together in a fruitful new arrangement. Essentially , creativity means spotting an opportunity to improve things through recombination. The creative person is someone particularly committed to the idea that there must be a better way of going about things. Creativity is not a rare and dramatic activity; it is not a sideshow incidental to the core concerns of our lives. Ideally, it is something that we are always involved in. It is a refusal to accept the world as it is in all its facets; it is a commitment to doing better with what we have. As creative people, we don’t need to write novels, we just need to be persistently on the lookout for (sometimes very small) ways of improving life .

iv. Friendship

The key to the problem of friendship is found in an odd - sounding place: we lack a sense of purpose. Our attempts at friendship tend to go adrift because we collectively resist the task of developing a clear picture of what friendship should really be for. The problem is that we are uncomfortable with the idea of friendship having any declared purpose to begin with, because we associate purpose with the least attractive and most cynical of motives. Yet purpose doesn’t have to ruin friendship. There is a range of goals we could be pursuing with the people we know. Grasping what the opportunities are is central to building a meaningful social existence.
It springs from a fundamentally modest awareness of how fragile and limited each of us is , and how much we need the support and strength of others. To network means to filter intelligently, to recognise that one cannot–and indeed should not–try to get to know everyone. It involves aligning one’s path through the world with a mission. It implies a wise acknowledgement that we do not have unlimited time. With a conscious mission in mind, networking ceases to be a brutal, discriminatory activity. It’s just a way of making sure that we are never far from harvesting insights and assistance.
(Friends) They help us to like ourselves and then to tolerate recognising some less than perfect things about who we are. They take our distress or excitement or anger seriously, but ask gentle and probing questions that help us understand our own initially vague first thoughts and feelings. They listen carefully, and they make it clear that they are on our side. They help us stick with a tricky point and go into more detail; they make connections to something we said earlier; they note our facial expression or tone of voice; they don’t jump to fill a pause but wait for us to say more. They act as a judicious, kindly mirror that helps us to know and befriend our own deeper selves.
The fun friend solves the problem of shame around important but unprestigious sides of ourselves. They don’t ignore or dismiss our more serious and solemn aspects; they show us that, in their eyes, being silly is not a disgrace: it is a serious need like any other.
The old friend is a guardian of memories on which we might otherwise have a damagingly tenuous hold. We need old friends because of a crucial complexity in human nature. We pass through stages of development and, as we do so, discard previous concerns and develop a lack of empathy around past perspectives. We experience life from a succession of very different vantage points over the decades, but–understandably–tend to be preoccupied only with the present vista, forgetting the particular, incomplete but still crucial wisdom contained in earlier phases. Every age possesses a superior kind of knowledge in some area, which it usually forgets to hand on to succeeding selves. Remembering what it was like not to be who we are now is vital to our growth and integrity. The best professors remain friends with their past. We are always better long-term lovers if we have an avenue of loyalty back to who we were when we first met our beloveds and were at an apogee of gratitude and modesty. Old friends are key activators of fascinating and valuable parts of the self that we need , but are always at risk of forgetting, in the blinkered present.
With a wide range of friends within reach, we are able to assemble and connect with the full, properly rounded, version of ourselves.

v. Culture

One of the most meaningful activities we ever engage in is the creation of a home. We need to get home to remember who we are. The Greeks took such care over Athena’s temple-home because they understood the human mind. They knew that, without architecture, we struggle to remember what we care about – and more broadly who we are. Without there being anything grandiose or supernatural in the idea, our homes are also temples; they are temples to us. We are not expecting to be worshipped, but we are trying to make a place that–like a temple–adequately embodies our spiritual values and merits. Creating a home is frequently such a demanding process because it requires us to find our way to objects that can correctly convey our identities. An object feels ‘right’ when it speaks attractively about qualities that we are drawn to, but don’t possess strong enough doses of in our day-to-day lives. The desirable object gives us a more secure hold on values that are present, yet fragile, in ourselves; it endorses and encourages important themes in us. The smallest things in our homes whisper to us; they offer us encouragement, reminders, consoling thoughts, warnings or correctives, as we make breakfast or do the accounts in the evening. Because we all want and need to hear such different things, we will all be pulled towards very different kinds of objects. There is a deeply subjective side to the feeling of beauty. It is not enough to know who we are in our own minds; we need something more tangible, material and sensuous to pin down the diverse and intermittent aspects of our identities. We need to rely on certain kinds of cutlery, bookshelves, laundry cupboards and armchairs to align us with who we are and seek to be. Home means the place where our soul feels that it has found its proper physical container, where, every day, the objects we live among quietly remind us of our most authentic commitments and loves.
We are highly emotional beings, but not all of our emotions make their way to the front of our conscious attention when they need to. They are there, but only in a latent, muted, undeveloped way. There is too much noise both externally and internally: we are under pressure at work; there’s a lot to be done at home; the news is on, we’re catching up with friends. This is why music matters: it offers amplification and encouragement. Specific pieces of music give strength and support to valuable but tentative emotional dispositions. A euphoric song amplifies the faint but ecstatic feeling that we could love everyone and find true delight in being alive. Day to day, these feelings exist, but are buried by the pressure to be limited, cautious and reserved. Now the song pushes them forward and gives them confidence; it provides the space in which they can grow and, given this encouragement, we can accord them a bigger place in our lives. With the help of particular chords, a compassionate side of ourselves, which is normally hard to access, becomes more prominent. Like an amplifier with its signal, music doesn’t invent emotion; it takes what is there and makes it louder. Exactly the same is true in our lives: we are constantly faced with situations where something significant is going on; at the back of our minds the helpful emotional reaction is there, but it’s subdued and drowned out by the ambient noise of existence. Music is the opposite of noise: it is the cure for noise. By finding the right piece of music at the right time, we are adding an accompanying score that highlights the emotions we should be feeling more strongly, and allows our own best reactions to be more prominent and secure. We end up feeling the emotions that are our due. We live according to what we actually need to feel.
Perhaps only thirty books will ever truly mark us. They will be different for each of us, but the way in which they affect us will be similar. The core, and perhaps unexpected, thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify them. Simplification does not betray the nuance of life: it renders life more visible. offer. The task of linking the right book to the right person at the right time hasn’t yet received the attention it deserves. Through books’ benign simplification, we become a little better at being who we truly are.
Our clothing, too, can offer a fuller portrait of our inner selves. When we get dressed, we are, in effect, operating as a tour guide, offering to show people around ourselves. We highlight interesting or attractive things about who we are – and, in the process, we clear up misconceptions. We act like artists painting a self-portrait: deliberately guiding the viewer’s perception of who we might be. Certain clothes make us really happy. They capture values that we’re drawn to. The erotic component is just an extension of a more general and understandable sympathy. By choosing particular sorts of clothes, we are shoring up our more fragile or tentative characteristics. We are communicating to others who we are while strategically reminding ourselves.
Although most of us no longer believe in the divine power of journeys to cure toothache or gallstones, we can still retain the idea that certain parts of the world possess a power to address complaints of our psyches and bring about change in us in a way that wouldn’t be possible if we stayed at home. There are places that, by virtue of their remoteness, vastness, climate, chaotic energy, haunting melancholy or sheer difference from our homelands can salve the wounded parts of us. Travelling to the place would be an occasion fundamentally to reorient their personality. It would be the call to arms to become a different person; a secular pilgrimage properly anchored around a stage of character development. Travel should not be allowed to escape the underlying seriousness of the area of life with which it deals. We should aim for locations in the outer world that can push us towards the places we need to go to within.

vi. Politics

Almost all of us are intensely political; we just don’t recognise ourselves as such because we have been equipped with the wrong definition of politics. Being political doesn’t only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election; to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers. Making strangers happy is deeply enjoyable, and a great deal easier than trying to make oneself or one’s immediate loved ones content. Politics is a refuge from the problems of trying to make oneself and one’s loved ones smile. It is the best possible kind of selfishness. We are not trying to solve all the problems of others; we are merely working on one or two targeted areas and so are granted a precious encounter with ourselves as people with the will, imagination and intelligence to get things done. We are taken out of the morass of our own minds. We have the joy of trying to change the world, rather than wrestling with the far thornier task of wondering how to be happy.

vii. Nature

One of the most consoling aspects of natural phenomena – whether a dog, a sheep, a tree or a valley – is that their meanings have nothing to do with our own perilous and tortured priorities. They are redemptively unconcerned with everything we are and want. They implicitly mock our self-importance and absorption and so return us to a fairer, more modest, sense of our role on the planet. Everything that happens to us, or that we do, is of no consequence whatever from the point of view of the dog, the sheep, the trees, the clouds or the stars; they are important representatives of a different perspective within which our own concerns are mercifully irrelevant.
Sport embodies a grand metaphysical struggle of the human spirit against the unruly and entropic forces of the material world. It is the most sophisticated and impressive form of revenge against the humiliations of having a body. Being a spectator of sport also offers us correctives to some of the entrenched, powerful problems of our lives. For example, it compresses action so as to give us a result within a time frame in tune with our native impatience and need for resolutions. We’re always supposed to imagine what bit of the truth may lie with the opposition. But at least briefly, around sport, we can be wholly and wildly partisan. We can innocently long to eradicate the enemy. We don’t need to worry about causing offence or about missing a nuance to the argument. We have at last found something pure, good and mercifully simple to believe in. We can be at odds with almost everyone over issues from the proper direction for the economy to what we should do with the holidays. There is no end to conflict and divergent convictions. But in sport, a devotion to our side brings with it a powerful experience of agreement with large numbers of people we don’t know. We’re no longer fighting our individual corners: we all agree. We’re excited at the same moment; when a questionable decision is made by the judges or umpire, we’re outraged by the same injustice. We love some very unlikely strangers. In our excitement, differences in status are erased. We are all spectators and supporters of the same team. Our job description (always a painfully skewed reflection of who we really are) can be forgotten. The rest of life is suspended; the CFO cheers alongside the stay-at-home father; the timid individual’s favourite midfielder makes a glorious, fearless comeback; the corporate chieftain’s beloved team is crushed.

viii. Philosophy

Socrates’s dictum that the unanalysed life is not worth living, or at least is rather uncomfortable. We need to remove ourselves and think because, on certain days, we are sad, and yet can’t identify the cause of an upset that lingers powerfully somewhere in our minds, just out of reach of consciousness. The more we leave the sadness unattended, the more it starts to colour everything we are involved with. We grow less scared of the contents of our minds. We feel calmer, less resentful and clearer about our direction. We recognise how much we depend – perhaps without knowing it – on the practice of philosophy: that is, on the pursuit of accurate, clear and manageable knowledge.

III. Obstacles to Meaning

i. Vague self-understanding

We want our lives to be meaningful, but there is too often a gap between our intentions and our realities. Some of the obstacles to meaning are external (wars, financial turmoil, etc.). But there are several issues in our own minds that block access to a more meaningful existence.

ii. Provincialism

Another reason why we hold back from the things that yield meaning is that they can seem abnormal. We know they are valuable; we are just afraid of seeming weird by pursuing them. We may really like getting up at 3am, having a long bath in the dark and thinking for hours about our childhoods. In our social lives, our real preference might be to see people for one-on-one conversations where the agenda would be abstract and announced beforehand. With our work, we know we do our best thinking in railway station cafés rather than in the cubicle where people expect us to be. On holiday, we have a yearning to visit the local sewage works and electricity plant rather than the beach or museum. But, haunted by the fear of being abnormal, we can end up following few of our authentic inclinations. The pity is that we probably take our cue about what is normal from a specific, and not particularly representative, group of people: those who just happen to be in the vicinity.

iii. Selflessness

We are highly attuned to the notion that being selfish is one of the worst character traits we might possess, a way of behaving associated with greed, entitlement and cruelty. And yet some of the reasons we fail to have the lives we should springs from an excess of the opposite trait: an overweening modesty; an over-hasty deference to the wishes of others; a dangerous and counter-productive lack of selfishness. We are at risk because we fail to distinguish between good and bad versions of selfishness. The good, desirable kind involves the courage to give priority to ourselves and our concerns at particular points; the confidence to be forthright about our needs, not in order to harm or conclusively reject other people, but in order to serve them in a deeper, more sustained and committed way over the long term. Bad selfishness, on the other hand, operates with no greater end in view and with no higher motive in mind. We do not decline to help so as to marshal our resources to offer others a greater gift down the line; we just can’t be bothered. A lack of selfishness can slowly turn us into highly disagreeable as well as ineffective people. Good selfishness grows out of an accurate understanding of what we need to do in order to maximise our utility for others.

iv. Immortality

A decisive barrier to the more meaningful lives we seek is the half-formed, secret and deeply dangerous suspicion that we may be immortal.

v. The art of storytelling

At moments of sorrow and exhaustion, it is only too easy to look back over the years and feel that our lives have, in essence, been meaningless. We take stock of just how much has gone wrong; how many errors there have been, how many unfulfilled plans and frustrated dreams we’ve had. We may feel like the distraught, damned Macbeth who, on learning of his wife’s death, exclaims at a pitch of agony that man is a cursed creature who: …struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. [Life] is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5 Only a small number of people ever self-consciously write their autobiographies. It is a task we associate with celebrities and the very old, but it is, in the background, a universal activity. We may not be publishing our stories, but we are writing them in our minds nevertheless. Every day finds us weaving a story about who we are, where we are going, and why events happened as they did. Many of us are strikingly harsh narrators of these life stories. We declare our achievements puny; we berate ourselves for our faults; we perceive only the negative sides of our characters. We constantly give the advantage to the other side. We may feel that we’re being objective, but it seems we are really rehearsing the case for an especially vicious imaginary prosecution. Yet there is nothing necessary about our methods or our verdicts. There could be ways of telling very different, far kinder and more balanced stories from the same sets of facts. Good narrators – ones who are fair-minded and judicious – know how to display a range of narrative skills that keep unfair, partisan and confidence-destroying lines of attack at bay. These good narrators accept that lives can be meaningful even when they involve a lot of failure and humiliation. Mistakes are not dead ends; they are sources of information that can be exploited and put to work as guides to more effective subsequent action. The sound and fury can be made to yield hugely significant insights. We needed the career crisis to understand our working identities; we had to fail at love to fathom our hearts. We cannot get anywhere important in one go. We must forgive ourselves the horrors of our first drafts. The good storyteller recognises too, contrary to certain impressions, that there will always be a number of players responsible for negative events in a person’s life. We are never the sole authors of our triumphs or of our defeats. It is therefore as unwarranted (and as egocentric) to take all the blame as to assume all the credit. Sometimes, it really will be the fault of something or somebody else: the economy, our parents, the government, our enemies, or sheer bad luck. We should not take the entire burden of our difficulties upon our own shoulders. Good narrators are compassionate. At many points, we simply could not have known. We were not exceptionally stupid, we were – like all humans – operating with limited information, trying to interpret the world with flawed and blinkered minds under the constant sway of emotion, damaged by our pasts and only selectively capable of reason and calm. Finally, good narrators appreciate that events can count as meaningful even when they aren’t recognised as such by powerful authorities in the world at large. We should not let false notions of prestige interfere with our attempts to focus on the aspects of our life stories that actually satisfy us. On our death beds, we will inevitably know that much didn’t work out; that there were dreams that didn’t come to pass and loves that were rejected; friendships that could never be repaired, and catastrophes and hurts we never overcame. But we will also know that there were threads of value that sustained us, that there was a higher logic we sometimes followed, that despite the agonies, our lives were not mere sound and fury; that in our own way, at select moments at least, we did properly draw benefit from, and understand, the meaning of life.

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The Meaning of Life by The School of Life