Is Life Worth Living?
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.”
-Victor Frankl
My wife left me. It wasn’t a healthy relationship and, in hindsight, her leaving was probably the best thing to ever happen to me but it sure as hell did not feel that way at the time. It broke me, nearly completely.
I’d made her my reason for living and when she left, well I couldn’t really find a reason to go on. I found myself facing a profound existential crisis. I was suicidal but I didn’t tell anyone. From a childhood filled with suicidal idealizations I already knew that when you tell people you are pondering killing yourself they feel a need to talk you out of it. I wasn’t interested in that. This was not a cry for help because I was convinced I was beyond help. It was a full on internal crisis.
I became determined to figure out if life was worth living and then, based on that calculation, either end my life or not. I felt at peace with this approach. I was already pretty sure the conclusion was going to be, “No. Life is not worth living.” But I wanted to approach it scientifically and see if I could prove my hypothesis.
I decided if there was a way to put all of the good stuff in life; all the joy, love, excitement, wonderment, and other positive experiences on one side of the scale and then put all the bad stuff; all the pain, anger, loneliness, and sorrow on the other. Then, I could see which side was heaviest and know whether life was worth living.
A friend told me that when you are depressed trying to imagine ever being happy again is like trying to imagine what ice cream tastes like while you’re eating liver. In other words, it’s basically impossible. And in the depths of my despair, the thought of a “happy life” felt pretty naive and impossible. Happy people seemed like idiots who didn’t understand what life was really like.
It turned out there were many problems with my quest to weigh life’s joys versus its anguish. How could I remember or quantify all the emotions in life, or even in a given day or year? To start there’s the problem of the Pollyanna principle, which is the brain’s tendency to misremember things as better than they really were. It’s a coping mechanism. For example, if a mother actually remembered just how excruciating and difficult childbirth she’d be very unlikely to go through it a second time. So, over time, our brains work hard to suppress painful memories so we can go on with life and acts such as birthing more children. Well the same thing happens throughout childhood and adulthood. However good or bad you think your childhood was, chances are it was really worse and your brain has worked to polish the memory for you to make life more bearable. If our brains didn’t do this, we humans might have died out a long time ago. All of this made figuring out what to put on each side of the scale practically impossible until I realized, my whole approach was wrong.
Antony Jay wrote, “The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.” I was realizing, my question was fundamentally flawed. It had set me up for a self-fulfilling prophecy. How you feel is based on how you think. If you think life is worth living, you’re right. But if you think life is not worth living, then you’re also right.
By the time I had this epiphany, I’d come out of the darkness just enough to realize, I’m probably was not going to kill myself. Even though I thought I felt it was the rationale thing to do, I just couldn’t seem to overcome my natural survival instinct. Then I had my next epiphany: if I was going to go on living, I might as well make the best of it. I might as well put as as many things as possible onto the positive side of the scale.
In time, I would realize that that people with high emotional intelligence are not happy all the time; they simply have learned to feel all their feelings deeply- the positive ones and negative ones. The secret to a happier life lies, not in expecting to be happy all the time, but rather in accepting all your feelings.
At the time, it was enough to know, I wanted to be happier. If we all see the world through our own biased lenses, if life truly is whatever we make of it then I wanted to make mine worth living. AI wanted the positive side of the scale to be heavier- not just by a little, but by a lot. That meant changing the way I think. That was not going to be easy, but then again, most worthwhile things in life aren’t.
Lucky for me, I felt completely broken. And, as I would soon discover, an emotional bottom is exactly the place where we are the most open to considering new ideas.
Ask Yourself:
After each letter, I’d like to propose some questions for you to ask yourself. There are no correct answers. The point is to help you discover what you think, how your thoughts may be holding you back, and whether you hold any beliefs it might be beneficial to challenge within yourself.
- Do I believe life is worth living?
- Do I believe my life is worth living?
- How does my answers to questions 1 and 2 affect the way I approach life?
Next Letter: Is There a Right Way to Live Life?