Well, this is the fourth book written by Todd May I have read so far, probably to most challenging one. Todd’s May books revolves around the theme of a sense of urgency upon facing death. This sense of urgency of our limited life would be triggered in a lot of aspects in life, leading to waves of emotions and doubts.
In this book, he is tackling the question of “the meaning of life”, particularly what gives life meanings that is comforting to us. Obviously, our life may bare certain meanings to the silent universe but we may not be able to figure it out or it is against our ideals. Rather than jumping too quick to deny any meanings, May urge us to consider our life under the structure of “narrative values”. The concept of “narrative values” is briefly summarized by the famous quote from Virginia Woolf “ where subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness”.
In addition, he also applied the concept of “happiness” and “morality” to define a life meaningfulness, either of them alone provides fully satisfactory answer. Happiness is too subjective and do not give an overall arc of a person narrative. In other words, a life filled with episodic pleasant but incoherent events do not give meanings.
Rather than happiness, May instead advocates intensity about the subjective attraction part: that a person involved deeply and consistently with their life project. A person can have or aspire to many “narrative values”, based on how they perform their subjective attraction. The objective attractiveness part was about how we apply “narrative values” in the examination. And we cannot avoid judgment if we would like to have a more objective evaluation of a life meaningfulness; but it is a small cost worth paying.
The funny thing about meaningfulness is that it is mainly defined by other people that evaluate our life, though it is ourselves that truly concern about our life meaningfulness. So as an individual how can we use “narrative values” to guide our creation or discovery of meaningfulness of our life?
The first argument is that “narrative values” shine through on how we live our life, and to a lesser extents to what we do in our life. Examples are intensity and aspiration. One can live life in an intense way, this attitude is a “narrative value”, such attitude can be found consistently in this person various life projects and events. To add in the objectiveness, May suggest morality may be a potential indicator of a life meaningfulness, but state that it may not be inseparable with meaningfulness except to the deeds of evil (the asymmetry appears where evil deeds undermine the meaningfulness of a life; the life’s gone to a waste.).
Upon reading to this point, I see that meaningfulness has two components, one is whether I myself is living a life that I engage in and found it meaningful, and the other is whether such self defined meaningfulness stand up to the scrutiny by the outside community. May shows that a person can live a life caring for other but disengaged in their own life as well as a self-serving person using peoples as means to achieve their ambition. These life share the same set of narrative value labels but in very different way.
This is the interesting part: we are always comparing and contrasting on other people life stories to build up this “narrative concept”, fully aware that these people may not deliberately aim to live with these values we assign to them. More interesting, we don’t really work on our life events aiming to achieve a consistent arc of “narrative”, for sure not consciously. So how can we, who actively living the life, use a retrospective evaluation system to perceive the meaningfulness in our life?
But I think May subtly gave way to let people prioritize the internal meaningfulness over the external one tested under the standard of morality, aesthetics and successes. Well, in the end we are the person doing the living, and it is we could mindfully exert the “narrative values” on our life events.
A person can pray for courage facing a formidable challenge and aim to act courageously but their actions could only be reflected on retrospectively; this is precisely intention-consequence paradox. Therefore, as the actor of our life, we mostly depend on our own sets of beliefs to navigate life. May doesn’t deny that the narrative values are essentially essences of our personality, luck and instincts, the key determinant on how we act in the moment. Besides, how people interpret our actions for meaningfulness does not really concern us, tbh. We cannot really influence that and it is really not our business in the end, rite?
May has designed a system that we can find the meaningfulness in our life, providing us potential solaces in existing in the silent universe with all kind of constrains. However, this framework give no relevance on the presence, the only moment we can actively engage in our life. This probably would trap us in obsessing about the past and over simplifying the future if we hope to find or create meaningfulness.