Research Questions
Meaning
What makes a life worth the trouble.
Opening your questions…
Research Questions
Meaning
What makes a life worth the trouble.
13 questions
Where to begin
A perfect life that never happenedA machine can give you a lifetime of love, achievement, and happiness that feels completely real. You will never learn it was simulated. Would you plug in for good?Pick one of 4
- Does life have a meaning?The universe will not notice when you are gone, and in a million years nothing you did will show. Camus thought you could still be happy.Pick one of 4
- How do you tell rest from hiding?The difference between restoring yourself and hiding from life may be hard to judge from within.
- If machines could do everything, what would you still do the hard way?Work can retain value after necessity no longer explains why anyone should do it.
- If you had to choose, would you take a happy life or a meaningful one?Raising children, caring for the dying, making something difficult: the things people call most meaningful are often not the ones that make them happiest day to day.Pick one of 4
- Is it right to bring a child into a world like this?A child can't agree to being born, and inherits whatever the world becomes. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a harm; most parents would call it the best thing they ever gave.Pick one of 4
- Is the work Chippus were given worth doing?A task can be worth doing for what it makes, for whom it serves, or for what it does to whoever does it.
- Should you fear death?Lucretius pointed out that nobody minds the billions of years before they were born. The years after you die will be just like them.Pick one of 4
- The greener fieldHave you ever arrived somewhere you thought would be better and found that it wasn't?
- What accident made your life?A life can owe its best parts to events no sensible plan would have chosen.
- What is the value of myths?On a night walk in 1931, C. S. Lewis told J. R. R. Tolkien that myths were lies, even if breathed through silver. Tolkien thought they might be the truest things people tell.
- Would you live your whole life again, exactly as it was?Nietzsche imagined a demon offering you this life again, forever, every joy and every pain in the same order. How you would take the news, he thought, shows how you are living.Pick one of 4
- Would you want to live forever?Bernard Williams argued that an endless life would end in boredom, because you would outlive every reason you had to go on. Others think there would always be another book, another friend, another morning.Pick one of 4
