the book of life essay

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Clip: ‘The Book of Life’

A scene from the film..

By Mekado Murphy

Oct. 15, 2014

From Mexican folk art to Sergio Leone to Radiohead, the director Jorge R. Gutierrez reached far and wide for inspiration in making “The Book of Life,” his first 3-D animated feature. The story of a woman and the two men who pine for her in a small Mexican village is at the heart of this mythic adventure, which has tinges of spaghetti westerns and makes room for magic, bullfighting and pop music.

Mr. Gutierrez, who was also behind Nickelodeon’s series “El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera,” emphasizes stylized rendering here. He designed the male characters, while his wife and collaborator, Sandra Equihua, did the female ones. Mr. Gutierrez looked at the hand-carved wooden figures from Mexican folk art and translated them for his film.

“One of my favorite things about Mexican folk art is this idea that artisans are making it,” Mr. Gutierrez said by phone from Washington. “So there are all these imperfections, and every piece is completely unique. As a kid, I loved having a Mexican folk art version of Superman or Bart Simpson. I loved the idea that they had become Mexican.”

Here is a look at three characters from “Life,” with commentary by Mr. Gutierrez and the art director, Paul J. Sullivan.

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The Film The Book Of Life - Lessons Learned

I will explain why-

The film starts with some children being led to a room in a museum. The room holds The Book Of Life. The Tour Guide tells them the story that takes place in a town called San Angel.

The are two other lands-The Land of the Remembered where the deceased live as long as their loved ones remember them and the Land of the Forgotten were the deceased live who have none to remember them. These lands have two separate gods-a good and a bad one of course.

The story begins with The Day of the Dead festival . There are celebrations on the graves of loved ones and the spirits of the loved ones appear and the people can feel them.

One of the main characters is a girl called Maria and the story is about two boys who are seeking her love. The two gods place a bet on which boy she will marry-if the good god wins the bad god has to be good but if the bad god wins he gets the good god's Land of the Remembered.

Each god chooses a boy to champion. The good god chooses the boy (Manolo) who just likes to play a guitar but is meant to be a bull fighter-but he can't bring himself to kill any bulls. The bad god chooses the soldiers son (Joaquin) and gives him a magic medal to make him invincible. The bad god cheats and makes Manolo believe that Maria is dead when she is bitten by a serpent he created. Manolo asks for the serpent to kill him too so he can follow Maria his true love into the Land of the Remembered.

However Maria is still alive and left to possibly marry Joaquin who is now a great warrior and can save and protect the town from enemies. When Manolo enters the Land of the Remembered he meets up with all his deceased family including his Mother. He realises he has been tricked as Maria is not there. The good god has been sent the Land of the Forgotten so he journeys there to tell her she has been tricked to. His family all help him.

To get into the land Manolo has to cross to the Cave of Souls. After taking on lots of dangerous tasks, Manolo's pure heart allows him and his family to enter the Cave. They meet the Candle Maker who oversees the lives of everybody in the living world. Every ones life is symbolised by a burning candle. Manolo convinces him to take him through to the Land of the Forgotten to meet The good god. The Candle Maker agrees after seeing that Manolo's story in the Book of Life has yet to be written because he is writing it himself. Manolo meets the good god and tells her the truth she makes the bad god listen to Manolo's wager of his own( to be restored to life if he passes any challenge).

Manolo is forced to face his deepest fear and to fight all the bulls his family had ever fought. He wins by singing about how sorry he is that the bulls were killed and the final bull peacefully dissolves. Manolo returns to the living world with his family. He goes on to save the day by being a true hero and marries Maria.

Key messages-the children learn

True Love never dies

Loved ones should be remembered

Our loved ones even in spirit form help us

We are reunited with our loved ones

Each of our lives is just a candle which can be extinguished at any point .

Celebrate our loved ones lives even after death

Show true strength by using what we have within ourselves to fight our enemies

Face your fears and if your heart is true you will overcome them

We all write the story of our life-the pages are blank until we write them

There is more to life and death we could ever imagine or know -within this film anything was possible

Within our lives anything is possible -our true feelings of love in our heart will help guide us. We should listen to our hearts.

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The Book of Life

“The Book of Life” bedazzles your eyes and buoys your spirits as it treads upon themes most commonly associated with the macabre universe of Tim Burton . But instead of being gaga for ghoulishness, this Mexican fiesta of animated splendor is packed with visual delights far more sunny than sinister as they burst forth as if flung from an over-packed piñata.

A collaboration between fledgling Reel FX Creative Studios and 20th Century Fox, “The Book of Life” is a rare cartoon feature that doesn’t just deserve to be seen in 3-D, but practically demands it. Complementing the eye candy is a quirkily eclectic soundtrack, including catchy new songs by award-winning score writer Gustavo Santaolalla and Paul Williams of “The Rainbow Connection” fame, and a wide-ranging voice cast. If you always wanted to hear opera great Placido Domingo sing “Cielto Lindo” and its “ay-yai-yai-yai” refrain as if it were Verdi, here is your chance.

That said, the basics of this fantastical fable, whose ingenious puppet-like character designs draw upon the familiar wooden folk-art figures associated with the annual celebration of The Day of the Dead, are somewhat overly familiar despite all the rich cultural references that spice up the proceedings.

There is the ever-popular love triangle in the form of three childhood amigos. Our main hero, the tender-hearted Manola ( Diego Luna , whose boyish vocals are a constant source of plaintive pleasure), comes from a long line of legendary bullfighters and is skilled in the ring himself. But his true calling is that of a guitar-strumming troubadour. The boastful Joaquin ( Channing Tatum , who taps into his abundant reserve of amusing swagger) is a man of action, a mucho-macho mustachioed bandit-rustler with a broad chest crammed with medals.

They both pursue Maria, the smart and headstrong daughter of the general who runs their village of San Angel. She has all the usual attributes of the typical empowered animated female lead – a bookworm with martial-arts fighting skills and all that — but is lucky enough to be blessed with the vivacious vocal spark of Avatar’s Zoe Saladana.

The Book of Life’s multi-tiered plot also involves dueling married deities who reign over separate domains in the afterlife and decide to make a wager. La Muerte (well-known telenovela star Kate del Castillo ), who oversees the cheery Land of the Remembered and believes in the decency of mortals, bets that sensitive soul Manolo will win Maria’s hand. Xiabalba ( Ron Perlman , a pet actor of the film’s producer, Guillermo del Toro), a devious sort who rules the dour Land of the Forgotten, backs the vain Joaquin.

Xiabalba fools Manolo into entering The Land of the Remembered to seek Maria, when it turns out she has only fallen into a “Sleeping Beauty”-style slumber. In order to return to The Land of the Living himself, Manolo must undergo a series of challenges involving his colorful ancestors. Meanwhile, San Angel is being threatened by the fearsome bandit Chakal (whose metallic monster form feels like a del Toro invention) and his gang of nasty thieves.

A three-way romance, multiple worlds, numerous feats, combative gods, a monstrous foe – all these layers make for a rather dense confection. But first-time feature director and co-writer Jorge R. Gutierrez (co-creator of Nickelodeon’s “El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera”) smartly tames his somewhat unwieldy story by cleverly having a modern-day museum guide ( Christina Applegate ) transfix a group of rowdy school kids by relating the tale we are watching as if it were a fable of old.

Where this device comes in handiest is when the subject of death is broached and the children think Maria has really passed away. As one dismayed boy exclaims, “Maria died? What kind of story is this? We’re just kids.” Gutierrez thoughtfully deflects any parental concern about dealing with a potentially morbid subject with a refreshing directness that goes beyond such iconic animated tragedies as the deaths of Bambi’s mother and Simba’s father in “ The Lion King .”

There is genius to be mined in the smaller details, something that Gutierrez excels at as he playfully mixes mythology both real and invented with pop-art touchstones. From a chorus of angelic singing nuns and hirsute town elders whose protruding snouts recall the hippie era’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers to pigs-gone-wild mayhem and a tipsy mariachi trio who slur their way through Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” and Biz Markie’s “I’m Just a Friend,” “The Book of Life” isn’t afraid to catch us off guard. When a forlorn Manolo, abandoned by the townsfolk after refusing to kill a bull in the ring, starts to wail Radiohead’s “Creep,” you could hear teen girls at my screening yelp in joyful recognition.

But Guiterrez even goes a step beyond, as “The Book of Life” personifies the philosophy that drives The Day of the Dead and encourages a healthy way to celebrate those who are gone. As he puts it, “As long as you remember those who came before you, and as long as you tell their stories, cook their dishes, and sing their songs … they’re with you. They live inside your heart.”

And this filmmaker’s heart definitely beats inside this impressive debut.

Susan Wloszczyna

Susan Wloszczyna spent much of her nearly thirty years at USA TODAY as a senior entertainment reporter. Now unchained from the grind of daily journalism, she is ready to view the world of movies with fresh eyes.

Christina Applegate as Mary Beth (voice)
Channing Tatum as Joaquin (voice)
Gabriel Iglesias as Pepe Rodriguez (voice)
Zoe Saldana as Maria (voice)
Eugenio Derbez as
Cheech Marin as Pancho Rodriguez (voice)
Diego Luna as Manolo (voice)
Ron Perlman as Xibalba (voice)
Guillermo Del Toro
Jorge R. Gutierrez

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‘the book of life’: film review.

Jorge R. Gutierrez's animated film, produced by Guillermo del Toro, is inspired by the Mexican holiday the Day of the Dead.

By THR Staff

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The Book of Life Still - H 2014

It’s not surprising that a companion art book to the new animated film directed by Jorge R. Gutierrez and produced by Guillermo del Toro has already been released. Steeped in Mexican folk art and inspired by that country’s holiday the Day of the Dead, The Book of Life is a visually stunning effort that makes up for its formulaic storyline with an enchanting atmosphere that sweeps you into its fantastical world, or in this case, three worlds. The film, which will have an obvious special appeal to Hispanic audiences, should prove a winner for 20th Century Fox Animation.

Bookended by amusing contemporary segments in which a sassy museum tour guide ( Christina Applegate ) hosts a group of skeptical school kids, the story concerns the romantic triangle among the free-spirited Maria ( Zoe Saldana ) and her two suitors: Manolo ( Diego Luna ), the scion of a long line of bullfighters, who really wants to be a singer/guitarist; and the vainglorious Joaquin ( Channing Tatum ), a military hero who struts around with a huge display of medals on his chest.

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The Book of Life

Manolo, a young man who is torn between fulfilling the expectations of his family and following his heart, embarks on an adventure that spans three fantastic worlds where he must face his greatest fears.
From producer Guillermo del Toro and director Jorge Gutierrez comes an animated comedy with a unique visual style. THE BOOK OF LIFE is the journey of Manolo, a young man who is torn between fulfilling the expectations of his family and following his heart. Before choosing which path to follow, he embarks on an incredible adventure that spans three fantastical worlds where he must face his greatest fears. Rich with a fresh take on pop music favorites, THE BOOK OF LIFE encourages us to celebrate the past while looking forward to the future. — 20th Century Fox
Mary Beth, a museum tour guide, takes a group of school detention students on a secret museum tour, telling them, with wooden figures, the story of a Mexican town called San Angel from the Book of Life, holding every story in the world. On the Day of the Dead, La Muerte, ruler of the Land of the Remembered, and Xibalba, ruler of the Land of the Forgotten, see Manolo Sánchez and Joaquín Mondragon competing over María Posada. They strike a wager: if María marries Manolo, Xibalba will no longer interfere in mortal affairs, but if she marries Joaquín, La Muerte and Xibalba will swap realms. However, Xibalba cheats by giving Joaquín his Medal of Everlasting Life, which grants the wearer invincibility.
While visiting a museum, a group of five troubled youth, on detention, are won over by their tour guide, Mary Beth. Part of what wins them over is the story she tells from the Book of Life, which contains all the stories of the world, both true and made-up. The story she tells centers on the Day of the Dead in San Angel, Mexico - the center of the universe - of three childhood best friends, strong-willed María Posada, Joaquín Mondragon Jr., who likes to show he's a man by sporting a fake mustache without truly knowing what it means to be a man, and guitar-playing Manolo Sánchez, the offspring of the town's general, a deceased military hero and a bullfighter respectively. Even at this age, both Joaquín and Manolo are in love with María, each knowing he would like eventually to marry her. They are separated when María's father sends her to Europe for school to learn to be a lady. By the time María returns to San Angel as a young woman, Joaquín has become a military hero like his father, and Manolo has become a bullfighter like all his Sánchez ancestors, male and female. While Manolo showed his aptitude for bullfighting at a young age, his heart still remains music, singing and playing his guitar, and not with bullfighting. Each still pines for María as his wife. What they are unaware of is that two leaders of the afterlife, estranged wife and husband, La Muerte, ruler of the Land of the Remembered, and Xibalba, ruler of the Land of the Forgotten, long ago made a wager on which of the two will marry María, the outcome which will have a profound effect not only on María, Joaquín and Manolo's joint lives, but the course of San Angel, which is constantly under threat by evil Chakal, and the world. What La Muerte is further unaware of is that Xibalba is taking underhanded measures to win, which also affects María, Joaquín and Manolo's live and possible deaths. — Huggo
A bus full of children arrives at a museum. They're a rowdy bunch that frighten the guards. A young woman named Mary Beth (voice of Christina Applegate) comes out and gets the kids to follow her as she tells them about the famous legends and myths of Mexican folklore. She leads them to the Book of Life, which holds the story of how the ways of their world were shaped. She opens a box of dolls that represent the characters of the story. As the story begins, Mary Beth says there were two gods - La Muerte (voice of Kate Del Castillo), ruler of the Land of the Remembered, where the spirits live on with their memories kept by their loved ones; and Xibalba (voice of Ron Perlman), ruler of the Land of the Forgotten, where the forgotten souls decay into oblivion. The two spirits watch over the town of San Angel and see three young children playing - Manolo (voice of Emil-Bastien Bouffard), Maria (voice of Genesis Ochoa), and Joaquin (voice of Elias Garza). Both boys are in love with Maria, but she does not wish to be claimed by anyone. Manolo comes from a family of bullfighters, but his real passion lies in music. Joaquin is more adventurous, hoping to avenge his father after he was killed by the sinister bandit Chakal (voice of Dan Navarro). Disguised as peasants, La Muerte and Xibalba go down to San Angel during a celebration of the Day of the Dead. Manolo and his father, Carlos Sanchez (voice of Hector Elizondo), remember his mother Carmen. La Muerte, as an old woman, asks Manolo for a piece of bread. He gladly gives her a whole loaf. Xibalba, as an old man, asks Joaquin for some, but he is more hesitant. Xibalba gives Joaquin a pin that is called the Pin of Everlasting Life, which is something Chakal is after as it can protect him from death. Xibalba then bets La Muerte that Maria will end up marrying Joaquin, while La Muerte bets on Manolo. The winner will be allowed to rule over the Land of the Remembered. The wager is set. Maria, a free and rebellious spirit, sets free a group of animals into the town after seeing a cute baby pig and fearing that he would be killed by the butcher, to the chagrin of her father General Posada (voice of Carlos Alazraqui). A wild boar comes into town and nearly gets Posada, but Manolo manages to lure the boar like a bullfighter with the red cape. He gets the boar to crash into a wall, but Posada, who was unable to see anything, thinks it was Joaquin that saved him, ignoring Manolo in favor of him. As punishment for her actions, Posada orders Maria to be sent to a private boarding school. She sadly leaves her two friends behind. Manolo gives her the baby pig that she wanted to save, which Manolo names Chuy. Maria gives him a guitar after his old one is broken. On it is an engraving that says "Always play from your heart." Over the years, Carlos mentors Manolo (now played by Diego Luna) into becoming a skilled bullfighter, while Joaquin (now voiced by Channing Tatum), with the help of the pin, manages to conquer many enemies and become the town hero. The day comes for Maria (now voiced by Zoe Saldana) to return home. A big celebration is held in town. Manolo and Joaquin see her and are captivated by her beauty. Manolo is set to fight a bull, but he has qualms over killing it. Although he is able to make it crash into the wall, he is told by Carlos to kill it, but he refuses. Everybody boos him, but Maria applauds him for his compassion. Somebody throws Manolo a guitar to his head, knocking him out. When he comes to, his father expresses his disappointment, saying he is not a real Sanchez. General Posada holds a party for Maria, where Joaquin suggests that Maria ought to be with him so that he can make her happy. This does not go over well with Maria, who tells him off and leaves. Meanwhile, Manolo gets his Mariachi band friends, the Rodriguez brothers (voices of Gabriel Iglesias, Cheech Marin, and Ricardo Sanchez), to help serenade her. The brothers play some tunes (like Biz Markie's "Just A Friend"), none of which impress Maria. Manolo serenades her with a song from his heart, which even moves all the townspeople. The brothers form a ladder to bring Manolo up to Maria's balcony so they may kiss, but she tells him it's not gonna be that easy. Joaquin proposes to Maria. Their marriage would keep San Angel safe from Chakal and his bandits. Manolo arrives and fights with Joaquin over Maria, which she thinks is foolish. Manolo later tells Maria to meet him at dawn. Fearing he will lose the wager, Xibalba turns his staff into a snake and sends it after Manolo. Maria follows a trail of candles to a tree where Manolo is. He professes his love to her, which she reciprocates. Then, the snake slithers into the area. Maria pushes Manolo out of the way, getting bitten by the snake. She dies instantly. Manolo screams in rage. He carries Maria's body back to San Angel, where both Joaquin and General Posada blame him for Maria's death. Manolo returns to the tree, mourning his love. Xibalba appears before him, and Manolo states that he will do anything to be with Maria again. Xibalba uses his staff to form a two-headed snake, which bites Manolo and kills him. Manolo's spirit goes down to the Land of the Remembered, looking like a skeleton. It is a remarkably wonderful looking place where the remembered spirits roam around. The captain of the land comes by and learns he is part of the Sanchez family. He escorts Manolo to meet them. He meets his famous ancestors, including Carmelo (Jorge R. Gutierrez), who never used capes to fight; Jorge (Placido Domingo), who fought with one arm and leg, and is a skilled singer; and Luis (Danny Trejo), Manolo's grandfather who is upset with Manolo for dying so soon. Manolo is taken to meet his mother Carmen (Ana de la Reguera). She is happy to see her son, but not happy that he is there so soon. With the help of his family, Manolo goes to La Muerte's castle, which is now run by Xibalba. He explains that the snake bite only put Maria to sleep, and Joaquin revived her with the pin. She is awake and learns that Manolo is dead. Angry over being cheated, Manolo vows to tell La Muerte what Xibalba did and to return to the human world. Manolo, Carmen, and Luis are told to travel to the Cave of Souls to make it to the Land of the Forgotten and meet with La Muerte. There, Manolo is thrown into a labyrinth where three large boulders roll around trying to crush him. Manolo evades all of them, to the surprise of the spirit guardian. The guardian takes a gigantic form and swings down a huge sword onto Manolo, which shatter upon hitting him. Realizing he is pure of heart, the guardian allows Manolo to pass on through The Sanchez's meet the Candle Maker (voice of Ice Cube), who oversees the lives of everybody in the living world. Manolo convinces him to take him through to the Land of the Forgotten to meet La Muerte. The Candle Maker agrees after seeing that Manolo's story has yet to be written, because he is writing it himself. In The Land of the Forgotten, Manolo, Carmen, and Luis see the lonely spirits decaying and withering away. They make it to Xibalba's castle to find La Muerte. Manolo tells her that Xibalba cheated, sending her into a rage. She summons him and angrily chastises him for betraying her again. Manolo then offers a wager himself. If he wins, Xibalba must let him return to the human world, and La Muerte adds that he may never interfere with the affairs of the living ever again. Otherwise, Xibalba may rule over both realms. The wager is set. Manolo is forced to face off against every bull that his family has ever fought. In the living world, Chakal and his bandits are making their way to San Angel, just as Maria and Joaquin are about to marry. Carlos charges toward Chakal, only to be killed. His spirit joins his family to watch Manolo fight. The bulls come together to form one giant bull. Instead of fighting it, Manolo sings it a song, apologizing for all the wrongs his family has brought to the bulls. Even as the giant bull nearly kills him, he keeps singing, bringing the bulls to peace, and surprising his family. La Muerte and Xibalba, impressed by Manolo's will, grant him his life back and send him to the living world just in time to fight back The three spirits decide, since it is the Day of the Dead, to have some fun by summoning all of Manolo's family to fight back against Chakal. Maria rounds up the whole town to fight back as well. Manolo and Joaquin make amends and decide to fight against Chakal together. Chakal grabs Maria and climbs the top of a tower. With the help of his forefathers, including a now proud Carlos, Manolo is sent up to the tower to face off Chakal. With Maria, they fight the bandit and knock him off the tower, also sending them falling as well, but they land safely. Chakal then lights up the bombs on his belt to take the whole town down with him. Manolo and Joaquin push Chakal beneath a bell and tie him up. Manolo knocks over a column to bring the bell down on him and Chakal. He tells Maria not to forget him. The bell traps them both as the bombs go off, killing Chakal, and supposedly Manolo. However, Manolo emerges safely, after Joaquin gave him the pin to stay alive. Joaquin now realizes that a true hero is selfless General Posada gives Manolo his blessing to marry Maria. The two are wed, with Manolo's family proud of their boy. Manolo and Maria then sing a song and dance with everybody. Xibalba apologizes to La Muerte for betraying her, telling her he loves her. They kiss. Back at the museum, Mary Beth ends the story as the children must leave. They leave excited after hearing the story. As the bus is set to depart, the kids wave goodbye to Mary Beth, who takes the form of La Muerte, to the joy of the kids. The security guard appears as Xibalba. They kiss again. The story ends, and the Candle Maker closes the Book of Life, reminding us all to write our own stories.

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Ron Perlman, Christina Applegate, Ice Cube, Hector Elizondo, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, Plácido Domingo, Kathy Griffin, Scott Adsit, Carlos Alazraqui, Kristen Alderson, Kristen Ariza, Kate del Castillo, Grey Griffin, Eugenio Derbez, Walt Dohrn, Ana de la Reguera, Gabriel Iglesias, Diego Luna, Danny Mann, Angélica María, Mike Mitchell, Zoe Saldana, Miguel Sandoval, Peter Sohn, Aron Warner, Eric Bauza, Ben Gleib, Sandra Equihua, Channing Tatum, Jorge R. Gutiérrez, Dan Navarro, Anjelah Johnson-Reyes, Ryan Potter, Emil-Bastien Bouffard, Gunnar Sizemore, Genesis Ochoa, Trey Bumpass, Ricardo El Mandril Sanchez, Ishan Sharma, Elijah Rodriguez, Kristen Phaneuf, Kennedy Peil, and Callahan Clark in The Book of Life (2014)

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The Book of Life

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

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Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-16

Chapters 17-21

Chapters 22-26

Chapters 27-31

Chapters 32-36

Chapters 37-41

Character Analysis

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Discussion Questions

Throughout The Book of Life , characters struggle with tolerance and acceptance. How does Deborah Harkness weave these concepts throughout the story through characterization and symbols?

Do Diana and Matthew have a healthy relationship? What efforts to they make to find a healthy balance, and do they succeed?

Family and heritage play a significant role in The Book of Life . How do these factors affect the characters of the story? How do they affect the plot? Use examples to explain your answer.

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The book of life.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 29 Reviews
Kids Say 42 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Beautifully animated film has some scary imagery.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 7+?

Potentially scary imagery/pervasive death references (skeletons, beheaded figure

There's no consumerism in the film, which is set in the past, but there are

Manolo and Joaquin are both in love with Maria. They try to kiss her several tim

Words like "kick his butt" and insults like "lazy bum." Some

There's drinking, but it's not clear what's being consumed.

Any Positive Content?

There's an ongoing message that doing what's right is more important tha

Manolo is pressured to be as great a bullfighter as his father and other ancesto

Kids will learn the cultural traditions of the Day of the Dead and what it was l

Violence & Scariness

Potentially scary imagery/pervasive death references (skeletons, beheaded figures, etc.) throughout the movie. Manolo fights real-life bulls, and, near the end, he also fights a scary demon bull the size of a building. Xiabalba, the king of the underworld, is scary and makes loud frightening movements that could scare some children. Manolo dies and becomes a skeleton figure and reunites with his dead ancestors, including his mother. His grandfather has his head chopped off, and Manolo's mother carries it around. Maria and Manolo are bitten by a snake that transforms from a cane. There's a battle scene at the end with punching and sword fighting. Joaquin, the town hero, fights throughout the movie. Manolo and Joaquin get in a slap fight over Maria. Throughout the movie, there are little scares where characters jump out or react loudly. At the beginning of the movie, children visiting a museum are taken through a magical door to a secret room.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

There's no consumerism in the film, which is set in the past, but there are tie-in marketing deals for clothing, jewelry, toys, etc.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Manolo and Joaquin are both in love with Maria. They try to kiss her several times, and Manolo eventually does. Manolo's mariachi friends sing "If You Think I'm Sexy" and "Just a Friend" to help Manolo court Maria.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Words like "kick his butt" and insults like "lazy bum." Some kids are called "detention kids."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

There's an ongoing message that doing what's right is more important than other people's expectations of you. When Manolo goes to the underworld, he learns that he's part of a bigger world. On the Day of the Dead, family members that have died are honored and remembered in a big celebration.

Positive Role Models

Manolo is pressured to be as great a bullfighter as his father and other ancestors were, but he defies them by not killing the bull in the ring because it’s wrong. His kindness and integrity end up saving him in the end. Maria is strong and self-sufficient; at first, she won't be pressured into marrying Joaquin just because her father wants her to and everyone in town admires him. Joaquin is egotistical and keeps a great secret about how he came to be the town's invincible hero. Xibalba is a classic villain who will stop at nothing to trade places with La Muerte.

Educational Value

Kids will learn the cultural traditions of the Day of the Dead and what it was like to live in an old Mexican town without technology.

Parents need to know that The Book of Life is a refreshingly original animated film that takes viewers to the underworld and back. Smaller children might find the scenes in the Land of the Remembered scary, especially those featuring the king of the underworld, Xibalba (who's named after the Mayan name for the realm of the dead). The characters in the Land of the Remembered are traditional Day of the Dead figures, which are skeletons in brightly colored clothing. One dead character's head is separate from his body. There are some bullfighting scenes and battle sequences that are a little violent, and things get somewhat darker when the action shifts to the underworld (there's a demonic bull surrounded by fire). Expect a little bit of kissing and a few insults ("kick his butt," "lazy bum"), too. But the fun definitely outweighs the scary/iffy parts, and ultimately this is a vibrant, colorful movie about doing the right thing and the importance of family -- messages that can be appreciated by both kids and parents. It's also an invitation to explore and learn more about Mexican culture, from the details of the Day of the Dead celebrations to legendary creatures like Chupacabras. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (29)
Kids say (42)

Based on 29 parent reviews

Violence, sexism, just junk

Enthralling story that highlights mexican culture, what's the story.

In THE BOOK OF LIFE, Manolo (voiced by Diego Luna ) and Joaquin ( Channing Tatum ) have loved Maria ( Zoe Saldana ) all their lives. What they don't know is that the kind La Muerte ( Kate del Castillo ) and the evil Xibalba ( Ron Perlman ) -- the rulers of the underworld -- made a bet over which boy Maria would marry. She's sent away to school and comes back more confident and more beautiful. Meanwhile, Manolo grows up into a sensitive guitar player whose family wants him to be a ruthless bullfighter, while Joaquin becomes the town hero -- with a big secret and huge ego. Xibalba will go to any lengths to win the bet, so he sets his snake on Manolo. So Manolo must travel through the underworld on the Day of the Dead, the biggest party of the year, to return to his true love.

Is It Any Good?

This is a beautifully animated film about Dia de los Muertos that combines essential Mexican folklore, ancient mythology, and pop culture. Luna is charming as Manolo, the guitar playing bullfighter who's too kind to kill the bull. Tatum has just the right amount of bravado to play Joaquin, who shouts his own name as he rushes into battle, and Saldana is sassy and adorable as the smart, independent Maria.

Most impressive is the visually stunning underworld that director Jorge Gutierrez has created. The Book of Life immerses viewers into the environment, traditions, colors, and sounds of Day of the Dead celebration; La Muerte is the most gorgeous animated queen since Maleficent in the original Sleeping Beauty , and Xibalba is perfect as her scary king. The characters and the music (excellent reworkings of classic and alternative pop songs) are absorbing and memorable, and you'll be thinking about the world full of color and fun that Gutierrez has created long after you've seen the movie.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the pressure to live up to expectations. Can you relate to Manolo and Joaquin's feeling that they can't fill the shoes of the family that came before them in The Book of Life ? What's the best way to handle that type of situation? Manolo, Maria, and Joaquin all ultimately realize that they must follow their own paths. Kids: Is it ever OK to defy your parents' wishes?

How scary is The Book of Life ? Is it ever fun to be scared? Why or why not?

How do the characters in The Book of Life demonstrate integrity ? Why is this an important character strength ?

Are you familiar with Day of the Dead? Does your culture celebrate loved ones after they've died? How could you learn more about this holiday? What other Latino traditions and values does the movie include?

Especially considering the movie's time setting (likely the early 1900s), Maria is a very progressive young woman, with a strong, determined personality. How does that make her a role model? How are her goals and dreams out of the ordinary for the world she's part of?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 17, 2014
On DVD or streaming : January 27, 2015
Cast : Diego Luna , Zoe Saldana , Channing Tatum
Director : Jorge R. Gutierrez
Inclusion Information : Latino actors, Female actors, Black actors
Studio : Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Genre : Family and Kids
Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Adventures , Fairy Tales , Great Boy Role Models , Great Girl Role Models
Character Strengths : Integrity
Run time : 95 minutes
MPAA rating : PG
MPAA explanation : mild action, rude humor, some thematic elements and brief scary images
Award : Common Sense Selection
Last updated : January 20, 2024

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, best books on the meaning of life.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? , one of Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin ‘s most famous paintings.

This is a list of the books on the meaning of life that I recommend. For more information click one of the links below. (Books that particularly influenced me. ** )

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The Meaning of Life

Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997). Consider, for instance, Aristotle on the human function, Aquinas on the beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good. Relatedly, think about Koheleth, the presumed author of the Biblical book Ecclesiastes, describing life as “futility” and akin to “the pursuit of wind,” Nietzsche on nihilism, as well as Schopenhauer when he remarks that whenever we reach a goal we have longed for we discover “how vain and empty it is.” While these concepts have some bearing on happiness and virtue (and their opposites), they are straightforwardly construed (roughly) as accounts of which highly ranked purposes a person ought to realize that would make her life significant (if any would).

Despite the venerable pedigree, it is only since the 1980s or so that a distinct field of the meaning of life has been established in Anglo-American-Australasian philosophy, on which this survey focuses, and it is only in the past 20 years that debate with real depth and intricacy has appeared. Two decades ago analytic reflection on life’s meaning was described as a “backwater” compared to that on well-being or good character, and it was possible to cite nearly all the literature in a given critical discussion of the field (Metz 2002). Neither is true any longer. Anglo-American-Australasian philosophy of life’s meaning has become vibrant, such that there is now way too much literature to be able to cite comprehensively in this survey. To obtain focus, it tends to discuss books, influential essays, and more recent works, and it leaves aside contributions from other philosophical traditions (such as the Continental or African) and from non-philosophical fields (e.g., psychology or literature). This survey’s central aim is to acquaint the reader with current analytic approaches to life’s meaning, sketching major debates and pointing out neglected topics that merit further consideration.

When the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people tend to pose one of three questions: “What are you talking about?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, and “Is life in fact meaningful?”. The literature on life's meaning composed by those working in the analytic tradition (on which this entry focuses) can be usefully organized according to which question it seeks to answer. This survey starts off with recent work that addresses the first, abstract (or “meta”) question regarding the sense of talk of “life’s meaning,” i.e., that aims to clarify what we have in mind when inquiring into the meaning of life (section 1). Afterward, it considers texts that provide answers to the more substantive question about the nature of meaningfulness (sections 2–3). There is in the making a sub-field of applied meaning that parallels applied ethics, in which meaningfulness is considered in the context of particular cases or specific themes. Examples include downshifting (Levy 2005), implementing genetic enhancements (Agar 2013), making achievements (Bradford 2015), getting an education (Schinkel et al. 2015), interacting with research participants (Olson 2016), automating labor (Danaher 2017), and creating children (Ferracioli 2018). In contrast, this survey focuses nearly exclusively on contemporary normative-theoretical approaches to life’s meanining, that is, attempts to capture in a single, general principle all the variegated conditions that could confer meaning on life. Finally, this survey examines fresh arguments for the nihilist view that the conditions necessary for a meaningful life do not obtain for any of us, i.e., that all our lives are meaningless (section 4).

1. The Meaning of “Meaning”

2.1. god-centered views, 2.2. soul-centered views, 3.1. subjectivism, 3.2. objectivism, 3.3. rejecting god and a soul, 4. nihilism, works cited, classic works, collections, books for the general reader, other internet resources, related entries.

One of the field's aims consists of the systematic attempt to identify what people (essentially or characteristically) have in mind when they think about the topic of life’s meaning. For many in the field, terms such as “importance” and “significance” are synonyms of “meaningfulness” and so are insufficiently revealing, but there are those who draw a distinction between meaningfulness and significance (Singer 1996, 112–18; Belliotti 2019, 145–50, 186). There is also debate about how the concept of a meaningless life relates to the ideas of a life that is absurd (Nagel 1970, 1986, 214–23; Feinberg 1980; Belliotti 2019), futile (Trisel 2002), and not worth living (Landau 2017, 12–15; Matheson 2017).

A useful way to begin to get clear about what thinking about life’s meaning involves is to specify the bearer. Which life does the inquirer have in mind? A standard distinction to draw is between the meaning “in” life, where a human person is what can exhibit meaning, and the meaning “of” life in a narrow sense, where the human species as a whole is what can be meaningful or not. There has also been a bit of recent consideration of whether animals or human infants can have meaning in their lives, with most rejecting that possibility (e.g., Wong 2008, 131, 147; Fischer 2019, 1–24), but a handful of others beginning to make a case for it (Purves and Delon 2018; Thomas 2018). Also under-explored is the issue of whether groups, such as a people or an organization, can be bearers of meaning, and, if so, under what conditions.

Most analytic philosophers have been interested in meaning in life, that is, in the meaningfulness that a person’s life could exhibit, with comparatively few these days addressing the meaning of life in the narrow sense. Even those who believe that God is or would be central to life’s meaning have lately addressed how an individual’s life might be meaningful in virtue of God more often than how the human race might be. Although some have argued that the meaningfulness of human life as such merits inquiry to no less a degree (if not more) than the meaning in a life (Seachris 2013; Tartaglia 2015; cf. Trisel 2016), a large majority of the field has instead been interested in whether their lives as individual persons (and the lives of those they care about) are meaningful and how they could become more so.

Focusing on meaning in life, it is quite common to maintain that it is conceptually something good for its own sake or, relatedly, something that provides a basic reason for action (on which see Visak 2017). There are a few who have recently suggested otherwise, maintaining that there can be neutral or even undesirable kinds of meaning in a person’s life (e.g., Mawson 2016, 90, 193; Thomas 2018, 291, 294). However, these are outliers, with most analytic philosophers, and presumably laypeople, instead wanting to know when an individual’s life exhibits a certain kind of final value (or non-instrumental reason for action).

Another claim about which there is substantial consensus is that meaningfulness is not all or nothing and instead comes in degrees, such that some periods of life are more meaningful than others and that some lives as a whole are more meaningful than others. Note that one can coherently hold the view that some people’s lives are less meaningful (or even in a certain sense less “important”) than others, or are even meaningless (unimportant), and still maintain that people have an equal standing from a moral point of view. Consider a consequentialist moral principle according to which each individual counts for one in virtue of having a capacity for a meaningful life, or a Kantian approach according to which all people have a dignity in virtue of their capacity for autonomous decision-making, where meaning is a function of the exercise of this capacity. For both moral outlooks, we could be required to help people with relatively meaningless lives.

Yet another relatively uncontroversial element of the concept of meaningfulness in respect of individual persons is that it is logically distinct from happiness or rightness (emphasized in Wolf 2010, 2016). First, to ask whether someone’s life is meaningful is not one and the same as asking whether her life is pleasant or she is subjectively well off. A life in an experience machine or virtual reality device would surely be a happy one, but very few take it to be a prima facie candidate for meaningfulness (Nozick 1974: 42–45). Indeed, a number would say that one’s life logically could become meaningful precisely by sacrificing one’s well-being, e.g., by helping others at the expense of one’s self-interest. Second, asking whether a person’s existence over time is meaningful is not identical to considering whether she has been morally upright; there are intuitively ways to enhance meaning that have nothing to do with right action or moral virtue, such as making a scientific discovery or becoming an excellent dancer. Now, one might argue that a life would be meaningless if, or even because, it were unhappy or immoral, but that would be to posit a synthetic, substantive relationship between the concepts, far from indicating that speaking of “meaningfulness” is analytically a matter of connoting ideas regarding happiness or rightness. The question of what (if anything) makes a person’s life meaningful is conceptually distinct from the questions of what makes a life happy or moral, although it could turn out that the best answer to the former question appeals to an answer to one of the latter questions.

Supposing, then, that talk of “meaning in life” connotes something good for its own sake that can come in degrees and that is not analytically equivalent to happiness or rightness, what else does it involve? What more can we say about this final value, by definition? Most contemporary analytic philosophers would say that the relevant value is absent from spending time in an experience machine (but see Goetz 2012 for a different view) or living akin to Sisyphus, the mythic figure doomed by the Greek gods to roll a stone up a hill for eternity (famously discussed by Albert Camus and Taylor 1970). In addition, many would say that the relevant value is typified by the classic triad of “the good, the true, and the beautiful” (or would be under certain conditions). These terms are not to be taken literally, but instead are rough catchwords for beneficent relationships (love, collegiality, morality), intellectual reflection (wisdom, education, discoveries), and creativity (particularly the arts, but also potentially things like humor or gardening).

Pressing further, is there something that the values of the good, the true, the beautiful, and any other logically possible sources of meaning involve? There is as yet no consensus in the field. One salient view is that the concept of meaning in life is a cluster or amalgam of overlapping ideas, such as fulfilling higher-order purposes, meriting substantial esteem or admiration, having a noteworthy impact, transcending one’s animal nature, making sense, or exhibiting a compelling life-story (Markus 2003; Thomson 2003; Metz 2013, 24–35; Seachris 2013, 3–4; Mawson 2016). However, there are philosophers who maintain that something much more monistic is true of the concept, so that (nearly) all thought about meaningfulness in a person’s life is essentially about a single property. Suggestions include being devoted to or in awe of qualitatively superior goods (Taylor 1989, 3–24), transcending one’s limits (Levy 2005), or making a contribution (Martela 2016).

Recently there has been something of an “interpretive turn” in the field, one instance of which is the strong view that meaning-talk is logically about whether and how a life is intelligible within a wider frame of reference (Goldman 2018, 116–29; Seachris 2019; Thomas 2019; cf. Repp 2018). According to this approach, inquiring into life’s meaning is nothing other than seeking out sense-making information, perhaps a narrative about life or an explanation of its source and destiny. This analysis has the advantage of promising to unify a wide array of uses of the term “meaning.” However, it has the disadvantages of being unable to capture the intuitions that meaning in life is essentially good for its own sake (Landau 2017, 12–15), that it is not logically contradictory to maintain that an ineffable condition is what confers meaning on life (as per Cooper 2003, 126–42; Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014), and that often human actions themselves (as distinct from an interpretation of them), such as rescuing a child from a burning building, are what bear meaning.

Some thinkers have suggested that a complete analysis of the concept of life’s meaning should include what has been called “anti-matter” (Metz 2002, 805–07, 2013, 63–65, 71–73) or “anti-meaning” (Campbell and Nyholm 2015; Egerstrom 2015), conditions that reduce the meaningfulness of a life. The thought is that meaning is well represented by a bipolar scale, where there is a dimension of not merely positive conditions, but also negative ones. Gratuitous cruelty or destructiveness are prima facie candidates for actions that not merely fail to add meaning, but also subtract from any meaning one’s life might have had.

Despite the ongoing debates about how to analyze the concept of life’s meaning (or articulate the definition of the phrase “meaning in life”), the field remains in a good position to make progress on the other key questions posed above, viz., of what would make a life meaningful and whether any lives are in fact meaningful. A certain amount of common ground is provided by the point that meaningfulness at least involves a gradient final value in a person’s life that is conceptually distinct from happiness and rightness, with exemplars of it potentially being the good, the true, and the beautiful. The rest of this discussion addresses philosophical attempts to capture the nature of this value theoretically and to ascertain whether it exists in at least some of our lives.

2. Supernaturalism

Most analytic philosophers writing on meaning in life have been trying to develop and evaluate theories, i.e., fundamental and general principles, that are meant to capture all the particular ways that a life could obtain meaning. As in moral philosophy, there are recognizable “anti-theorists,” i.e., those who maintain that there is too much pluralism among meaning conditions to be able to unify them in the form of a principle (e.g., Kekes 2000; Hosseini 2015). Arguably, though, the systematic search for unity is too nascent to be able to draw a firm conclusion about whether it is available.

The theories are standardly divided on a metaphysical basis, that is, in terms of which kinds of properties are held to constitute the meaning. Supernaturalist theories are views according to which a spiritual realm is central to meaning in life. Most Western philosophers have conceived of the spiritual in terms of God or a soul as commonly understood in the Abrahamic faiths (but see Mulgan 2015 for discussion of meaning in the context of a God uninterested in us). In contrast, naturalist theories are views that the physical world as known particularly well by the scientific method is central to life’s meaning.

There is logical space for a non-naturalist theory, according to which central to meaning is an abstract property that is neither spiritual nor physical. However, only scant attention has been paid to this possibility in the recent Anglo-American-Australasian literature (Audi 2005).

It is important to note that supernaturalism, a claim that God (or a soul) would confer meaning on a life, is logically distinct from theism, the claim that God (or a soul) exists. Although most who hold supernaturalism also hold theism, one could accept the former without the latter (as Camus more or less did), committing one to the view that life is meaningless or at least lacks substantial meaning. Similarly, while most naturalists are atheists, it is not contradictory to maintain that God exists but has nothing to do with meaning in life or perhaps even detracts from it. Although these combinations of positions are logically possible, some of them might be substantively implausible. The field could benefit from discussion of the comparative attractiveness of various combinations of evaluative claims about what would make life meaningful and metaphysical claims about whether spiritual conditions exist.

Over the past 15 years or so, two different types of supernaturalism have become distinguished on a regular basis (Metz 2019). That is true not only in the literature on life’s meaning, but also in that on the related pro-theism/anti-theism debate, about whether it would be desirable for God or a soul to exist (e.g., Kahane 2011; Kraay 2018; Lougheed 2020). On the one hand, there is extreme supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary for any meaning in life. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by this view, everyone’s life is meaningless. On the other hand, there is moderate supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary for a great or ultimate meaning in life, although not meaning in life as such. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by this view, everyone’s life could have some meaning, or even be meaningful, but no one’s life could exhibit the most desirable meaning. For a moderate supernaturalist, God or a soul would substantially enhance meaningfulness or be a major contributory condition for it.

There are a variety of ways that great or ultimate meaning has been described, sometimes quantitatively as “infinite” (Mawson 2016), qualitatively as “deeper” (Swinburne 2016), relationally as “unlimited” (Nozick 1981, 618–19; cf. Waghorn 2014), temporally as “eternal” (Cottingham 2016), and perspectivally as “from the point of view of the universe” (Benatar 2017). There has been no reflection as yet on the crucial question of how these distinctions might bear on each another, for instance, on whether some are more basic than others or some are more valuable than others.

Cross-cutting the extreme/moderate distinction is one between God-centered theories and soul-centered ones. According to the former, some kind of connection with God (understood to be a spiritual person who is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful and who is the ground of the physical universe) constitutes meaning in life, even if one lacks a soul (construed as an immortal, spiritual substance that contains one’s identity). In contrast, by the latter, having a soul and putting it into a certain state is what makes life meaningful, even if God does not exist. Many supernaturalists of course believe that God and a soul are jointly necessary for a (greatly) meaningful existence. However, the simpler view, that only one of them is necessary, is common, and sometimes arguments proffered for the complex view fail to support it any more than the simpler one.

The most influential God-based account of meaning in life has been the extreme view that one’s existence is significant if and only if one fulfills a purpose God has assigned. The familiar idea is that God has a plan for the universe and that one’s life is meaningful just to the degree that one helps God realize this plan, perhaps in a particular way that God wants one to do so. If a person failed to do what God intends her to do with her life (or if God does not even exist), then, on the current view, her life would be meaningless.

Thinkers differ over what it is about God’s purpose that might make it uniquely able to confer meaning on human lives, but the most influential argument has been that only God’s purpose could be the source of invariant moral rules (Davis 1987, 296, 304–05; Moreland 1987, 124–29; Craig 1994/2013, 161–67) or of objective values more generally (Cottingham 2005, 37–57), where a lack of such would render our lives nonsensical. According to this argument, lower goods such as animal pleasure or desire satisfaction could exist without God, but higher ones pertaining to meaning in life, particularly moral virtue, could not. However, critics point to many non-moral sources of meaning in life (e.g., Kekes 2000; Wolf 2010), with one arguing that a universal moral code is not necessary for meaning in life, even if, say, beneficent actions are (Ellin 1995, 327). In addition, there are a variety of naturalist and non-naturalist accounts of objective morality––and of value more generally––on offer these days, so that it is not clear that it must have a supernatural source in God’s will.

One recurrent objection to the idea that God’s purpose could make life meaningful is that if God had created us with a purpose in mind, then God would have degraded us and thereby undercut the possibility of us obtaining meaning from fulfilling the purpose. The objection harks back to Jean-Paul Sartre, but in the analytic literature it appears that Kurt Baier was the first to articulate it (1957/2000, 118–20; see also Murphy 1982, 14–15; Singer 1996, 29; Kahane 2011; Lougheed 2020, 121–41). Sometimes the concern is the threat of punishment God would make so that we do God’s bidding, while other times it is that the source of meaning would be constrictive and not up to us, and still other times it is that our dignity would be maligned simply by having been created with a certain end in mind (for some replies to such concerns, see Hanfling 1987, 45–46; Cottingham 2005, 37–57; Lougheed 2020, 111–21).

There is a different argument for an extreme God-based view that focuses less on God as purposive and more on God as infinite, unlimited, or ineffable, which Robert Nozick first articulated with care (Nozick 1981, 594–618; see also Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014). The core idea is that for a finite condition to be meaningful, it must obtain its meaning from another condition that has meaning. So, if one’s life is meaningful, it might be so in virtue of being married to a person, who is important. Being finite, the spouse must obtain his or her importance from elsewhere, perhaps from the sort of work he or she does. This work also must obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is meaningful, and so on. A regress on meaningful conditions is present, and the suggestion is that the regress can terminate only in something so all-encompassing that it need not (indeed, cannot) go beyond itself to obtain meaning from anything else. And that is God. The standard objection to this relational rationale is that a finite condition could be meaningful without obtaining its meaning from another meaningful condition. Perhaps it could be meaningful in itself, without being connected to something beyond it, or maybe it could obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is beautiful or otherwise valuable for its own sake but not meaningful (Nozick 1989, 167–68; Thomson 2003, 25–26, 48).

A serious concern for any extreme God-based view is the existence of apparent counterexamples. If we think of the stereotypical lives of Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa, and Pablo Picasso, they seem meaningful even if we suppose there is no all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good spiritual person who is the ground of the physical world (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 31–37, 49–50; Landau 2017). Even religiously inclined philosophers have found this hard to deny these days (Quinn 2000, 58; Audi 2005; Mawson 2016, 5; Williams 2020, 132–34).

Largely for that reason, contemporary supernaturalists have tended to opt for moderation, that is, to maintain that God would greatly enhance the meaning in our lives, even if some meaning would be possible in a world without God. One approach is to invoke the relational argument to show that God is necessary, not for any meaning whatsoever, but rather for an ultimate meaning. “Limited transcendence, the transcending of our limits so as to connect with a wider context of value which itself is limited, does give our lives meaning––but a limited one. We may thirst for more” (Nozick 1981, 618). Another angle is to appeal to playing a role in God’s plan, again to claim, not that it is essential for meaning as such, but rather for “a cosmic significance....intead of a significance very limited in time and space” (Swinburne 2016, 154; see also Quinn 2000; Cottingham 2016, 131). Another rationale is that by fulfilling God’s purpose, we would meaningfully please God, a perfect person, as well as be remembered favorably by God forever (Cottingham 2016, 135; Williams 2020, 21–22, 29, 101, 108). Still another argument is that only with God could the deepest desires of human nature be satisfied (e.g., Goetz 2012; Seachris 2013, 20; Cottingham 2016, 127, 136), even if more surface desires could be satisfied without God.

In reply to such rationales for a moderate supernaturalism, there has been the suggestion that it is precisely by virtue of being alone in the universe that our lives would be particularly significant; otherwise, God’s greatness would overshadow us (Kahane 2014). There has also been the response that, with the opportunity for greater meaning from God would also come that for greater anti-meaning, so that it is not clear that a world with God would offer a net gain in respect of meaning (Metz 2019, 34–35). For example, if pleasing God would greatly enhance meaning in our lives, then presumably displeasing God would greatly reduce it and to a comparable degree. In addition, there are arguments for extreme naturalism (or its “anti-theist” cousin) mentioned below (sub-section 3.3).

Notice that none of the above arguments for supernaturalism appeals to the prospect of eternal life (at least not explicitly). Arguments that do make such an appeal are soul-centered, holding that meaning in life mainly comes from having an immortal, spiritual substance that is contiguous with one’s body when it is alive and that will forever outlive its death. Some think of the afterlife in terms of one’s soul entering a transcendent, spiritual realm (Heaven), while others conceive of one’s soul getting reincarnated into another body on Earth. According to the extreme version, if one has a soul but fails to put it in the right state (or if one lacks a soul altogether), then one’s life is meaningless.

There are three prominent arguments for an extreme soul-based perspective. One argument, made famous by Leo Tolstoy, is the suggestion that for life to be meaningful something must be worth doing, that something is worth doing only if it will make a permanent difference to the world, and that making a permanent difference requires being immortal (see also Hanfling 1987, 22–24; Morris 1992, 26; Craig 1994). Critics most often appeal to counterexamples, suggesting for instance that it is surely worth your time and effort to help prevent people from suffering, even if you and they are mortal. Indeed, some have gone on the offensive and argued that helping people is worth the sacrifice only if and because they are mortal, for otherwise they could invariably be compensated in an afterlife (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 91–94). Another recent and interesting criticism is that the major motivations for the claim that nothing matters now if one day it will end are incoherent (Greene 2021).

A second argument for the view that life would be meaningless without a soul is that it is necessary for justice to be done, which, in turn, is necessary for a meaningful life. Life seems nonsensical when the wicked flourish and the righteous suffer, at least supposing there is no other world in which these injustices will be rectified, whether by God or a Karmic force. Something like this argument can be found in Ecclesiastes, and it continues to be defended (e.g., Davis 1987; Craig 1994). However, even granting that an afterlife is required for perfectly just outcomes, it is far from obvious that an eternal afterlife is necessary for them, and, then, there is the suggestion that some lives, such as Mandela’s, have been meaningful precisely in virtue of encountering injustice and fighting it.

A third argument for thinking that having a soul is essential for any meaning is that it is required to have the sort of free will without which our lives would be meaningless. Immanuel Kant is known for having maintained that if we were merely physical beings, subjected to the laws of nature like everything else in the material world, then we could not act for moral reasons and hence would be unimportant. More recently, one theologian has eloquently put the point in religious terms: “The moral spirit finds the meaning of life in choice. It finds it in that which proceeds from man and remains with him as his inner essence rather than in the accidents of circumstances turns of external fortune....(W)henever a human being rubs the lamp of his moral conscience, a Spirit does appear. This Spirit is God....It is in the ‘Thou must’ of God and man’s ‘I can’ that the divine image of God in human life is contained” (Swenson 1949/2000, 27–28). Notice that, even if moral norms did not spring from God’s commands, the logic of the argument entails that one’s life could be meaningful, so long as one had the inherent ability to make the morally correct choice in any situation. That, in turn, arguably requires something non-physical about one’s self, so as to be able to overcome whichever physical laws and forces one might confront. The standard objection to this reasoning is to advance a compatibilism about having a determined physical nature and being able to act for moral reasons (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009, 145–77). It is also worth wondering whether, if one had to have a spiritual essence in order to make free choices, it would have to be one that never perished.

Like God-centered theorists, many soul-centered theorists these days advance a moderate view, accepting that some meaning in life would be possible without immortality, but arguing that a much greater meaning would be possible with it. Granting that Einstein, Mandela, and Picasso had somewhat meaningful lives despite not having survived the deaths of their bodies (as per, e.g., Trisel 2004; Wolf 2015, 89–140; Landau 2017), there remains a powerful thought: more is better. If a finite life with the good, the true, and the beautiful has meaning in it to some degree, then surely it would have all the more meaning if it exhibited such higher values––including a relationship with God––for an eternity (Cottingham 2016, 132–35; Mawson 2016, 2019, 52–53; Williams 2020, 112–34; cf. Benatar 2017, 35–63). One objection to this reasoning is that the infinity of meaning that would be possible with a soul would be “too big,” rendering it difficult for the moderate supernaturalist to make sense of the intution that a finite life such as Einstein’s can indeed count as meaningful by comparison (Metz 2019, 30–31; cf. Mawson 2019, 53–54). More common, though, is the objection that an eternal life would include anti-meaning of various kinds, such as boredom and repetition, discussed below in the context of extreme naturalism (sub-section 3.3).

3. Naturalism

Recall that naturalism is the view that a physical life is central to life’s meaning, that even if there is no spiritual realm, a substantially meaningful life is possible. Like supernaturalism, contemporary naturalism admits of two distinguishable variants, moderate and extreme (Metz 2019). The moderate version is that, while a genuinely meaningful life could be had in a purely physical universe as known well by science, a somewhat more meaningful life would be possible if a spiritual realm also existed. God or a soul could enhance meaning in life, although they would not be major contributors. The extreme version of naturalism is the view that it would be better in respect of life’s meaning if there were no spiritual realm. From this perspective, God or a soul would be anti-matter, i.e., would detract from the meaning available to us, making a purely physical world (even if not this particular one) preferable.

Cross-cutting the moderate/extreme distinction is that between subjectivism and objectivism, which are theoretical accounts of the nature of meaningfulness insofar as it is physical. They differ in terms of the extent to which the human mind constitutes meaning and whether there are conditions of meaning that are invariant among human beings. Subjectivists believe that there are no invariant standards of meaning because meaning is relative to the subject, i.e., depends on an individual’s pro-attitudes such as her particular desires or ends, which are not shared by everyone. Roughly, something is meaningful for a person if she strongly wants it or intends to seek it out and she gets it. Objectivists maintain, in contrast, that there are some invariant standards for meaning because meaning is at least partly mind-independent, i.e., obtains not merely in virtue of being the object of anyone’s mental states. Here, something is meaningful (partially) because of its intrinsic nature, in the sense of being independent of whether it is wanted or intended; meaning is instead (to some extent) the sort of thing that merits these reactions.

There is logical space for an orthogonal view, according to which there are invariant standards of meaningfulness constituted by what all human beings would converge on from a certain standpoint. However, it has not been much of a player in the field (Darwall 1983, 164–66).

According to this version of naturalism, meaning in life varies from person to person, depending on each one’s variable pro-attitudes. Common instances are views that one’s life is more meaningful, the more one gets what one happens to want strongly, achieves one’s highly ranked goals, or does what one believes to be really important (Trisel 2002; Hooker 2008). One influential subjectivist has recently maintained that the relevant mental state is caring or loving, so that life is meaningful just to the extent that one cares about or loves something (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94, 2004). Another recent proposal is that meaningfulness consists of “an active engagement and affirmation that vivifies the person who has freely created or accepted and now promotes and nurtures the projects of her highest concern” (Belliotti 2019, 183).

Subjectivism was dominant in the middle of the twentieth century, when positivism, noncognitivism, existentialism, and Humeanism were influential (Ayer 1947; Hare 1957; Barnes 1967; Taylor 1970; Williams 1976). However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, inference to the best explanation and reflective equilibrium became accepted forms of normative argumentation and were frequently used to defend claims about the existence and nature of objective value (or of “external reasons,” ones obtaining independently of one’s extant attitudes). As a result, subjectivism about meaning lost its dominance. Those who continue to hold subjectivism often remain suspicious of attempts to justify beliefs about objective value (e.g., Trisel 2002, 73, 79, 2004, 378–79; Frankfurt 2004, 47–48, 55–57; Wong 2008, 138–39; Evers 2017, 32, 36; Svensson 2017, 54). Theorists are moved to accept subjectivism typically because the alternatives are unpalatable; they are reasonably sure that meaning in life obtains for some people, but do not see how it could be grounded on something independent of the mind, whether it be the natural or the supernatural (or the non-natural). In contrast to these possibilities, it appears straightforward to account for what is meaningful in terms of what people find meaningful or what people want out of their lives. Wide-ranging meta-ethical debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language are necessary to address this rationale for subjectivism.

There is a cluster of other, more circumscribed arguments for subjectivism, according to which this theory best explains certain intuitive features of meaning in life. For one, subjectivism seems plausible since it is reasonable to think that a meaningful life is an authentic one (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94). If a person’s life is significant insofar as she is true to herself or her deepest nature, then we have some reason to believe that meaning simply is a function of those matters for which the person cares. For another, it is uncontroversial that often meaning comes from losing oneself, i.e., in becoming absorbed in an activity or experience, as opposed to being bored by it or finding it frustrating (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94; Belliotti 2019, 162–70). Work that concentrates the mind and relationships that are engrossing seem central to meaning and to be so because of the subjective elements involved. For a third, meaning is often taken to be something that makes life worth continuing for a specific person, i.e., that gives her a reason to get out of bed in the morning, which subjectivism is thought to account for best (Williams 1976; Svensson 2017; Calhoun 2018).

Critics maintain that these arguments are vulnerable to a common objection: they neglect the role of objective value (or an external reason) in realizing oneself, losing oneself, and having a reason to live (Taylor 1989, 1992; Wolf 2010, 2015, 89–140). One is not really being true to oneself, losing oneself in a meaningful way, or having a genuine reason to live insofar as one, say, successfully maintains 3,732 hairs on one’s head (Taylor 1992, 36), cultivates one’s prowess at long-distance spitting (Wolf 2010, 104), collects a big ball of string (Wolf 2010, 104), or, well, eats one’s own excrement (Wielenberg 2005, 22). The counterexamples suggest that subjective conditions are insufficient to ground meaning in life; there seem to be certain actions, relationships, and states that are objectively valuable (but see Evers 2017, 30–32) and toward which one’s pro-attitudes ought to be oriented, if meaning is to accrue.

So say objectivists, but subjectivists feel the pull of the point and usually seek to avoid the counterexamples, lest they have to bite the bullet by accepting the meaningfulness of maintaining 3,732 hairs on one’s head and all the rest (for some who do, see Svensson 2017, 54–55; Belliotti 2019, 181–83). One important strategy is to suggest that subjectivists can avoid the counterexamples by appealing to the right sort of pro-attitude. Instead of whatever an individual happens to want, perhaps the relevant mental state is an emotional-perceptual one of seeing-as (Alexis 2011; cf. Hosseini 2015, 47–66), a “categorical” desire, that is, an intrinsic desire constitutive of one’s identity that one takes to make life worth continuing (Svensson 2017), or a judgment that one has a good reason to value something highly for its own sake (Calhoun 2018). Even here, though, objectivists will argue that it might “appear that whatever the will chooses to treat as a good reason to engage itself is, for the will, a good reason. But the will itself....craves objective reasons; and often it could not go forward unless it thought it had them” (Wiggins 1988, 136). And without any appeal to objectivity, it is perhaps likely that counterexamples would resurface.

Another subjectivist strategy by which to deal with the counterexamples is the attempt to ground meaningfulness, not on the pro-attitudes of an individual valuer, but on those of a group (Darwall 1983, 164–66; Brogaard and Smith 2005; Wong 2008). Does such an intersubjective move avoid (more of) the counterexamples? If so, does it do so more plausibly than an objective theory?

Objective naturalists believe that meaning in life is constituted at least in part by something physical beyond merely the fact that it is the object of a pro-attitude. Obtaining the object of some emotion, desire, or judgment is not sufficient for meaningfulness, on this view. Instead, there are certain conditions of the material world that could confer meaning on anyone’s life, not merely because they are viewed as meaningful, wanted for their own sake, or believed to be choiceworthy, but instead (at least partially) because they are inherently worthwhile or valuable in themselves.

Morality (the good), enquiry (the true), and creativity (the beautiful) are widely held instances of activities that confer meaning on life, while trimming toenails and eating snow––along with the counterexamples to subjectivism above––are not. Objectivism is widely thought to be a powerful general explanation of these particular judgments: the former are meaningful not merely because some agent (whether it is an individual, her society, or even God) cares about them or judges them to be worth doing, while the latter simply lack significance and cannot obtain it even if some agent does care about them or judge them to be worth doing. From an objective perspective, it is possible for an individual to care about the wrong thing or to be mistaken that something is worthwhile, and not merely because of something she cares about all the more or judges to be still more choiceworthy. Of course, meta-ethical debates about the existence and nature of value are again relevant to appraising this rationale.

Some objectivists think that being the object of a person’s mental states plays no constitutive role in making that person’s life meaningful, although they of course contend that it often plays an instrumental role––liking a certain activity, after all, is likely to motivate one to do it. Relatively few objectivists are “pure” in that way, although consequentialists do stand out as clear instances (e.g., Singer 1995; Smuts 2018, 75–99). Most objectivists instead try to account for the above intuitions driving subjectivism by holding that a life is more meaningful, not merely because of objective factors, but also in part because of propositional attitudes such as cognition, conation, and emotion. Particularly influential has been Susan Wolf’s hybrid view, captured by this pithy slogan: “Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (Wolf 2015, 112; see also Kekes 1986, 2000; Wiggins 1988; Raz 2001, 10–40; Mintoff 2008; Wolf 2010, 2016; Fischer 2019, 9–23; Belshaw 2021, 160–81). This theory implies that no meaning accrues to one’s life if one believes in, is satisfied by, or cares about a project that is not truly worthwhile, or if one takes up a truly worthwhile project but fails to judge it important, be satisfied by it, or care about it. A related approach is that, while subjective attraction is not necessary for meaning, it could enhance it (e.g., Audi 2005, 344; Metz 2013, 183–84, 196–98, 220–25). For instance, a stereotypical Mother Teresa who is bored by and alienated from her substantial charity work might have a somewhat significant existence because of it, even if she would have an even more significant existence if she felt pride in it or identified with it.

There have been several attempts to capture theoretically what all objectively attractive, inherently worthwhile, or finally valuable conditions have in common insofar as they bear on meaning in a person’s life. Over the past few decades, one encounters the proposals that objectively meaningful conditions are just those that involve: positively connecting with organic unity beyond oneself (Nozick 1981, 594–619); being creative (Taylor 1987; Matheson 2018); living an emotional life (Solomon 1993; cf. Williams 2020, 56–78); promoting good consequences, such as improving the quality of life of oneself and others (Singer 1995; Audi 2005; Smuts 2018, 75–99); exercising or fostering rational nature in exceptional ways (Smith 1997, 179–221; Gewirth 1998, 177–82; Metz 2013, 222–36); progressing toward ends that can never be fully realized because one’s knowledge of them changes as one approaches them (Levy 2005); realizing goals that are transcendent for being long-lasting in duration and broad in scope (Mintoff 2008); living virtuously (May 2015, 61–138; McPherson 2020); and loving what is worth loving (Wolf 2016). There is as yet no convergence in the field on one, or even a small cluster, of these accounts.

One feature of a large majority of the above naturalist theories is that they are aggregative or additive, objectionably treating a life as a mere “container” of bits of life that are meaningful considered in isolation from other bits (Brännmark 2003, 330). It has become increasingly common for philosophers of life’s meaning, especially objectivists, to hold that life as a whole, or at least long stretches of it, can substantially affect its meaningfulness beyond the amount of meaning (if any) in its parts.

For instance, a life that has lots of beneficence and otherwise intuitively meaning-conferring conditions but that is also extremely repetitive (à la the movie Groundhog Day ) is less than maximally meaningful (Taylor 1987; Blumenfeld 2009). Furthermore, a life that not only avoids repetition but also ends with a substantial amount of meaningful (or otherwise desirable) parts seems to have more meaning overall than one that has the same amount of meaningful (desirable) parts but ends with few or none of them (Kamm 2013, 18–22; Dorsey 2015). Still more, a life in which its meaningless (or otherwise undesirable parts) cause its meaningful (desirable) parts to come about through a process of personal growth seems meaningful in virtue of this redemptive pattern, “good life-story,” or narrative self-expression (Taylor 1989, 48–51; Wong 2008; Fischer 2009, 145–77; Kauppinen 2012; May 2015, 61–138; Velleman 2015, 141–73). These three cases suggest that meaning can inhere in life as a whole, that is, in the relationships between its parts, and not merely in the parts considered in isolation. However, some would maintain that it is, strictly speaking, the story that is or could be told of a life that matters, not so much the life-story qua relations between events themselves (de Bres 2018).

There are pure or extreme versions of holism present in the literature, according to which the only possible bearer of meaning in life is a person’s life as a whole, and not any isolated activities, relationships, or states (Taylor 1989, 48–51; Tabensky 2003; Levinson 2004). A salient argument for this position is that judgments of the meaningfulness of a part of someone’s life are merely provisional, open to revision upon considering how they fit into a wider perspective. So, for example, it would initially appear that taking an ax away from a madman and thereby protecting innocent parties confers some meaning on one’s life, but one might well revise that judgment upon learning that the intention behind it was merely to steal an ax, not to save lives, or that the madman then took out a machine gun, causing much more harm than his ax would have. It is worth considering how far this sort of case is generalizable, and, if it can be to a substantial extent, whether that provides strong evidence that only life as a whole can exhibit meaningfulness.

Perhaps most objectivists would, at least upon reflection, accept that both the parts of a life and the whole-life relationships among the parts can exhibit meaning. Supposing there are two bearers of meaning in a life, important questions arise. One is whether a certain narrative can be meaningful even if its parts are not, while a second is whether the meaningfulness of a part increases if it is an aspect of a meaningful whole (on which see Brännmark 2003), and a third is whether there is anything revealing to say about how to make tradeoffs between the parts and whole in cases where one must choose between them (Blumenfeld 2009 appears to assign lexical priority to the whole).

Naturalists until recently had been largely concerned to show that meaning in life is possible without God or a soul; they have not spent much time considering how such spiritual conditions might enhance meaning, but have, in moderate fashion, tended to leave that possibility open (an exception is Hooker 2008). Lately, however, an extreme form of naturalism has arisen, according to which our lives would probably, if not unavoidably, have less meaning in a world with God or a soul than in one without. Although such an approach was voiced early on by Baier (1957), it is really in the past decade or so that this “anti-theist” position has become widely and intricately discussed.

One rationale, mentioned above as an objection to the view that God’s purpose constitutes meaning in life, has also been deployed to argue that the existence of God as such would necessarily reduce meaning, that is, would consist of anti-matter. It is the idea that master/servant and parent/child analogies so prominent in the monotheist religious traditions reveal something about our status in a world where there is a qualitatively higher being who has created us with certain ends in mind: our independence or dignity as adult persons would be violated (e.g., Baier 1957/2000, 118–20; Kahane 2011, 681–85; Lougheed 2020, 121–41). One interesting objection to this reasoning has been to accept that God’s existence is necessarily incompatible with the sort of meaning that would come (roughly stated) from being one’s own boss, but to argue that God would also make greater sorts of meaning available, offering a net gain to us (Mawson 2016, 110–58).

Another salient argument for thinking that God would detract from meaning in life appeals to the value of privacy (Kahane 2011, 681–85; Lougheed 2020, 55–110). God’s omniscience would unavoidably make it impossible for us to control another person’s access to the most intimate details about ourselves, which, for some, amounts to a less meaningful life than one with such control. Beyond questioning the value of our privacy in relation to God, one thought-provoking criticism has been to suggest that, if a lack of privacy really would substantially reduce meaning in our lives, then God, qua morally perfect person, would simply avoid knowing everything about us (Tooley 2018). Lacking complete knowledge of our mental states would be compatible with describing God as “omniscient,” so the criticism goes, insofar as that is plausibly understood as having as much knowledge as is morally permissible.

Turn, now, to major arguments for thinking that having a soul would reduce life’s meaning, so that if one wants a maximally meaningful life, one should prefer a purely physical world, or at least one in which people are mortal. First and foremost, there has been the argument that an immortal life could not avoid becoming boring (Williams 1973), rendering life pointless according to many subjective and objective theories. The literature on this topic has become enormous, with the central reply being that immortality need not get boring (for more recent discussions, see Fischer 2009, 79–101, 2019, 117–42; Mawson 2019, 51–52; Williams 2020, 30–41, 123–29; Belshaw 2021, 182–97). However, it might also be worth questioning whether boredom is sufficient for meaninglessness. Suppose, for instance, that one volunteers to be bored so that many others will not be bored; perhaps this would be a meaningful sacrifice to make. Being bored for an eternity would not be blissful or even satisfying, to be sure, but if it served the function of preventing others from being bored for an eternity, would it be meaningful (at least to some degree)? If, as is commonly held, sacrificing one’s life could be meaningful, why not also sacrificing one’s liveliness?

Another reason given to reject eternal life is that it would become repetitive, which would substantially drain it of meaning (Scarre 2007, 54–55; May 2009, 46–47, 64–65, 71; Smuts 2011, 142–44; cf. Blumenfeld 2009). If, as it appears, there are only a finite number of actions one could perform, relationships one could have, and states one could be in during an eternity, one would have to end up doing the same things again. Even though one’s activities might be more valuable than rolling a stone up a hill forever à la Sisyphus, the prospect of doing them over and over again forever is disheartening for many. To be sure, one might not remember having done them before and hence could avoid boredom, but for some philosophers that would make it all the worse, akin to having dementia and forgetting that one has told the same stories. Others, however, still find meaning in such a life (e.g., Belshaw 2021, 197, 205n41).

A third meaning-based argument against immortality invokes considerations of narrative. If the pattern of one’s life as a whole substantially matters, and if a proper pattern would include a beginning, a middle, and an end, it appears that a life that never ends would lack the relevant narrative structure. “Because it would drag on endlessly, it would, sooner or later, just be a string of events lacking all form....With immortality, the novel never ends....How meaningful can such a novel be?” (May 2009, 68, 72; see also Scarre 2007, 58–60). Notice that this objection is distinct from considerations of boredom and repetition (which concern novelty ); even if one were stimulated and active, and even if one found a way not to repeat one’s life in the course of eternity, an immortal life would appear to lack shape. In reply, some reject the idea that a meaningful life must be akin to a novel, and intead opt for narrativity in the form of something like a string of short stories that build on each other (Fischer 2009, 145–77, 2019, 101–16). Others, though, have sought to show that eternity could still be novel-like, deeming the sort of ending that matters to be a function of what the content is and how it relates to the content that came before (e.g., Seachris 2011; Williams 2020, 112–19).

There have been additional objections to immortality as undercutting meaningfulness, but they are prima facie less powerful than the previous three in that, if sound, they arguably show that an eternal life would have a cost, but probably not one that would utterly occlude the prospect of meaning in it. For example, there have been the suggestions that eternal lives would lack a sense of preciousness and urgency (Nussbaum 1989, 339; Kass 2002, 266–67), could not exemplify virtues such as courageously risking one’s life for others (Kass 2002, 267–68; Wielenberg 2005, 91–94), and could not obtain meaning from sustaining or saving others’ lives (Nussbaum 1989, 338; Wielenberg 2005, 91–94). Note that at least the first two rationales turn substantially on the belief in immortality, not quite immortality itself: if one were immortal but forgot that one is or did not know that at all, then one could appreciate life and obtain much of the virtue of courage (and, conversely, if one were not immortal, but thought that one is, then, by the logic of these arguments, one would fail to appreciate limits and be unable to exemplify courage).

The previous two sections addressed theoretical accounts of what would confer meaning on a human person’s life. Although these theories do not imply that some people’s lives are in fact meaningful, that has been the presumption of a very large majority of those who have advanced them. Much of the procedure has been to suppose that many lives have had meaning in them and then to consider in virtue of what they have or otherwise could. However, there are nihilist (or pessimist) perspectives that question this supposition. According to nihilism (pessimism), what would make a life meaningful in principle cannot obtain for any of us.

One straightforward rationale for nihilism is the combination of extreme supernaturalism about what makes life meaningful and atheism about whether a spiritual realm exists. If you believe that God or a soul is necessary for meaning in life, and if you believe that neither is real, then you are committed to nihilism, to the denial that life can have any meaning. Athough this rationale for nihilism was prominent in the modern era (and was more or less Camus’ position), it has been on the wane in analytic philosophical circles, as extreme supernaturalism has been eclipsed by the moderate variety.

The most common rationales for nihilism these days do not appeal to supernaturalism, or at least not explicitly. One cluster of ideas appeals to what meta-ethicists call “error theory,” the view that evaluative claims (in this case about meaning in life, or about morality qua necessary for meaning) characteristically posit objectively real or universally justified values, but that such values do not exist. According to one version, value judgments often analytically include a claim to objectivity but there is no reason to think that objective values exist, as they “would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe” (Mackie 1977/1990, 38). According to a second version, life would be meaningless if there were no set of moral standards that could be fully justified to all rational enquirers, but it so happens that such standards cannot exist for persons who can always reasonably question a given claim (Murphy 1982, 12–17). According to a third, we hold certain beliefs about the objectivity and universality of morality and related values such as meaning because they were evolutionarily advantageous to our ancestors, not because they are true. Humans have been “deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a distinterested, objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey” (Ruse and Wilson 1986, 179; cf. Street 2015). One must draw on the intricate work in meta-ethics that has been underway for the past several decades in order to appraise these arguments.

In contrast to error-theoretic arguments for nihilism, there are rationales for it accepting that objective values exist but denying that our lives can ever exhibit or promote them so as to obtain meaning. One version of this approach maintains that, for our lives to matter, we must be in a position to add objective value to the world, which we are not since the objective value of the world is already infinite (Smith 2003). The key premises for this view are that every bit of space-time (or at least the stars in the physical universe) have some positive value, that these values can be added up, and that space is infinite. If the physical world at present contains an infinite degree of value, nothing we do can make a difference in terms of meaning, for infinity plus any amount of value remains infinity. One way to question this argument, beyond doubting the value of space-time or stars, is to suggest that, even if one cannot add to the value of the universe, meaning plausibly comes from being the source of certain values.

A second rationale for nihilism that accepts the existence of objective value is David Benatar’s (2006, 18–59) intriguing “asymmetry argument” for anti-natalism, the view that it is immoral to bring new people into existence because doing so would always be on balance bad for them. For Benatar, the bads of existing (e.g., pains) are real disadvantages relative to not existing, while the goods of existing (pleasures) are not real advantages relative to not existing, since there is in the latter state no one to be deprived of them. If indeed the state of not existing is no worse than that of experiencing the benefits of existence, then, since existing invariably brings harm in its wake, it follows that existing is always worse compared to not existing. Although this argument is illustrated with experiential goods and bads, it seems generalizable to non-experiential ones, including meaning in life and anti-matter. The literature on this argument has become large (for a recent collection, see Hauskeller and Hallich 2022).

Benatar (2006, 60–92, 2017, 35–63) has advanced an additional argument for nihilism, one that appeals to Thomas Nagel’s (1986, 208–32) widely discussed analysis of the extremely external standpoint that human persons can take on their lives. There exists, to use Henry Sidgwick’s influential phrase, the “point of view of the universe,” that is, the standpoint that considers a human being’s life in relation to all times and all places. When one takes up this most external standpoint and views one’s puny impact on the world, little of one’s life appears to matter. What one does in a certain society on Earth over 75 years or so just does not amount to much, when considering the billions of temporal years and billions of light-years that make up space-time. Although this reasoning grants limited kinds of meaning to human beings, from a personal, social, or human perspective, Benatar both denies that the greatest sort of meaning––a cosmic one––is available to them and contends that this makes their lives bad, hence the “nihilist” tag. Some have objected that our lives could in fact have a cosmic significance, say, if they played a role in God’s plan (Quinn 2000, 65–66; Swinburne 2016, 154), were the sole ones with a dignity in the universe (Kahane 2014), or engaged in valuable activities that could be appreciated by anyone anywhere anytime (Wolf 2016, 261–62). Others naturally maintain that cosmic significance is irrelevant to appraising a human life, with some denying that it would be a genuine source of meaning (Landau 2017, 93–99), and others accepting that it would be but maintaining that the absence of this good would not count as a bad or merit regret (discussed in Benatar 2017, 56–62; Williams 2020, 108–11).

Finally, a distinguishable source of nihilism concerns the ontological, as distinct from axiological, preconditions for meaning in life. Perhaps most radically, there are those who deny that we have selves. Do we indeed lack selves, and, if we do, is a meaningful life impossible for us (see essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018; Le Bihan 2019)? Somewhat less radically, there are those who grant that we have selves, but deny that they are in charge in the relevant way. That is, some have argued that we lack self-governance or free will of the sort that is essential for meaning in life, at least if determinism is true (Pisciotta 2013; essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018). Non-quantum events, including human decisions, appear to be necessited by a prior state of the world, such that none could have been otherwise, and many of our decisions are a product of unconscious neurological mechanisms (while quantum events are of course utterly beyond our control). If none of our conscious choices could have been avoided and all were ultimately necessited by something external to them, perhaps they are insufficient to merit pride or admiration or to constitute narrative authorship of a life. In reply, some maintain that a compatibilism between determinism and moral responsibility applies with comparable force to meaning in life (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009, 145–77), while others contend that incompatibilism is true of moral responsibility but not of meaning (Pereboom 2014).

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O’Brien, W., 2021, “ The Meaning of Life: Early Continental and Analytic Perspectives ”, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , J. Fieser and B. Dowden (eds.).
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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

The Meaning of Life: What’s the Point?

Author: Matthew Pianalto Categories: Ethics , Phenomenology and Existentialism , Philosophy of Religion Word Count: 1000

Editors’ note: this essay and its companion essay, Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? both explore the concept of meaning in relation to human life. This essay focuses on the meaning of life as a whole, whereas the other addresses meaning in individual human lives.

At the height of his literary fame, the novelist Leo Tolstoy was gripped by suicidal despair. [1] He felt that life is meaningless because, in the long run, we’ll all be dead and forgotten. Tolstoy later rejected this pessimism in exchange for religious faith in life’s eternal, divine significance.

Tolstoy’s outlook—both before and after his conversion—raises many questions:

Does life’s having meaning depend on a supernatural reality?
Is death a threat to life’s meaning?
Is life the sort of thing that can have a “meaning”? In what sense?

Here we will consider some approaches to questions about the meaning of life. [2]

1. Questioning the Question

Many philosophers begin thinking about the meaning of life by asking what the question itself means. [3] Life could refer to all lifeforms or to human life specifically. This essay focuses on human life, but it is worth considering how other things might have or lack meaning, too. [4] This can help illuminate the different meanings of meaning .

Sometimes, we use “meaning” to refer to the origin or cause of something’s existence. If I come home to a trashed house, I might wonder, “What is the meaning of this?” Similarly, we might wonder where life comes from or how it began; our origins may tell us something about other meanings, like our value or purpose.

We also use “meaning” to refer to something’s significance or value . Something can be valuable in various ways, such as by being useful, pleasing, or informative. We might call something meaningless if it is trivial or unimportant.

“Meaning” can also refer to something’s point or purpose . [5] Life could have some overarching purpose as part of a divine plan, or it might have no such purpose. Perhaps we can give our lives purpose that they did not previously possess.

Notice that even divine purposes may not always satisfy our desire for meaning: suppose our creator made us to serve as livestock for hyper-intelligent aliens who will soon arrive and begin to farm us. [6] We might protest that this is not the most meaningful use of our human potential! We may not want our life-story to end as a people-burger.

Indeed, a thing’s meaning can also be its story . The meaning of life might be the true story of life’s origins and significance. [7] In this sense, life cannot be meaningless, but its meaning might be pleasing or disappointing to us. When people like Tolstoy regard life as meaningless, they seem to be thinking that the truth about life is bad news. [8]

2. Supernaturalism

Supernaturalists hold that life has divine significance. [9] For example, from the perspective of the Abrahamic religions, life is valuable because everything in God’s creation is good . Our purpose is to love and glorify God. We are all part of something very important and enduring : God’s plan.

Much of the contemporary discussion about the meaning of life is provoked by skepticism about traditional religious answers. [10] The phrase “the meaning of life” came into common usage only in the last two centuries, as advances in science, especially evolutionary theory, led many to doubt that life is the product of intelligent, supernatural design. [11] The meaning of life might be an especially perplexing issue for those who reject religious answers.

3. Nihilism

Nihilists think that life, on balance, lacks positive meaning. [12] Nihilism often arises as a pessimistic reaction to religious skepticism: life without a divine origin or purpose has no enduring significance.

Although others might counter that life can have enduring significance that doesn’t depend on a supernatural origin, such as our cultural legacy, nihilists are skeptical. From a cosmic perspective, we are tiny specks in a vast universe–and often miserable to boot! Even our most important cultural icons and achievements will likely vanish with the eventual extinction of the species and the collapse of the solar system.

4. Naturalism

Naturalists suggest that the meaning of life is to be found within our earthly lives. Even if life possesses no supernatural meaning, life itself may have inherent significance. [13] Things are not as bad as nihilists claim.

Some naturalists argue that life—at least human life—has objectively valuable features, such as our intellectual, moral, and creative abilities. [14] The meaning of life may be to develop these capacities and put them to good use. [15]

Other naturalists are subjectivists about life’s meaning. [16] Existentialists , for example, argue that life has no meaning until we give it meaning by choosing to live for something that we find important. [17]

Critics (including nihilists and supernaturalists) argue that the naturalists are fooling themselves. What naturalists propose as sources of meaning in life are at best a distraction from life’s lack of ultimate or cosmic significance (if naturalism is true). What is the point of personal development and good works if we’ll all be dead sooner or later?

Naturalists may respond that the point is in how these activities affect our lives and relationships now rather than in some distant, inhuman future. [18] Feeling sad or distressed over our lack of cosmic importance might be a kind of vanity we should overcome. [19] Some also question whether living forever would necessarily add meaning to life; living forever might be boring! [20] Having limited time may be part of what makes some of our activities and experiences so precious. [21]

5. Conclusion

In Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , the supercomputer Deep Thought is prompted to discover “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.” After 7 ½ million years of computation, Deep Thought determines that the answer is…

forty-two .

Reflecting on this bizarre result, Deep Thought muses, “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.” [22]

Adams may be wise to offer some comic relief. [23] Furthermore, given the various meanings of “meaning,” perhaps there is no single question to ask and thus no single correct answer.

Tolstoy’s crisis is a reminder that feelings of meaninglessness can be distressing and dangerous. [24] However, continuing to search for meaning in times of doubt may be one of the most meaningful things we can do. [25]

[1] Tolstoy (2005 [1882]). For discussion of Tolstoy’s rediscovery of meaning that extends his ideas beyond the specific religious outlook he adopted, see Preston-Roedder (2022).

[2] For more detailed overviews of the meaning of life, see Metz (2021) and the entries on the meaning of life by Joshua Seachris and Wendell O’Brien in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

[3] Ayer (2008) suspects the question is incoherent. For a response, see Nielsen (2008). For helpful discussion of the meanings of meaning, see Thomas (2019).

[4] For discussion of meaning beyond humans (and agents), see Stevenson (2022).

[5] Notice that purpose appears to be one type of value, as discussed in the preceding paragraph.

[6] Nozick (1981) develops this point about purpose; Nozick (2008) offers the key points, too. In a different spirit, the ancient Daoist philosophy of Zhuangzi (2013) provides some perspective on the advantages of being “useless” (having no purpose) and the dangers of being “useful.”

[7] On this proposal of the meaning of life as narrative, see Seachris (2009). A similar approach that emphasizes the notion of interpretation rather than story or narrative is proposed in Prinzing (2021).

[8] A starter list of life’s features that might lead one to tell such a story about life: war, poverty, physical and mental illness, natural disasters, addiction, labor exploitation and other injustices, and pollution. For more, see Benatar (2017).

[9] Some, like Craig (2013), argue vigorously that life can have meaning only if supernaturalism is true. For further discussion and examples, see discussions of supernaturalism in Seachris, “The Meaning of Life: Contemporary Analytic Perspectives” and Metz (2021).

[10] See Landau (1997) and Setiya (2022), Ch. 6, for discussion of the origin of the phrase.

[11] Nietzsche’s discussion of the “death of God” in The Gay Science (2001 [1882]) reflects these sorts of concerns.

[12] For recent defenses of this view, see Benatar (2017) and Weinberg (2021).

[13] See I. Singer (2009) for a wide-ranging naturalist approach. Wolf’s (2010, 2014) approach to meaning in life is one of the most widely accepted views amongst contemporary philosophers.

[14] For a helpful discussion of the idea that some things might be objectively valuable, see Ethical Realism by Thomas Metcalf.

[15] Metz (2013) and P. Singer (1993) defend this sort of view of meaning in life. Transhumanists would argue that the best uses of our abilities will be those that help us overcome the problems, like disease and mortality, that beset humans and may transform us in substantial ways: perhaps we can achieve a natural form of immortality through technology! On transhumanism, see Messerly (2022).

[16] Representative subjectivists include Taylor (2000) and Calhoun (2015). Susan Wolf’s works (2010 and 2014) develop a “hybrid” account of meaning that combines objective and subjective elements.

[17] For classic expressions of this existentialist view, see Sartre (2021 [1943]) and Beauvoir (2018 [1947]). For a brief overview of existentialist philosophy, see Existentialism by Addison Ellis. For a more detailed, contemporary overview, see Gosetti-Ferencei (2020).

[18] On this point, see Nagel (1971), Nagel (1989), and “The Meanings of Lives” in Wolf (2014). For further discussion see Kahane (2014).

[19] Marquard (1991); see Hosseini (2015) for additional discussion. Albert Camus makes a similar point, invoking the notion of “moderation,” at the end of The Rebel (1992 [1951]).

[20] Williams (1973) gives the classic expression of this idea. For a brief overview of Williams’ argument, see Is Immortality Desirable? , by Felipe Pereira.

[21] Of course, this outlook does mean that death can sometimes rob people of potential meaning, since death can be untimely. But death would not erase the meaningfulness of whatever one had already experienced or achieved. For arguments concerning whether death harms the individual who dies, see Is Death Bad? Epicurus and Lucretius on the Fear of Death by Frederik Kaufman.

[22] Adams (2017), Chapters 27-28. Asking a computer to give us the answer might also be a problem.

[23] For additional comic relief, see the film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983). Such playfulness may seem irreverent of these “deep” philosophical questions, but Schlick (2017 [1927]) argued that the meaning of life is to be found in play!

[24] For discussion of crises of meaning and an introduction to psychological research on meaning in life, see Smith (2017).

[25] William Winsdale relates that the existential psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was once asked to “express in one sentence the meaning of his own life” (in Frankl (2006), 164-5). After writing his answer, he asked his students to guess what he wrote. A student said, “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.” Frankl responded, “That is it exactly. Those are the very words I had written.”

Adams, Douglas (2017). The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . Del Rey. Originally published in 1979.

Ayer, A.J. (2008). “The Claims of Philosophy.” In: E.D. Klemke and Seven M. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life, Third Edition . Oxford University Press: 199-202.

Beauvoir, Simone de (2018). The Ethics of Ambiguity . Open Road Media. Originally published in French in 1947.

Benatar, David (2017). The Human Predicament . Oxford University Press.

Calhoun, Cheshire (2015). “Geographies of Meaningful Living,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 32(1): 15-34.

Camus, Albert (1992). The Rebel . Vintage. Originally published in French in 1951.

Craig, William Lane (2013). “The Absurdity of Life Without God.” In: Jason Seachris, ed. Exploring the Meaning of Life . Wiley-Blackwell: 153-172.

Frankl, Viktor E. (2006). Man’s Search for Meaning . Beacon Press.

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna (2020). On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life . Oxford University Press.

Hosseini, Reza (2015). Wittgenstein and Meaning in Life . Palgrave Macmillan.

Kahane, Guy (2014). “Our Cosmic Insignificance.” Noûs 48(4): 745–772.

Landau, Iddo (2017). Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World . Oxford University Press.

— (1997). “Why Has the Question of the Meaning of Life Arisen in the Last Two and a Half Centuries?” Philosophy Today 41(2): 263-269.

Marquard, Odo (1991). “On the Dietetics of the Expectation of Meaning.” In: In Defense of the Accidental . Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Oxford University Press: 29-49.

Messerly, John (2022). Short Essays on Life, Death, Meaning, and the Far Future .

Metz, Thaddeus (2013). Meaning in Life . Oxford University Press .

— (2021). “The Meaning of Life.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.).

Nagel, Thomas (1971). “The Absurd,” Journal of Philosophy 68(20): 716-727.

— (1989). The View From Nowhere . Oxford University Press.

Nielsen, Kai (2008). “Linguistic Philosophy and ‘The Meaning of Life.’” In: E.D. Klemke and Seven M. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life, Third Edition . Oxford University Press: 203-219.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (2001). The Gay Science . Translated by Josephine Nauckhoff. Cambridge University Press. Originally published in German in 1882.

Nozick, Robert (1981). Philosophical Explanations . Harvard University Press.

— (2018), “Philosophy and the Meaning of Life,” in: E.D. Klemke and Seven M. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life, Fourth Edition . Oxford University Press: 197-204.

O’Brien, Wendell. “The Meaning of Life: Early Continental and Analytic Perspectives.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Last Accessed 12/19/2022.

Preston-Roedder, Ryan (2022). “Living with absurdity: A Nobleman’s guide,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Early View) .

Prinzing, Michael M. (2021). “The Meaning of ‘Life’s Meaning,’” Philosopher’s Imprint 21(3).

Sartre, Jean-Paul (2021). Being and Nothingness . Washington Square Press. Originally published in French in 1943.

Schlick, Moritz (2017). “On the Meaning of Life,” in: In: E.D. Klemke and Seven M. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life, Third Edition . Oxford University Press: 56-65. Originally published in 1927.

Seachris, Joshua. “The Meaning of Life: Contemporary Analytic Perspectives.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Last Accessed 12/19/2022.

— (2009). “The Meaning of Life as Narrative.” Philo 12(1): 5-23.

Setiya, Kieran (2022). Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way . Riverhead Books.

Singer, Irving (2009). Meaning in Life, Vol. 1: The Creation of Value . MIT Press.

Singer, Peter (1993). How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest . Prometheus.

Smith, Emily E. (2017). The Power of Meaning . Crown.

Stevenson, Chad Mason (2022). “Anything Can Be Meaningful.” Philosophical Papers (forthcoming).

Taylor, Richard (2000). Good and Evil . Prometheus. Originally published in 1970.

Thomas, Joshua Lewis (2019). “Meaningfulness as Sensefulness,” Philosophia 47: 1555-1577.

Tolstoy, Leo (2005). A Confession . Translated by Aylmer Maude. Dover. Originally published in Russian in 1882.

Weinberg, Rivka (2021). “Ultimate Meaning: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad,” Journal of Controversial Ideas 1(1), 4.

Williams, Bernard (1973). “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality.” In: Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, 1956-1972 . Cambridge University Press: 82-100.

Wolf, Susan (2010). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters . Princeton University Press. ( Wolf’s lecture is also available at the Tanner Lecture Series website ).

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Zhuangzi (2013). The Complete Works of Zhuangzi . Translated by Burton Watson. Columbia University Press.

Related Essays

Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? by Matthew Pianalto

Existentialism by Addison Ellis

Camus on the Absurd: The Myth of Sisyphus by Erik Van Aken

Nietzsche and the Death of God by Justin Remhof

Is Death Bad? Epicurus and Lucretius on the Fear of Death by Frederik Kaufman

Ancient Cynicism: Rejecting Civilization and Returning to Nature by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

The Badness of Death by Duncan Purves

Is Immortality Desirable? by Felipe Pereira

Hope by Michael Milona & Katie Stockdale

Ethical Realism by Thomas Metcalf

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Matthew Pianalto is a Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of On Patience (2016) and several articles and book chapters on ethics. philosophy.eku.edu/pianalto

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Essays About Life: Top 5 Examples Plus 7 Prompts

Life envelops various meanings; if you are writing essays about life, discover our comprehensive guide with examples and prompts to help you with your essay.

What is life? You can ask anyone; I assure you, no two people will have the same answer. How we define life relies on our beliefs and priorities. One can say that life is the capacity for growth or the time between birth and death. Others can share that life is the constant pursuit of purpose and fulfillment. Life is a broad topic that inspires scholars, poets, and many others. It stimulates discussions that encourage diverse perspectives and interpretations.

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5 Essay Examples

1. essay on life by anonymous on toppr.com, 2. the theme of life, existence and consciousness by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 3. compassion can save life by anonymous on papersowl.com, 4. a life of consumption vs. a life of self-realization by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. you only live once: a motto for life by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is the true meaning of life, 2. my life purpose, 3. what makes life special, 4. how to appreciate life, 5. books about life, 6. how to live a healthy life, 7. my idea of a perfect life.

“…quality of Life carries huge importance. Above all, the ultimate purpose should be to live a meaningful life. A meaningful life is one which allows us to connect with our deeper self.”

The author defines life as something that differentiates man from inorganic matter. It’s an aspect that processes and examines a person’s actions that develop through growth. For some, life is a pain because of failures and struggles, but it’s temporary. For the writer, life’s challenges help us move forward, be strong, and live to the fullest. You can also check out these essays about utopia .

“… Kafka defines the dangers of depending on art for life. The hunger artist expresses his dissatisfaction with the world by using himself and not an external canvas to create his artwork, forcing a lack of separation between the artist and his art. Therefore, instead of the art depending on the audience, the artist depends on the audience, meaning when the audience’s appreciation for work dwindles, their appreciation for the artist diminishes as well, leading to the hunger artist’s death.”

The essay talks about “ A Hunger Artist ” by Franz Kafka, who describes his views on life through art. The author analyzes Kafka’s fictional main character and his anxieties and frustrations about life and the world. This perception shows how much he suffered as an artist and how unhappy he was. Through the essay, the writer effectively explains Kafka’s conclusion that artists’ survival should not depend on their art.

“Compassion is that feeling that we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives. When we know that there is someone that really cares for us. Compassion comes from that moment when we can see the world through another person’s eyes.”

The author is a nurse who believes that to be professional, they need to be compassionate and treat their patients with respect, empathy, and dignity. One can show compassion through small actions such as talking and listening to patients’ grievances. In conclusion, compassion can save a person’s life by accepting everyone regardless of race, gender, etc.

“… A life of self-realization is more preferable and beneficial in comparison with a life on consumption. At the same time, this statement may be objected as person’s consumption leads to his or her happiness.”

The author examines Jon Elster’s theory to find out what makes a person happy and what people should think and feel about their material belongings. The essay mentions a list of common activities that make us feel happy and satisfied, such as buying new things. The writer explains that Elster’s statement about the prevalence of self-realization in consumption will always trigger intense debate.

“Appreciate the moment you’ve been given and appreciate the people you’ve been given to spend it with, because no matter how beautiful or tragic a moment is, it always ends. So hold on a little tighter, smile a little bigger, cry a little harder, laugh a little louder, forgive a little quicker, and love a whole lot deeper because these are the moments you will remember when you’re old and wishing you could rewind time.”

This essay explains that some things and events only happen once in a person’s life. The author encourages teenagers to enjoy the little things in their life and do what they love as much as they can. When they turn into adults, they will no longer have the luxury to do whatever they want.

The author suggests doing something meaningful as a stress reliever, trusting people, refusing to give up on the things that make you happy, and dying with beautiful memories. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

7 Prompts for Essays About Life

Essays About Life: What is the true meaning of life?

Life encompasses many values and depends on one’s perception. For most, life is about reaching achievements to make themselves feel alive. Use this prompt to compile different meanings of life and provide a background on why a person defines life as they do.

Take Joseph Campbell’s, “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning, and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer,” for example. This quote pertains to his belief that an individual is responsible for giving life meaning.

For this prompt, share with your readers your current purpose in life. It can be as simple as helping your siblings graduate or something grand, such as changing a national law to make a better world. You can ask others about their life purpose to include in your essay and give your opinion on why your answers are different or similar.

Life is a fascinating subject, as each person has a unique concept. How someone lives depends on many factors, such as opportunities, upbringing, and philosophies. All of these elements affect what we consider “special.”

Share what you think makes life special. For instance, talk about your relationships, such as your close-knit family or best friends. Write about the times when you thought life was worth living. You might also be interested in these essays about yourself .

Life in itself is a gift. However, most of us follow a routine of “wake up, work (or study), sleep, repeat.” Our constant need to survive makes us take things for granted. When we endlessly repeat a routine, life becomes mundane. For this prompt, offer tips on how to avoid a monotonous life, such as keeping a gratitude journal or traveling.

Many literary pieces use life as their subject. If you have a favorite book about life, recommend it to your readers by summarizing the content and sharing how the book influenced your outlook on life. You can suggest more than one book and explain why everyone should read them.

For example, Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” reminds its readers to live in the moment and never fear failure.

Essays About Life: How to live a healthy life?

To be healthy doesn’t only pertain to our physical condition. It also refers to our mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being. To live a happy and full life, individuals must strive to be healthy in all areas. For this prompt, list ways to achieve a healthy life. Section your essay and present activities to improve health, such as eating healthy foods, talking with friends, etc.

No one has a perfect life, but describe what it’ll be like if you do. Start with the material things, such as your house, clothes, etc. Then, move to how you connect with others. In your conclusion, answer whether you’re willing to exchange your current life for the “perfect life” you described and why. See our essay writing tips to learn more!

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.” –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture. –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think. –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel Lost Children Archive (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a good conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment. Tell Me How It Ends is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.” –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing Bad Feminist that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell. This Young Monster (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from Artforum , Dazed & Confused , and Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic, This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) · Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012) · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014) · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014) · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014) · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) · Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016) · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016) · Lindy West, Shrill (2016) · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016) · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016) · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016) · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016) · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017) · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017) · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017) · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017) · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017) · Joan Didion, South and West (2017) · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017) · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017) · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) · Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017) · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018) · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018) · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018) · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018) · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018) · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019) · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019) · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019) · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019) · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019) · Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019) · Robert A. Caro, Working (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Donald Trump

My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die’

W hen my uncle was elected President , I recognized what a highly privileged position I would be in. I would have some access to the White House. And as long as that was true, I wanted to make sure I used that access for something positive. I was eager to champion something my wife, Lisa, and I were deeply passionate about, something we lived every day: the challenges for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families.

Our son William, our third child, was born on June 30, 1999. Within 24 hours, he went from seemingly healthy to fighting for his life in the NICU. Raising him was different from the start. William was diagnosed at three months with infantile spasms, a rare seizure disorder which in William's case altered his development physically and cognitively. We had so many questions: What would the future hold for someone like William? How far could he go? How much could he learn? Would he ever have the chance to do the things that other children do?

We just didn’t know. It took 15 years before his medical team could accurately pinpoint the cause of his condition: a KCNQ2 mutation, a genetic misfire that the doctors called a potassium channel deletion.

In our journey with William, Lisa and I had become close to some truly inspiring parents and dedicated advocates who were doing amazing work to improve the day-to-day reality for families like ours. It’s a huge lift for caregivers, not to mention the constant need to mitigate expenses . There are so many different demands and challenges. But there are things that the government can do—some things that can only be done by the government, both federal and state. We wanted to bring knowledgeable people to the White House, to see if we could make a difference.

Lisa reached out to my cousin Ivanka, who was working in the White House as an advisor to the President. Ivanka got right back to her and said she’d be happy to help. She provided a contact for Ben Carson , the retired neurosurgeon who was secretary of housing and urban development. We brought several talented advocates with us for a meeting with Carson and members of his senior staff in April 2017. “Look,” I said as we got started, “I’m the least important person in the room.” I wanted the focus to be on the others, who knew a lot more than I did. They immediately started floating ideas, which was exactly why we were there. Our collective voice was being heard. It was a start.

Fred Trump III and Donald in the Oval Office, 2018

In January 2020, just before COVID hit, Lisa, myself, and a team of advocates met with Chris Neeley, who headed the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities, a much-needed federal advisory committee that promotes policies and initiatives that support independent and lifelong inclusion . We discussed the need for all medical schools to include courses that focus on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities . We emphasized how crucial it was for hospitals and other acute-care facilities to help patients transition from pediatric to adult services. We emphasized the importance of collecting sufficient data to explain medically complex disorders. This was not about more government spending. It was about smarter investing and greater efficiency.

We spent the next few months making calls and talking with officials and gathering our own recommendations, giving special attention to the critical need for housing support for people with disabilities. We were back in Washington in May.

By this time, COVID was raging. We were all masked up and COVID tested on the way into the White House Cabinet Room. Once we got inside, we sat down with Alex Azar , the administration’s secretary of health and human services, and Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health, both of whom served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The promising agency motto stated: HHS: Enhancing the Health and Well-Being of All Americans.

Sharp, direct, and to the point, Azar exhibited my kind of efficiency with no time to waste. His first question was, “OK, why are you here?”

I made a brief introduction. Our group included a leading doctor and several highly qualified advocates. What followed was a great discussion. Something clicked with Giroir—an idea for a program everyone could agree on that would cut through the bureaucracy and control costs and also yield better and more efficient medical outcomes.

Excellent. We were making progress.

“Really appreciate your coming in,” Azar finally said, more warmly than he had sounded at the start. “I know we’re going to see the President.”

The meeting I had assumed would be a quick handshake hello with Donald had turned into a 45-minute discussion in the Oval Office with all of us—Azar, Giroir, the advocates, and me. I never expected to be there so long. Donald seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members, who were constantly in and out of the hospital and living with complex arrays of challenges .

Donald was still Donald, of course. He bounced from subject to subject—disability to the stock market and back to disability. But promisingly, Donald seemed genuinely curious regarding the depth of medical needs across the U.S. and the individual challenges these families faced. He told the secretary and the assistant secretary to stay in touch with our group and to be supportive.

After I left the office, I was standing with the others near the side entrance to the West Wing when Donald’s assistant caught up with me. “Your uncle would like to see you,” she said.

Azar was still in the Oval Office when I walked back in. “Hey, pal,” Donald said. “How’s everything going?”

“Good,” I said. “I appreciate your meeting with us.”

“Sure, happy to do it.”

He sounded interested and even concerned. I thought he had been touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared about their journey with their patients and their own family members. But I was wrong.

“Those people . . . ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

I truly did not know what to say. He was talking about expenses. We were talking about human lives. For Donald, I think it really was about the expenses, even though we were there to talk about efficiencies, smarter investments, and human dignity.

I turned and walked away.

When William was 9 years old, Lisa and I met with Donald and a medical fund was created for William's care by the Trump Family, a fund that was crucial to our ability to support him.

In the summer of 2018, William was in the hospital for almost three weeks with a serious case of life-threatening pneumonia. He was 19 and very sick. It was incredibly frightening for Lisa and me—and for his brother and sister too. It was always hard to know if moments like these could compromise his health to the point that we would lose him. These are the times that you reach for all the strength you have.

Fred Trump III, William, and Lisa in the NICU

William came home with oxygen and a feeding tube. After more than two weeks on a ventilator, he needed to learn how to eat all over again. We were too often in these setback situations, but you move forward the best you can.

It’s times like these when family support is most needed and appreciated. At every opportunity, we let my aunts and uncles know how grateful we were for the medical fund for William’s care and recovery. We sent pictures and updates, as we had in the past. We got no personal responses, which was the norm. It was the dedicated support and genuine love of caregivers that helped us the most.

Uncle Robert died in 2020 , and the medical fund for William continued. It was enormously helpful with our home-care costs and medical expenses, and we were always grateful to my father’s siblings for contributing. But even before Robert’s death, their interest had seemed to begin waning. My cousin Eric, who was the administrator, called me to say the fund was running low. Donald was the only one contributing consistently. Eric said he’d been getting some resistance from Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Ann Marie, Robert’s widow. I really didn’t look forward to these calls.

“Why don’t you call Donald?” Eric said. “Talk to him about it.”

I thanked Eric for the heads-up and promised I would.

Soon thereafter, I was up at Briarcliff Manor, home of the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, N.Y. Donald happened to be there.

He was talking with a group of people. I didn’t want to interrupt. I just said hi on my way through the clubhouse. I called him later that afternoon, and he answered.

I got him up to speed on what Eric had told me. I said I’d heard the fund for William was running low, and unfortunately, the expenses certainly were not easing up as our son got older. In fact, with inflation and other pressures, the needs were greater than they’d been. “We’re getting some blowback from Maryanne and Elizabeth and Ann Marie. We may need your help with this. Eric wanted me to give you a call.”

Donald took a second as if he was thinking about the whole situation.

“I don’t know,” he finally said, letting out a sigh. “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”

Wait! What did he just say? That my son doesn’t recognize me? That I should just let him die?

Did he really just say that? That I should let my son die . . . so I could move down to Florida?

I’m usually pretty good at getting my head around things that other people say, even when I don’t agree with them. But this was a tough one. This was my son.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Donald say that. It wasn’t far off from what he’d said that day in the Oval Office after our meeting with the advocates. Only that time, it was other people’s children who should die. This time, it was my son.

I didn’t want to argue with him. I knew there was no point in that, not at the same time I was calling for his help. I tried to keep my cool.

“No, Donald,” I said. “He does recognize me.”

Donald’s comment was appalling. It hurt to hear him say that. But it also explained why Lisa and I felt so strongly about advocating for our son and why we wanted to help other people understand what it was like to raise a child like William. A lot of people just don’t know.

People with these disabilities are perceived as less than in so many ways. That attitude is everywhere, even at the highest levels of policy and politics.

William deserves a life just like anyone else, and to that end, I knew I had to advocate for him in every way possible. I might never change Donald’s mind or change the mind of anyone who lacked love and compassion for those whose voices couldn’t be heard and whose lives were fully dependent on others. But I knew what I could do. I could offer my voice, my experience, and my strength to push forward for those who needed it.

The barriers are everywhere , even in communities that are generally supportive, like ours. There are still doorways that can’t accommodate wheelchairs. It is still hard to find meaningful day programs that foster independence with learning, socialization, and assistive technology. The whole narrative still needs to change.

I knew that acceptance and tolerance would only come with public education and awareness. Donald might never understand this, but at least he had been open to our advocating through the White House. That was something. If we couldn’t change his feelings about William, that was his loss. He would never feel the love and connection that William offered us daily.

(Editor’s note: TIME reached out to former President Trump for a response to the description of events in this piece and did not receive a reply.)

Copyright © 2024 by Frederick Crist Trump III. From the forthcoming book ALL IN THE FAMILY: The Trumps and How We Got This Way by Fred Trump, to be published by Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.

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4 min read. "The Book of Life" bedazzles your eyes and buoys your spirits as it treads upon themes most commonly associated with the macabre universe of Tim Burton. But instead of being gaga for ghoulishness, this Mexican fiesta of animated splendor is packed with visual delights far more sunny than sinister as they burst forth as if flung ...
What is the Book of Life and Does It Really Exist?
"The Book of Life is God's record of all those over the centuries who have trusted Christ as their Savior and have followed Him as Lord. Many books are mentioned in the Bible: the Book of the Covenant, Book of the Law, Book of the Kings, Book of the Records, Book of Remembrance, Book of the Lord, and so forth. But one book is supremely ...
The Book of Life Summary and Study Guide
The Book of Life is the 2014 concluding volume of Deborah Harkness's acclaimed All Souls Trilogy, a romantic fantasy series.Deborah Harkness, a professor, historian, and novelist, began her bestselling series with A Discovery of Witches (2011), followed by a Shadow of Night (2012). A prequel, Time's Convert (2019), delves into the backstory of the character Marcus Whitmore.
Summary Of The Film 'The Book Of Life'
The film The Book Of Life is a film about a character named Manolo who tries to rescue the girl he loves and protect his family and city. Characters La Muerte and Xibalba go to the town of San Angel during the day of the dead. The Characters are seen with traditional sugar skulls as faces throughout the film. Some major themes in this movie are ...
'The Book of Life': Film Review
Steeped in Mexican folk art and inspired by that country's holiday the Day of the Dead, The Book of Life is a visually stunning effort that makes up for its formulaic storyline with an ...
Book Of Life Film Analysis
826 Words4 Pages. The Book of Life directed by Jorge R. Gutierrez follows the love story of three childhood friends, Manolo, Maria, and Joaquin, in a little town in Mexico. Their story involves many twists and turns, eye catching design, and even a little death. Following a story line that seems to come from the mind of Tim Burton, The Book of ...
The Book of Life (2014)
THE BOOK OF LIFE is the journey of Manolo, a young man who is torn between fulfilling the expectations of his family and following his heart. Before choosing which path to follow, he embarks on an incredible adventure that spans three fantastical worlds where he must face his greatest fears. Rich with a fresh take on pop music favorites, THE ...
The Book of Life Essay Topics
Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Book of Life" by Deborah Harkness. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The Book of Life Movie Review
The Book of Life immerses viewers into the environment, traditions, colors, and sounds of Day of the Dead celebration; La Muerte is the most gorgeous animated queen since Maleficent in the original Sleeping Beauty, and Xibalba is perfect as her scary king. The characters and the music (excellent reworkings of classic and alternative pop songs ...
Book Of Life Movie Analysis
When Esteban was a young man and felt his life was out of control after his betrothed, Clara's sister, Rosa, died, he went to the small village he owned. When Esteban first moves to Tres Marías, living on his family's country estate, he violently rapes a young peasant girl named Pancha García.
The Meaning of Life
1. The Meaning of "Meaning". One part of the field of life's meaning consists of the systematic attempt to clarify what people mean when they ask in virtue of what life has meaning. This section addresses different accounts of the sense of talk of "life's meaning" (and of "significance," "importance," and other synonyms).
"The Book of Life" Book Review
The last 100 pages of "The Book of Life" were mesmerizing. The biggest pro in the ending for me though the fluffy family stuff was nice, was how it wasn't a complete happily ever after kind of end. Something happens that leaves Diana feeling uneasy and that made a HUGE impact on the conclusion of the story.
Best Books on the Meaning of Life
Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature. • Simon Critchley ~ The Book of Dead Philosophers. • The Dalai Lama ~ The Meaning of Life. • Hubert Dreyfus & Sean Kelly ~ All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find …. • Will Durant ~ Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God. • Will Durant ~ On the Meaning ...
The Meaning of Life
3. Naturalism. Recall that naturalism is the view that a physical life is central to life's meaning, that even if there is no spiritual realm, a substantially meaningful life is possible. Like supernaturalism, contemporary naturalism admits of two distinguishable variants, moderate and extreme (Metz 2019).
The Meaning of Life: What's the Point?
The meaning of life might be the true story of life's origins and significance.[7] In this sense, life cannot be meaningless, but its meaning might be pleasing or disappointing to us. When people like Tolstoy regard life as meaningless, they seem to be thinking that the truth about life is bad news.[8] 2.
Essays About Life Lessons: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts
For example, Euphoria is a TV series that created hubbub for its intrigue and sensitive themes. Dissect what life lessons one can retrieve from watching the show and relate them to personal encounters. You can also compile lessons from online posts and discussions. 5. Using Life Lessons in Starting a Business.
Essays About Life: Top 5 Examples Plus 7 Prompts
7 Prompts for Essays About Life. 1. What Is The True Meaning Of Life. Use this prompt to compile different meanings of life and provide a background on why a person defines life as they do. Life encompasses many values and depends on one's perception.
Importance of Books Essay
200 Words Essay on Importance of Books. Books are an essential part of our lives. They provide us with knowledge, entertainment, and the opportunity to escape from the stresses of everyday life. Books can open up new worlds and experiences, and allow us to learn about different cultures and perspectives. They can also help us to develop our ...
What Is The Meaning Of Life?
The meaning of life may never be definitively known. The meaning of life may be different for each individual and/or each species. The truth of the meaning of life is likely in the eye of the beholder. There were three choices given at the beginning of this essay, and for me, the answer is all of the above. Jason Hucsek, San Antonio, TX
The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade
Hilton Als, White Girls (2013) In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als' breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls, which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book.
The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life
Abstract. This volume presents thirty-two essays on a wide array of topics in modern philosophical meaning in life research. The essays are organized into six parts. Part I, Understanding Meaning in Life, focuses on various ways of conceptualizing meaning in life. Among other issues, it discusses whether meaning in life should be understood ...
Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans "Should Just Die"
Fred C. Trump III and his wife, Lisa, welcomed their son William in 1999; as nephew to former President Donald Trump, Fred Trump advocated for disabled Americans in White House meetings.
What I've Learned in London: My Experiences
London's history comes to life - in a graveyard, of all places! About: Sarah Reema Müller-Westernhagen was born in London and grew up with her mother in Twickenham, where she came into contact with the London music scene at an early age. Performing under the name "Reema" she blends folk with chamber music and has released two EPs, with ...
Book Review: 'We're Alone' by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat
In the essay collection, the author of the celebrated memoir "Brother, I'm Dying," and novels like "Breath, Eyes, Memory" and "Claire of the Sea Light," moves from her native Port-au ...

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The Book of Life

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The Meaning of Life

1. The Meaning of “Meaning”

2. Supernaturalism

3. Naturalism