Does Life Have Any Meaning?

David Benatar’s pessimism may seem, at first glance, to be a mere rehearsal of a very familiar anxiety: What if there’s no point to my life? But unlike the existential ennui of the modern age, Benatar’s cynicism is precise, or as precise as it can possibly be. He is attempting to clarify what kind of question it actually is, to ask whether one’s life has any meaning; what sort of answer it could possibly admit; and whether the most comforting responses pass philosophical muster. For Benatar, the question of meaning is not primarily one about feelings of fulfillment, but about whether human lives can plausibly be said to have a point that justifies the immense effort, suffering, and anguish they contain.

Much contemporary discussion of meaning assumes a subjectivist framework; that is, it supposes that for one’s life to be meaningful, it is sufficient that one experiences it as such. So, if one feels fulfilled, purposeful, or engaged, meaning is thereby secured. But Benatar rejects this assumption as implausibly permissive. People can be, and frequently are, mistaken about even (and especially) those things that matter deeply to them; there is no obvious reason meaning should be exempt. One may experience one’s pursuits as remarkably profound while, in reality, these activities appear arbitrary or compulsive when viewed by an outsider standing at even a modest distance. The simple fact that a person finds purpose in some activity does not endow that activity—or the life organized around it—with significance.

Of course, this does not mean that subjective experience is irrelevant. Feeling that one’s life truly matters can improve its quality, and quality of life is itself an important value. But meaning, as Benatar understands it, concerns whether there is a satisfying vindication for the whole enterprise of living. Does a person’s striving, he asks, connect to anything that can bear justificatory weight? And the answer to this question, on Benatar’s view, is deeply dependent on the perspective from which it is assessed. “Meaning” is not absolute. After all, from the perspective of family or close relationships, most lives matter acutely; from the perspective of a broader community, fewer do; from the perspective of humanity as a whole, only a tiny minority have any lasting impact. And from the widest possible perspective—that of the universe itself—Benatar sees no plausible way for any human lives to possess significance at all.

When people ask what their lives are “for,” Benatar claims, they are often responding to a sense of frustrated recursion. One’s work enables one’s survival, and one’s survival enables one’s work, both of which are endlessly fraught with effort, hardship, and the knowledge of eventual death. Individual meanings, like being important to one’s friends or contributing to one’s profession, can certainly soften this harsh reality, but they offer no real apology for the pain and suffering of human life. They remain internal, after all, to the human experience whose point is in question. The dissatisfaction driving the question of meaning cannot be offset by being told that one matters only to others who are engaged in the same dissatisfying cycle.

This discomfort with life is why the idea of undeniable cosmic purpose holds such appeal: the universe has a perspective broad enough to situate human striving within a larger framework that promises to break the circle of emptiness. But according to Benatar, this promise is itself an empty one. The universe is indifferent, incapable of perceiving or caring about humanity. Even those human achievements that are extraordinary by terrestrial standards are entirely negligible when weighed against the scale of cosmic time and space. And to say that this insignificance does not matter because the universe necessarily lacks a perspective is, for Benatar, no comfort. The absence of a cosmic audience cannot confer significance upon our projects and pursuits as human beings; in fact, it makes them seem even more futile.

It is tempting to try to save the idea of meaning by arguing that some human achievements—such as art, beauty, or intellectual discovery—have inherent value, but Benatar thinks that these efforts are useless. Such values, he argues, depend on sentient beings for their existence as values at all. The most beautiful sculpture in existence, in an entirely uninhabited universe, has no one to admire it and thus is not beautiful at all; an elegant theorem in a mindless cosmos has no one to find it elegant. Whatever value such creations have is ultimately reliant on human perception and response. So, once all perceivers are gone (as they inevitably will be), the value disappears. The hope that our creations somehow add intrinsic beauty or meaning to the universe misunderstands the kind of things that they are.

This analysis might seem to prescribe an unsettling despair: if human lives have no purpose at all, why not simply end them? But Benatar resists this conclusion. The fact that life lacks cosmic meaning does not entail that it lacks all value, nor that suicide is generally the rational response. Meaning is an important good, but it exists among other goods, and even limited meaning can be worth having. Moreover, annihilation carries its own harms. It not only deprives a person of future goods but, Benatar argues, is ipso facto bad—a claim most people implicitly accept, as evidenced by the widespread desire to continue existing even when future pleasures are scarce. The rationality of ending one’s life depends not on the abstract absence of ultimate purpose but on concrete assessments of quality, suffering, and future possibilities.

Still, the pessimism remains. The goods available to us as humans—meaning, knowledge, pleasure, wisdom—are profoundly limited. Human knowledge, considered either individually or collectively, occupies an infinitesimal area of what could, in principle, be known. Even our species’ greatest intellectual achievements coexist with severe ignorance, both cognitive and moral. These constraints, rather than being simply unfortunate, are the bedrock of the human predicament. We are creatures who can glimpse ideals we cannot begin to approach, who desire forms of significance we are structurally incapable of attaining.

It is this predicament that grounds Benatar’s antinatalism. Bringing new people into existence guarantees that they too will strive to surmount these insurmountable limitations, and will experience the suffering and frustration that accompany them. Even a perfectly idyllic life, were it possible, would not constitute a benefit over nonexistence, because nonexistence involves no deprivation. There is no one for whom the absence of some pleasure could constitute a deprivation, after all. To be born is to be subjected to immense harm for the sake of goods that are, at best, partial and contingent. And the fact that many people are glad to be alive does not alter this asymmetry, according to Benatar, since gratitude presupposes existence, whereas nonexistence necessarily cannot register any loss.

In the face of these supremely distasteful conclusions, one might wonder whether some degree of illusion is not only inevitable but desirable. If believing one’s life to be more meaningful than it is makes it go better, then perhaps we should seek out those distortions of reality which allow us to believe our lives have a point. Benatar acknowledges this possibility but treats it warily. Some beliefs, like passive theism, may be mostly harmless and infinitely comforting, but deeper departures from reality risk justifying harm both to oneself and to others. Benatar contends that ideological certainty, whether religious or secular, can generate intense satisfaction for those who hold it but inflict misery on those who do not. And personal falsehoods meant to give our lives meaning should not come at a high cost to others.

What Benatar ultimately recommends is neither relentless hopelessness nor blissful ignorance, but simple lucidity. One need not dwell constantly on the meaninglessness of life; doing so would likely erode what limited individual meaning one can achieve. But neither should one interpolate cosmic meaning into a basically pointless experience. Clear-eyed recognition of our limits allows us to seek to improve the quality of our lives, reduce suffering, and cultivate the modest forms of meaning that are available to us. In this sense, Benatar’s philosophy is not an attempt to strip life of any and all value, but to discipline our expectations of it.