A better social world starts off with asking the right philosophical questions.

If we get the philosophy right, or at least if we get the questions right, then the reality based on them will be on the right track. If we get the questions right, we can always adjust our reality as our answers mature. Asking the right questions is the most important thing, and the main question I always want to ask is: “what makes life worth living?”

This is a philosophical question and not merely a factual one. When I say “philosophical,” I mean that you need to examine the question and the answer, not simply state what happens to make life worth living for you right now.

Upon examination of this question, you will see that there are many ways to be wrong about what makes life worth living. You could have been lied to or manipulated by someone. You could be involved in various social games that inherently shape the answer, and even who you are, the vantage point from which you’d think about the answer.

It’s a question worth reflecting on: “What makes life worth living?”

From that question we can then ask other questions such as, “how do we go about achieving what makes life worth living?” and “how can everyone live a life worth living?” and we can always hold those secondary answers accountable to the primary question: “what makes life worth living?”

In my years of thinking about this question on the personal and social level, here are some answers I’ve come up with:

• to live a well-examined life

• to make sense of one’s values

• to continually grow one’s psychology

• to gain maturity and insight

• to have fun

• to grow more wise

• to grow more creative

• to break free of delusions and seek truth

• to combine our best selves with others’ best selves
  (or “ever-better selves”, as I like to say)

• to have authentic and substantive relationships

• to allow all of the above for others in their own unique way

There are many things that get in the way of this right now on the social systems level, and there are many “alternatives” to those social systems that are still very much like those social systems. I don’t want to say what they are, because you already know them. What I want to ask of you is that instead of simply asking questions about social systems, please start by asking the question “what makes life worth living?” and then allow social questions to emerge from there. Allow creativity into the pursuit of the primary question, and allow your imagination to emerge from a well-examined answer. From there, we can ask better questions about how we want to shape society—but it all has to start from “What makes life worth living?”

——

Vanessa Molano is the author of Redesign Everything, a participatory, self-redesigning book that asks philosophical questions for a well-examined social reality.

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