This post is a submission to this month’s IndieWeb carnival on “The Meaning Of Life”.

Growing up Christian, I would originally have said that my faith gave my life meaning. When I lost my faith around age 17, I was plagued by several anxieties — the fear of death, the fear of being wrong and thus condemning myself to hell, and the fear that life would become meaningless. While I was able to get used to my own mortality after a few years, the question of a meaningless life remained.

The messages of the New Atheists offered various salves to the problem of meaning. Usually they appealed to the wonder of the cosmos, and how fortunate we are to be around to enjoy it. Now, the wonder of the cosmos is cool and all, but it doesn’t really give my day-to-day life much meaning. “We’re all made of star-stuff, man” is pretty awesome, but it doesn’t really inform why I drag myself to work every day, or look after my kids.

The book that has most shaped my understanding of what makes life meaningful since then is This Life by philosopher Martin Hägglund, which I read in 2024. Hägglund presents two core concepts, which he calls secular faith and spiritual freedom. The former is most relevant to “the meaning of life”, so it’ll be the focus here, but I will briefly outline spiritual freedom toward, which is more of a political concept.

The first half of Hägglund’s book argues against religious faith being a source of meaning, and for secular faith as it’s true source. Hägglund’s definition of “religious” in this argument is fairly broad — what he means is anything that is supposedly eternal or invulnerable, such as a god, an afterlife, a reincarnation cycle, and so on.

The claim here is that once we introduce eternity, any possibility of meaning is dissolved. How can devotion to an eternal god be meaningful, since my devotion cannot possibly have any consequence for such a being? How can an eternal afterlife have meaning, since it literally does not matter what I do? — anything that could be considered important could be put off until tomorrow, forever. And what would it mean to care for my family, friends, and neighbours if they too were eternal, as in an afterlife? They would have no need for anyone’s care. In Hägglund’s words,

Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal. […] The question of what I ought to do with my life — a question that is at issue in everything I do — presupposes that I understand my time to be finite.

Likewise, belief systems that promise some sense of invulnerability ultimately lead to meaninglessness. Buddhism promises that if we reach nirvana, we can let go of all impermanent things that cause us pain, and attain a state of “perfect rest and absolute permanence”. Stoics like Epictetus teach that we must let go of impermanent things (such as our own children) and have faith in an eternal, provident universe. But again we are left with the problem: what is left for us to value if it cannot be taken away or harmed?

My argument is that we should reject the idea that such a state of being is a goal worth striving for. A religious [(eternal)] redemption from loss — whether through an immanent detachment or transcendent eternity — is not a solution to any of our problems. Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: it is to be dead.

On the other hand, secular faith is defined as faith in finite, fragile things — our own lives, our loved ones, our projects, and our moral and political causes. Unlike an eternal god, these things literally depend on our faith to be sustained. If I lose faith in my marriage, then my marriage will fall apart. As Hägglund writes:

To have secular faith is to acknowledge that the object of our faith is dependent on the practice of faith. I call it secular faith, since the object of devotion does not exist independently of those who believe in its importance and who keep it alive through their fidelity.

A religious reader might read this and think “Hey, I believe in eternal life, but I still value my relationships”. But for Hägglund, in this capacity you are acting on the basis of your secular faith, not your religious faith. If you care about your relationships to other people — if you have devotion to them — it is because you understand their fragility.

Ultimately, I agree with the thrust of Hägglund’s point here. Maybe this is something I on some level already believed, but Hägglund articulates it well and rigorously. This life, the fragile life we have together, is all we have. Our actions take on meaning because we are vulnerable to failure, to things falling through, to losing someone or something. I go to work because I value the way of life I can provide for my family, which is fragile, and also because I value education, a collective commitment that is only sustained through the endeavour of everyone in the sector. I nurture my relationships because I could lose them. I look after my health because I am committed to continuing a good life for as long as I can, even though it is fragile and I will one day lose it.

The other idea in the book is spiritual freedom. He contrasts spiritual freedom with the natural freedom of an animal. An animal can in some sense choose what it does with its time. But humans have the (seemingly, but not necessarily, unique) capacity to question what we ought to do with our time, who we ought to be, and how we ought to live. Ours is the possibility of meaningfully questioning the direction of life is taking, to reevaluate what matters to us, and also to question the historical and cultural norms that govern our life, or as Hägglund puts it

the question of if I ought to do what I supposedly ought to do.

That is to say, spiritual freedom is not freedom from constraints and obligations. But it entails the capacity to question and challenge our constraints and obligations if we ultimately realise they’re not what we ought to be doing.

Our spiritual freedom comes in degrees. If we are a slave, or in such desperate poverty that every day is a fight for mere survival, the question of what we ought to be doing doesn’t carry much weight — we don’t have much spiritual freedom.

This is where the book’s political argument comes in. Hägglund argues that the goal of political and economic life should be the maximisation of spiritual freedom. Now taking a strongly Marxist turn, Hägglund summarises the arguments of Vol. 1 of Capital, and reinterprets the critique of capitalism in terms of its diminishment of spiritual freedom. According to Marx’s Law of Value, it is socially necessary labour time that produces value, surplus value, and hence profits, under capitalism. Hence capitalist societies are structured around compelling us to engage in as much socially necessary labour as possible to generate the most value.

Hägglund argues instead for a socialist society in which the socially necessary labour is minimised and distributed as efficiently and equitably as possible, leaving as much as our time as possible for us to exercise our spiritual freedom by pursuing our freely determined ends.

The exact structure of this argument is quite intricate and more than I can go into here, and how much you accept the details may depend quite a lot on how sympathetic you are to Marx’s Law of Value. Like many utopian visions, the question of quite how we will all negotiate to determine, minimise, and equitably share the socially necessary labour is also left underspecified. But regardless of these critiques, the overall argument is fascinating and stimulating, and don’t diminish my recommendation of This Life at all. I think any ex-religious person interested in “the meaning of life” without religion would find it interesting, as well as any leftist interested in a “spiritual” conception of why leftwing politics matter. The throughline of the book is the idea of finite time — it is our finite time that makes our life meaningful in the first place, and we are not spiritually free until how we use that finite time can be meaningfully questioned.