A Very Old Question, Now With a Survey

People have been asking some version of what makes a life meaningful for as long as anyone has been writing things down. It is a genuinely strange turn of events that the question now sometimes arrives as a multiple choice survey.

The instinct to raise an eyebrow at this is understandable. There is something faintly absurd about reducing a question ancient philosophers spent entire careers on to a handful of scaled items. But the surveys are not really trying to replace the question. They are trying to notice a pattern researchers kept finding anyway: that people who describe a strong sense of direction also tend, on average, to sleep better, recover faster, and report fewer of the aches that seem to have no other explanation.

The instruments are new. The question they are pointing at is one of the oldest anyone has asked.

None of this makes the old question smaller. If anything, it is a little reassuring that something philosophers argued about for centuries turns out to correlate with something as unglamorous as a decent night's sleep. Meaning was never only an abstract concern. It appears to sit fairly close to the body the whole time, whether or not anyone thought to measure it.

Whatever your opinion of the survey, the question underneath it is not going anywhere. It has already outlasted several thousand years of people trying to answer it definitively, which is probably the best evidence that it was never the kind of question meant to be finished.