Being Mortal Pt. 2

Sunday, January 19

A direct excerpt from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, the subject of yesterday’s post:

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.

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I don’t know if I agree with Gawande — I’ve always been sympathetic to hedonistic accounts of welfare, which see a good life as nothing more than a sum of positive moments, subtracted by the negative ones. After all, is a life in service of a great cause meaningful if there is no recognition of this fact? And what is recognition of this fact, if not in the form of moments of our lives?

But I do think Gawande’s point is a strong counterargument against naive hedonism, which see something like pleasure, or the absence of immediate pain, as all that matters. There is, in my view, a far greater diversity of positive experiences out there, including those that aren’t pleasurable per se — difficult projects, type 2 fun, acts of service, and so on.