Mattering That It’s You

Abstract To live meaningfully, we can’t just be receptacles for the right sorts of activities – it has to matter that it’s us living our lives. Something is missing in valuable activities, if the same value could be achieved by anyone who performs the task. Meaningfulness requires that it be our own ideals, personalities, and priorities contributing to the value of what we do. Recognizing this can shed light on our relationship with meaning in three ways. First, it shows a distinctive reason that autonomy is important: what we do without autonomy will lack meaning. Second, it helps us understand a challenge we encounter when facing trade-offs between different types of meaning, navigating between opportunities to have a few of our characteristics matter widely (e.g., as a filmmaker or an activist) and intimate contexts in which much more of who we are matters to a small group of people. Finally, if living meaningfully involves our central characteristics shaping what’s valuable about our actions, then discovering pre-set purposes (e.g., from fate, God, or the cosmos) might actually undermine our capacity to live meaningful lives.