Does life have meaning after death?

Eternity Matters - The Map, part 3

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I woke up in complete darkness.

It was hot. I thought my eyes might still be closed, so I blinked them a few times. Nothing changed. 

My breath felt close to my face. I lifted my hands to feel what was there and hit my knuckles off something hard.

I felt around the rough, flat surface close above me. Moving my hands made me feel dizzy.

The ceiling felt like raw wood. I moved my hands around my head. It was cramped. There were flat walls of raw wood close by my body in all directions. I was lying on one as well.

That’s when it dawned on me. I kicked downwards. The soft thud of my boot on the bottom wall confirmed it.

I was buried alive.

We may never have been buried in a coffin. But we have been buried alive.

The box we are buried in is much larger than a coffin, but it’s still a box. The universe itself is a kind of box because we cannot leave it, and it is decaying too.

We will all die in a box whether we’re stuck in a tiny box or a very large one.

If your life has no meaning while you’re alive, can it have a meaning when you die?

Does death make our life meaningless? When we die, our life ceases to exist. And something that does not exist cannot have a meaning.

To say that "only the here and now matters" is to deny death.

This letter is the third part of the map, which is the belief that eternity matters. We talked about the unavoidability of faith in the first letter, and the authority that purpose gives in the second letter.

This letter, we will finish the map. In the next letter, we will put it all together and follow the map to the Gate.

The Little Prince

The classic story of death and belonging, The Little Prince, tells the story of a boy, the prince, who comes to understand that he loves his talking rose and should return to her.

He goes through a journey of three responses to needing a meaning for life, each of which is shown through his relationship to his rose.

The three responses to needing meaning for your life are:

1. I don’t need a meaning, because life is meaningless.

2. I have a temporary meaning, because even though I will die, a temporary life is meaningful.

3. I have an eternal meaning, because life is not really temporary because death is irrelevant.

In the prince’s story, he leaves his rose and comes across many people with worldviews he does not find meaning in. He meets someone obsessed with himself, he meets someone obsessed with knowledge, and he meets someone obsessed with possessions.

Then, he comes to a garden filled with roses that are identical to his, and despairs. He believes there is no meaning to his relationship with his rose—that there is no meaning to his life—because there is nothing unique about his rose.

His life is the same as everyone else’s, and meaningless.

Then, he meets a fox. And the fox tells him the value of his rose is not that it’s unique. The value of his rose is that it’s his.

It is the closeness of the relationship with his rose that provides meaning.

It is the fact that his life is his, not someone else's, that provides a meaning to his life. His life is meaningful to him even if it ends.

In the final pages, the prince leaves his friend the pilot and goes back to his rose on a planet among the stars. As a parting gift to the pilot, the prince laughs, and tells the pilot to consider that all the stars are filled with that laugh, since the prince is up there somewhere.

His life has a meaning beyond its end, because the pilot will remember him and be happy.

But as the pilot watches the stars and remembers the prince, he realizes that the prince may be weeping instead of laughing. There is a sheep on the prince’s little planet that may have eaten the rose.

Does the meaning of the prince’s life continue even when he has lost what gave it meaning? Even after he has lost the unique relationship with his rose?

Does the meaning of our life continue even when we have lost what gave it meaning? Even after we have lost the unique relationship of living our life?

If the prince's rose was eaten, the prince would be returned to a state worse than when he began. His life would still be meaningless, since it was meaningless before he had the rose, but he would have lost what he thought gave his life meaning.

Whether his life was given meaning by loving his rose, or by loving his life, what is left after he has lost it?

It may be better to have loved and lost than never loved. But if life does not have meaning before you have lost, how can it have meaning after you’ve lost?

I said that the third stage of the prince’s journey, where the memory of his laughter gave his life meaning, was the belief that life was not really temporary. What I meant by this was that the prince said he “continued on” in the memory of the pilot, and that continuation gave his life meaning.

The prince denied that the loss of his presence ended the meaning of his life.

The prince denied that his death changed the meaning of his life.

But the pilot knew better. The pilot knew that death was something to be mourned, not to be denied.

If life doesn’t have meaning before death, it doesn’t have meaning in death or after death. Life after you have lost it must have a meaning greater than being alive.

All meanings to life must withstand the test of death.

There are three broad scales of the meaning of life that do not provide meaning after death.

They are:

1. The meaning of life is to live for yourself.

2. The meaning of life is to live for others.

3. The meaning of life is to live for a higher purpose.

I came to these options through what I call Box Theory, which in part is considering what holds a person’s identity. We can talk about why this list is complete in another letter.

Living for Yourself

The first option is simple to see why it does not provide meaning after death: if you live for yourself, you have to stop doing that when you’re dead.

It’s like being stuck in a coffin—a box that you will die in. If everything you do is for yourself, then everything you do is stuck in the coffin. And the coffin becomes empty when you die.

Something that does not exist cannot have a meaning.

Some people say that the meaning of their life is their legacy. That the meaning of their life is their impact on others.

While it’s possible to genuinely believe that legacy is a form of living for others, would you believe that a man who builds a statue of himself to “cement his legacy” was living for others?

Legacy, like the memory of the little prince’s laughter, cannot provide a meaning to your life for two reasons:

1. It does you no good when you are dead.

2. You will inevitably be forgotten.

There is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley called Ozymandias, in which a broken statue in the desert proclaims, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” It is intended as a bold claim of greatness. But the surrounding desert makes it a claim of irrelevance.

Legacy as the meaning of your life is a denial of death.

Living for Others

Living for others is similar. A memory does nothing for you when you are dead, and you will eventually be forgotten.

Something that does not exist cannot have a meaning.

However, there is one categorical difference: Living for others allows you to believe that they are in your box of “self.”

Take children as an example. It seems reasonable to say that you live for your children. The meaning of your life is the life of your children.

But, again, there is a problem: What is the meaning of your childrens’ lives? The meaning of your life would be the meaning of their life.

If they live for themselves, then your life has no meaning when they die.

If they also live for their children, what then? You are making the coffin bigger. Now, all of your descendents are in the coffin too.

One day, all of your descendents will die. Even if you make the coffin as big as the universe, that will die too, and then your life will have no meaning.

Making the box—the coffin—bigger doesn’t change anything. It only gives you more time before everything in the box dies.

And if you still find meaning in that you’re really just living for yourself.

Living for others is another form of denying that death ends the meaning of life.

Living for a Higher Purpose

But what about living for something that doesn’t die? What about the meaning of life being living for a higher purpose?

If you live for a higher purpose, then I would ask: Whose purpose is it?

As we discussed last letter, where there is a purpose, there is a purposer.

If the higher purpose is something like the survival of humanity, as Elon Musk has said his purpose is, then the death of the last human ends the meaning of your life.

A higher purpose is still a denial of death if all of its purposers die.

Any purpose that does not provide life after death is a denial that death ends the meaning of your life.

Remember: Something that does not exist cannot have a meaning. If you die, you cease to exist and cannot have a meaning.

What kind of purpose can provide existence after death?

Only a purpose that never ends, that never dies. And where do you find this kind of purpose?

A purpose that never ends is an eternal purpose. And if there is an eternal purpose, it would have to start with the source of existence because eternity can’t be any larger than existence. Existence is the biggest box.

Eternity matters because it is the only way to avoid the meaninglessness that comes from death.

So what?

Why should you want a meaning that doesn’t end with death?

While it’s irrational to deny that death ends the meaning of your life, there are reasons not to care.

For instance, if you are content living life for yourself, you may not need a meaning that survives death.

If you don’t mind that your children will also die, then you may not need a meaning that survives their death.

If you don’t mind that a higher purpose ends with its purposers, then you don’t need a meaning that survives its death.

But if you really don’t care that death ends those meanings, I have to ask you: Are those purposes really what you care about?

If you don’t mind that the human race will die, is it really the meaning of your life to keep it alive?

If you don’t mind that your children will die, is their life really the meaning of your life?

If you don’t mind that you will die, is your life really the meaning of your life?

Death changes the meaning of life while we’re alive.

If you don’t care, are you doing anything more than pursuing good feelings while denying death? If you don't mind, is that really enough?

If it is enough—then you’re living for yourself. You are living for your experience.

I was pursuing distraction and denying death when I found a reason to care about meaning, and life, after death.

If you’ve read my other letters, you already know what I’m going to say: I wanted to love my wife. Why does that change where the meaning of life comes from?

Because I needed more than just my life to have meaning. I needed her life to have meaning, too.

And because I loved her, I did not want the meaning of her life to end.

That is what brought me to eternity, to see if it could give us a meaning that did not end with death.

Eternity matters.

In the next letter, I’ll put the three parts of the map together to show you what they lead to.

They lead to a Gate where meaning is.