Narrative and the Meaning of Life

Ray Briggs
Would your life make a great memoir?

Josh Landy
Does it have to in order to be meaningful?

Ray Briggs
Can you really tell your story without fudging the facts?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about Narrative and the Meaning of Life.

Josh Landy
Meaning of ife—what meaning of life, Ray? We’re all just atoms in the void!

Ray Briggs
Ah, come on. You don’t think life has any meaning. That’s pretty bleak. Why even bother getting up in the morning if that’s what you think?

Josh Landy
There’s satisfactions to be had and people to help. But none of that gives life meaning.

Ray Briggs
Wait, wait, say more about this “helping people” thing. If life is really meaningless, why aren’t you just selfish?

Josh Landy
I don’t want to be selfish, but that doesn’t have anything to do with meaning. I mean, helping other people gets me out of bed, sure, and it makes me feel like I’m not totally wasting my time on Earth. But what does that have to do with meaning?

Ray Briggs
Josh, that is meaning a meaningful life is just one that’s worthwhile. Sure, there might be pains and sacrifices. You have to get up in the middle of the night to take your friend to the hospital, but ultimately, it’s all worth it, because your life has meaning.

Josh Landy
Well, okay, if that’s all meaning is then, then, sure, but I don’t see what narrative has to do with it.,

Ray Briggs
Okay, think about the example of taking your friend to the hospital. What could possibly redeem the pain of having to wake up in the middle of the night? Well, it’s that. It’s part of a narrative. Your friend was in trouble, they reached out to you. You took them to the hospital, and they felt better. It’s a little story, and the ending of the story gives meaning and purpose to this stuff earlier on.

Josh Landy
I just don’t get why you need a story. What matters is that my friend needed help, and they got it. Surel, the rest is incidental.

Ray Briggs
Is it? Though, imagine that it happens a different way. Your friend calls you up and you just go back to sleep, but a stranger finds them and takes them to the hospital. In that story, they still get the help they need, but you’re not living your life very well.

Josh Landy
Why is it all about me? I mean, isn’t this my friend’s story. I feel like there’s something a little narcissistic in in thinking that my friend’s pain is just part of my life narrative.

Ray Briggs
Look, I’m not saying your narrative is all that matters, but we were talking about what gives your life meaning, and the answer to that question is, well, it’s living out a good story, like the story where you help your friends in times of need, instead of hanging up and going back to sleep.

Josh Landy
Okay, maybe that’s true for this one event, helping my friend in the middle of the night. That does make a nice little story. But my life that doesn’t make a nice little story. My life’s been full of random noise and stops and starts and boring dead ends. No one’s gonna read that novel.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, speak for yourself, Josh, my memoir is going to be a best-seller.

Josh Landy
I believe you actually, and I think there’s a reason for that, which is you’re going to be making it up, right? If you don’t care about factual accuracy, it’s easy to make a life seem exciting.

Ray Briggs
Excuse you—the notorious El Rio incident, that really happened.

Josh Landy
The less said about that, the better.

Ray Briggs
Agreed—I’m saving it for the memoir. But the point is, I don’t have to make things up. I can just report real events. When you put them together, you get a single coherent narrative, and that’s what gives life meaning.

Josh Landy
But I bet that story leaves a bunch of stuff out all those boring faculty meetings that gas bills you’ve paid, the busses you’ve waited for. I can’t help thinking that this true story of yours is a bit abridged.

Ray Briggs
Well, I still think my life story is cool, and I bet our guest will agree with me. It’s Helena De Bres, author of “Narrative and Meaning in life.”

Josh Landy
In the meantime, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to learn about caregivers who are taking control of their own narratives through poetry. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Her son tells it like this… When Brenda Sue Pignata met her future husband, Frank, decades ago, she came home with a smile on her face and a cheeriness in her step. As they grew older and Frank struggled with dementia, he still wrote her love letters. I was lucky to speak with Brenda Sue before she died, not long after her husband passed away. When they met, they were both math teachers.

Brenda Sue Pignata
He and Sacramento meet in Stockton, and he asked me to dance at a math conference gathering.

Holly McDede
Frank had joined the merchant marines when he was 17. He and a buddy paid a man on the street some $20 to act as their father so they could fight in World War Two. On one of their first dates, Frank flew Brenda Sue around in an airplane.

Brenda Sue Pignata
And I got sick, and he had to land us. But that’s another old story.

Holly McDede
They lived together in the town of Rescue, California—their little piece of heaven

Brenda Sue Pignata
When he got really sick, gardening and journaling were my refuge places. He could sit on the deck and watch me. The deeper his dementia got, the more he needed to see me, he needed the comfort of knowing exactly where I was and that I could answer whatever his questions were.

Holly McDede
She said caregiving for someone with dementia is like acting you go along with their story.

Brenda Sue Pignata
We learn how to do therapeutic lies if it helps them. You know, say things are okay, it’s all right, not get upset if he asks the same question 20 times.

Holly McDede
But she also needed somewhere to release how she was feeling, so she joined a unique kind of poetry group just for caregivers. The group’s leader, Francis Kakugawa, inspires caregivers in Sacramento to create meaning out of painful experiences through poetry. Brenda Sue remembers breaking down in tears when she met everyone.

Brenda Sue Pignata
All this time, I thought I was totally alone, and nobody in the whole world had ever done it before. I just wrote down and cried a lot.

Holly McDede
Writing poetry helped Brenda Sue slow down and appreciate the simple moments she wrote a poem called “Am I the caregiver or the receiver?”

Brenda Sue Pignata
His memories from yesteryear remind me of our abundance, our history, our travel, our joyful dances through decades, its frequent nap gifts me with solitude to know myself, catch up with chores or read or write without interruption.

Holly McDede
In the poetry group, nothing was off limits.

Brenda Sue Pignata
We talk about things that you couldn’t talk in normal company. If there’s pee and poop, we talk the pee and the poop.

Holly McDede
One of her poems took the shape of a help wanted ad.

Brenda Sue Pignata
Love and kindness required. Patience and listening a plus. Logic and reason don’t exist.

Holly McDede
We don’t often hear stories that show the value of caregiving for people with dementia, or poetry that uses humor to capture the absurdity of aging.

Kate McLean
Those are probably stories that aren’t shared as often.

Holly McDede
Kate McLean is a professor at Western Washington University. She studies how people recall and interpret their experiences in narrative form.

Kate McLean
So perhaps it’s an act of resistance or empowerment just to put them out into the ether, these experiences of caring for someone with dementia, which might begin to normalize or bring some empathy or compassion to that experience.

Holly McDede
McLean also talks about the idea of master narratives, culturally shared stories that help provide a framework for how we understand ourselves.

Kate McLean
And they also can be constraining if our experiences or identities don’t fit within those storylines.

Holly McDede
The caregiver poets create their own kind of master narratives. They write poems that reframe what it means to help loved ones age with dignity.

Mike Smith
Well, she’s my mother, so of course, she’s the most fantastic person to have ever lived. But everyone says that about her. So it’s not just my bias.

Holly McDede
That’s Brenda Sue’s son, Mike Smith. He lives in his mom’s old house, and rescue a home filled with her photographs and writing

Mike Smith
all the other writings that she has, I don’t know what I’m going to do with. I feel like I should read them, but I don’t know that I’ll have enough lifetime to read them.

Holly McDede
Mike reads one of his mom’s poems titled “The Long Waltz.”

Mike Smith
We’re dancing the long waltz out of step, yet holding tightly to yesteryear. This long goodbye amplifies memories we treasure and that we’d rather forget. We face eternity on a different schedule. Is this the day our dance stops? Well, I hear different music create my own dance. Is there another dance yet to be learned, or will all the music stop?

We’ve been saying goodbye for at least 10 years, and so every moment that she got with him was a gift, right? It was gravy on top.

Holly McDede
Before she died, Brenda Sue had been working on a book dancing with Mr. P disco to dementia. The title captures their story, poetic and filled with love from beginning to the end. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly. Jim McDade,

Josh Landy
tTanks for that lovely report. Holly. That story was covered while Holly was with the investigative reporting program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism through a grant from the SCAN Foundation. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about narrative and the meaning of life.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Helena De Bres. She’s professor of philosophy at Wellesley College and author of the forthcoming book, “Philosophy in the First Person,” Helena, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Helena de Bres
Thank you. It’s wonderful to be back here.

Josh Landy
So Helena, you’ve been thinking a lot about narrative and meaning, but how did you first get interested in that topic?

Helena de Bres
Well, when I was a kid, I wrote a lot of stories. I wrote, in particular, one very long novel when I went home from school every afternoon about a Victorian orphan who lived with her aunt and uncle in the countryside and had adventures. So I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, it was not a good novel, as most 12 year old novels, but then I totally lost that. I became a philosophy major, I went to grad school. I didn’t read or write fiction, really tell any stories on paper for about 10 years, and then about 10 years ago, I wanted to reconnect with my earlier kid self and started writing memoir, personal essays and stories, but affection again. So there’s a nice narrative arc to that kid writer falls in love with writing, falls out of love with writing, falls in love with philosophy, dishes philosophy, and then comes back to her first love.

Josh Landy
It’s a romantic comedy.

Helena de Bres
So now I write a lot of stories, including philosophy, but also a lot of personal narrative. So I’ve sort of integrated those two things in my life now.

Ray Briggs
So Helena, how exactly does narrative connect to having a meaningful life?

Helena de Bres
Well, I don’t think narrative is the whole story. So to speak about meaning in life, many different things can make a life meaningful. Projects valuable relationships, Adventures of various kinds, contributions to social justice, projects, a whole range of different things. But I do think that narrative is one part of what makes a life meaningful. I think one main way that it does that it makes life more intelligible, more understandable, both to the person telling the story and to the people the story is told too. And I think understanding your life is an important part of seeing it as meaningful and have others recognize it as meaningful.

Ray Briggs
I’m kind of puzzled by the suggestion that I might fail to understand my own life. So don’t I just understand it by living

Helena de Bres
it well? I think William James talked about the experience of an infant being faced by the world when they first arrive on the planet. And he called it a buzzing, booming confusion, right? There’s all this massive sensations and experiences happening, and a kid has to learn how to filter through them, be more selective, somehow connect them to each other in a coherent way. So part of growing up is working out how to make sense of the world, and as we get older, we taught to do that in part by telling stories about our experience and the experience of others. So storytelling, I think, is just one important human way to filter through the massive data and sensations that the world throws at us.

Josh Landy
Makes sense. I mean, you gave a great example a moment ago, where you talked about, you know, at 12 you wrote a novel, and then that interest in writing fiction went away, but now it’s kind of come back. This creative side of your life has come sort of roaring back. And My instant reaction was, okay, romantic comedy. So that’s something we often do, right? We’re able to put a very concise label on a large series of events over many years. So that seems to be a real value that narrative provides for us to be able to conceive of enormous amounts of moments in time in two words. But presumably it also helps us to evaluate right to think, not just what was this, but why was this? How was this? Was it a good thing? You know? How should I think about the way I’ve lived my life so far? Is that part of what you’re thinking, that narrative also allows me to decide, okay, is the life I’ve been living a good life?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, so a story isn’t just a matter of stringing together a bunch of events in a kind of clinical manner. I think paradigmatic narratives also include an interpretation of those events that tries to portray their significance to an audience, right? So it is a it’s an evaluative exercise. It’s not purely descriptive. And as you mentioned, one handy way to do this is to think about other pre existing story forms. So every culture, every human culture, has a set of conventions, themes, motifs, you know, plot arcs. And when you’re trying to work out what’s going on in your own life, it might seem like a total mess to you. It’s a handy shortcut to think about those kinds of shapes and those kinds of themes and arcs that you’re familiar with within your own cultural heritage.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about narrative and the meaning of life with Helena de Bres from Wellesley College.

Ray Briggs
How do you tell the story of your life? Who exactly is the audience? Is the narrator? Even ReliAble

Josh Landy
Living lives and telling tales—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues you.

Hamilton
Who tells your story, who tells your story?

Josh Landy
You don’t have to be a founding father to tell your story. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about narrative and the meaning of life with Helena De Bres author of “Philosophy, in the First Person.”

Josh Landy
Got questions about what makes life meaningful? Email us at comments at philosophy talk.org or you can comment on our completely revamped website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and find the narrative in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Helena, you’ve told us that narrative is important because it makes us intelligible to ourselves, but you said it also makes us intelligible to others. Can you tell us more about how it does that and why that’s important?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, so you can just write a story for yourself sitting at home, you know, writing up some aspect of your life and your journal. But most of us tend to think that when we’re telling a story and we’re directing it an audience of some kinds. We have some audience in mind. It might be an actual one or a hypothetical one. And why do we do that? I think it’s part of the general human desire to not be alone in the universe, right? We all have this sense sometimes that we’re isolated, that we’re living our experiences, going through our troubles and joys solo, telling a story as a way of trying to connect with other humans. So having them understand what you’re going through, maybe understanding via your telling of a story to them that your experience is similar to theirs in certain ways. So it sets up a kind of conversation between you and your fellow humans. And I think that’s really important to us as social beings.

Josh Landy
I mean, I like that a lot. Something else I think about is the temptation that many of us have to aggrandize ourselves, excuse ourselves, things like that, and whether having an actual or even imagined audience can tamp that down a little bit. I often think about dostoevsky’s novel Notes from Underground, where the main character is telling his story to himself and but telling it to an imaginary set of gentlemen, and he says, You know, I purposely imagine an audience before me in order to conduct myself in a more dignified manner. I’ll be able to criticize myself better. You know, he’s a strange being, but I kind of like this idea that if we at least imagine a potentially critical audience holding us to account and saying, What are you talking about? You weren’t the hero that day. You were actually kind of miserable or whatever, maybe that’s a little bit of a nudge in the right direction.

Helena de Bres
Yeah. And I think that connects to a really important point, which is that telling a story that isn’t true about your life isn’t going to make it more meaningful. It might increase your sense that your life is meaningful, but you can’t really make your life meaningful by telling some totally fake story about it. So we do want our stories to track at least the main facts we might get some things wrong. You know, we’re all limited in various ways, but we want our life stories to be roughly speaking true. And you’re right, having this hypothetical audience that we’re telling the story to is a way of ensuring that we are responsible when doing that. Getting a bit fact checking if people do in fact hear it. So yeah, I think that’s a really important part of it as well.

Ray Briggs
So I definitely see the value of having your life narrative not be a lie. I wonder about completeness, like, is completeness a virtue, or does it just give you too much junk and no filter?

Helena de Bres
No one wants to hear your complete life story. Ray, I mean, you know, no offense. It’d be way too long, and some of it will be very slow. Rio, episodes, we want to have that in detail and maybe filter out some of the rest of it. Yeah, it’s impossible to tell a full life story. So you do have to be selective. And some people worry about this. They think if you’re picking and choosing different parts of your life, then you’re going to be falsifying it, right? You’re going to give this inaccurate representation of what happened. But actually being selective in that way is a way of transmitting a different kind of understanding. I think it’s a way of being more truthful. If you pick out things that seem more salient to you, you’re better able to make connections between those things and other things and create this framework of understanding, a digestible interpretation of what happened that isn’t just a list of successive events. So selectivity is actually, I think, really crucial to a good story. It’s not a sign that the story’s gone wrong.

Ray Briggs
So yeah, so I see how it transmits information about what’s important in the story. Do you think that there’s a kind of prior fact about what’s important, or do I make things important by choosing to focus on them in my narrative?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, there’s a couple of different views on that. So one view is that lives are already kind of story shaped, right? So your life has a certain kind of plot built into it, and when you tell a story about it, you’re just describing that pre existing plot, right? So there’s an actual identifiable story that you’re finding, discovering and then relating. There’s another take, which says, No, that lives themselves. Don’t really have a plot or arc. That arc is something that we that we create when we tell a story about them. So the story is an interpretation. It’s adding some significance, but it’s not completely divorced from what actually happened in the life. So I like that take the idea that what matters is the shape of your life, but also the constructive act of telling a story about it, drawing out what seems important to you, highlighting certain kinds of values and events as being more significant than others. So it’s a combination of the actual things that happened and also your own particular perspective on what happened.

Josh Landy
I mean, you know, people quote Ron content from Sartre’s novel nausea says, you know, people talk about true stories as though there could be such things as true stories, because the very fact of ordering is itself falsifying. People talk about memory being unreliable. I want to throw in one other objection people, which I think is maybe the most interesting, which is that even if you’re getting the events correct, and even if your selection is sort of fair, the meaning of those events has a way of changing. Like, take your story that we started with. You wrote a novel when you were 12. Then you had the misfortune of becoming a philosopher, and now you’re back. So you know, if you had told the same story 10 or 15 years ago, you might have said, Yeah, I used to write this stuff as a kid, but it wasn’t any good, and I’m not interested in that. Or, you know, now I’m doing better stuff or something like that. But the meaning of that, even for you, if I’m not putting your words in your mouth, has changed, and that’s true of a lot of things in our lives, that as new events happen and we make different choices, even though the events in the past remain the same, weirdly, they kind of get illuminated in different ways. So isn’t there a potential worry that any story I’m telling right now is only kind of provisional, and the story I might tell but the very same sequence of events is going to be different in 10 years?

Helena de Bres
Yeah. I mean, for one thing, I’d say is that I think there can be many different true stories told about a single, you know, episode or stretch of life. Life is complicated, right? So there’s different things that you can highlight that doesn’t mean that the different things are false. They can be consistent with each other. So that’s one thing I’d say, you know, I’m not too worried about stories changing over time, because I think what we’re engaged in is this interpretive project. We’re trying to make sense of our lives. We’re not it’s very un it’s very unlikely that we’re going to get it all correct the first time and see it as sort of an ongoing attempt to get a grip on what’s happening right? We’re faced with this big, hot mess. We’re going to necessarily end up with a story that’s in some ways a simplification, in some ways false and error written. But you know, that’s better than no story at all, if storytelling really is as crucial as I think it is to understanding our lives and communicating them to others.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about narrative and the meaning of life with Helena De Bres from Wellesley College, and we’ve got an email from Mike. Mike writes, the purpose of life is whatever purpose you choose for your life. Helena, what do you think of that?

Helena de Bres
Everyone’s tempted by that idea, I think. But I’m not sure that it really works. I do think that it matters which particular purpose you choose. Some purposes are going to be more rich in value filled than others. Sometimes. People don’t like that. They think that it would be nice if we didn’t have to make those discriminations. But I think it’s just true. Like, think about a life of someone who spends their entire day just counting blades of grass on the back the back lawn, and then compare that life to, you know, a life that’s dedicated to pursuing social justice, right? So the life of Martin Luther King, I’d call myself an Objectivist, a partial objectivist, about meaning in life. It’s not just a subjective matter. There are certain kinds of constraints on what lives are meaningful. But I also think there are many, many different kinds of meaningful lives possible. It’s not like there’s five and everyone else is getting it wrong. I think life is just filled with different potential, valuable, meaningful purposes. So you just got to pick one of those and not one of the ones that falls outside the category.

Josh Landy
So, you know, Mike raised one version of existentialism, right? Give your own life your meaning. Here’s another version of existentialism, Camus. Camus says life will be lived all the better if it has no meaning, which is a really interesting, bold claim. What do you say to something like that? Right there? So there’s a, you know, there’s a whole tradition out there of saying, What are you doing, asking for life to have meaning, or my life to have meaning. Just live. And the more you’re attached to meaning, according to Camus, the more you’re kind of constraining yourself, when you could be living all kinds of different lives and doing all kinds of different things and collecting experiences and having a very exciting life, but not a meaningful one.

Helena de Bres
Yeah. I mean, I think what the existentialists were doing, in part, was pushing back on a particular account of what Lent meaning to life. So it was this traditional cosmic story, a religious based theistic picture of the universe as being, you know, created by a Divine Being who gave each of us a task to pursue, right? So the divine purpose theory of meaning in life. So they didn’t like that, I think, for good reasons. So we should ditch that and instead try and create meaning on a more human scale, according to our own, you know, purposes and values. I think that you know you can still pursue meaning in the absence of some cosmic overarching meaning of the religious nature. So, and I think it’s important for us to do that. It’s very easy to read. The existentialist is proposing an account of meaning rather than just ditching it. I think those of us who are skeptical of there being an answer to the question, what is the meaning of life, can still be sympathetic to the idea that individual human lives can have meaning. They can be deeper and more purposeful, have more enduring value in some forms than in others, and we should go for the ones that are more valuable and have more of a point.

Ray Briggs
Helena, we’ve got an email question from Mark in Aptos, California. So Mark writes, Many people who maintain journals or diaries do so without any intention of turning them into memoirs or autobiographies. They aren’t necessarily crafting a life narrative for an audience. They’re simply journaling for the sake of reflection, personal insight, or even just to capture moments as they come. My question is, how do you think the act of journaling, purely for oneself contributes to an individual’s sense of meaning in life, even if there’s no overt narrative or story being constructed for others?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, I don’t think that you need to have a story, sorry, an audience for your story. In order for your life to be meaningful, I also don’t think that you need to write it down, right? A lot of storytelling happens internally, totally silently in one’s head. I’m a writer, so I tend to, you know, talk about writing life stories as being meaningful, but you could never pick up a pen at all, but still spin a narrative about your life. Have you know an understanding of your prison experience in the context of your past and your projected future? That’s really the key thing that matters, I think. And the writing is a bit of an incidental thing that you do afterwards. It makes it easier to transmit your story to others, but it’s not really necessary.

Josh Landy
So an audience is one way in which other people show up in my story, right? My story isn’t just about me, but there are other ways in which other people show up, right? So other people show up in my story as core elements of the story. Maybe part of my story is, you know, the story of finding my life partner, something incredibly important to my story. Of course, hopefully I’m also important to their story. But you know, there’s also folks that I care about and I’m trying to help, right? Martin Luther King, a lot of other people show up in his story. Were he to tell one about, you know, whom he was able to help? Or there’s also inspirations. There are people who are obstacles, there’s oppressors. What do we owe such people in our stories? Right? Do we owe something to the people in our lives, not necessarily to our oppressors, but certainly to our life partners, to our inspirations and so on, to get it right about them? Can I just tell my own story, which is also a story of you, it’s also a story of Ray, of Devon, of all. Kinds of other people? Can I just tell them any way I want, or do I have some kind of moral responsibility?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, there is this danger. People talk about the main character complex, right, where you start seeing your life as a story and yourself as the main protagonist, you get a bit of a Hero, Hero complex as a result, and think of others as mere I don’t know instruments or side characters. I think that’s unhealthy a truthful story, one that actually reflected the facts when, as you’re saying, Josh, include important roles for everyone else and not have yours in the in the driving seat or the star position. So it’s important, if you’re going to tell the truthful life story, that you recognize the role of others in your life. And it’s also important for them, that, yeah, that you don’t misrepresent your relations to them or things that they’ve done, especially if you’re writing it down and telling the story to others. It’s big ethical worries that might come up that way. So yeah, I think being responsible to the other people in your story is a really important ethical demand, and it’s important for meaning too. I don’t think any human life can be meaningful without being deeply connected to the lives of other humans. So telling that story accurately is both meaningful and ethical.

Ray Briggs
Another connection that I’ve seen people draw between sort of narrative and other people involves people who are unable, either temporarily or permanently, to tell their own narrative. So like really small children, adults suffering from dementia, people with really serious disabilities. So one story I’ve heard about them, I think the philosopher Hilda Lindemann is really good on this, is that people like this still have meaningful lives, and part of what gives them meaning is that other people can supply some of the ingredients in their narrative. Like a small child is somebody’s child that they value and love, and an older adult with dementia is somebody who has done a lot of things that their relatives can tell stories about. Do you agree with Lindemann there?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, I really like that idea. So you don’t have to be the narrator in order to receive meaning narratively, something like that. I think that is definitely true. And I’d also say, I think something I said earlier, which is that I don’t think that narrative is necessary for a meaningful life. You can lead a meaningful life without telling a story. It’s only one aspect of what it is to live meaningfully. So so non storytellers can still have meaning, rich lives for many other reasons, the kinds of relationships they’re in, the experiences they have, the projects that they have, the virtues they display. So yeah, I think it’s also important to recognize that some people are more narrative than others. So we’re not talking you know about people who are unable to narrate, maybe, but some people are more narratively inclined. And I don’t think that quality alone means that you’re necessarily going to live a more meaningful life than someone who’s less narratively inclined.

Josh Landy
But let’s say you are narratively inclined, and you have a choice between making an effort to tell your story in your way, on the one hand and on the other hand, you know just kind of adopting an off the shelf story, the kind of story that your parents might tell about you, the kind of story your community might tell about you, a story belonging to an age old narrative tradition, like a conversion narrative, or something like that. Is there any additional value to telling my story in my way, or is it just as good or even better to adopt a kind of time worn, time honored form?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, so the lazier option is just to take one off the shelf, and maybe also the less interesting option, yeah, I think telling a story that’s that is not entirely conventional has some you know, unique and idiosyncratic elements that you have created yourself. Might be a life that has that kind of story in it, active storytelling in it might be more interesting. It might be more authentic, in certain ways, more creative. So those values are going to be could be higher. But I do think there’s just something to the basic act of storytelling, provided, again, that the story fits your life, that provides a kind of a pretty high baseline level of meaning. I’m not sure if I want to say that a life is necessarily more meaningful if it has a more interesting story, even though it might have more value in other ways,

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about narrative and the meaning of life with Helena debrest from Wellesley College, author of “Philosophy in the First Person.”

Ray Briggs
is anything stopping you from finding meaning in life? What could make it easier is meaning available to some and not others,

Josh Landy
Making room for meaning—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues,

The Magnetic Fields
Yes, yes, yes, it was beautifully meaningless

Josh Landy
Is a life with a clear narrative, a life less meaningless? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Helena De Bres from Wellesley College, and we’re thinking about narrative and the meaning of life.

Josh Landy
We’ve got an email from James. James writes, there’s an initial key to the meaning of life which lies in present moment awareness. This is the witnessing of events without thought, definition, description, words or reflections, where one is simply in a state of awe. This moment of awe escapes us as soon as we had a thought, a word or a story, to what we witnessed, this state of awe is what gives life meaning hard to convey in a story. You had to have been there. What do you think it’s kind of an interesting challenge?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, I’m actually very sympathetic to that kind of concern. So some philosophers who talk about the importance of narrative to meaning in life claim that we have to have, like, a really interesting kind of plot, rich, very active, challenging life, full of, you know, exciting pursuits, developing of capacities over time, earlier chapters, building on later chapters, so that we have a very kind of interesting action adventure story going on. And one thing I don’t like about the idea that that is crucial for the meaning giving power of narrative is that there are plenty of lives that don’t look like that seem to that seem to me, to be very meaningful. So I do think it’s, yeah, it’s important to recognize we don’t need to have that traditional kind of Western structure. You can think of it as a kind of Aristotelian arc to a protagonist goes out into the world, faces conflicts, achieves, you know, results in various ways, has a crisis, recovers, you know, instead something that’s quieter than that. But I think that even no one lives their life meditating continuously, like even monks, have to do some stuff in between the meditation, right? So I think you can still tell a story about a life that is primarily presence, focused or experiential. And again, maybe you know some people who really don’t find narrative to be necessary. I’m open to that, but I do think most of us are going to need to tell at least a minimal story about how the various pieces of our lives hold together.

Ray Briggs
Helena, the structure that you’ve been criticizing is the one that I’ve heard a lot called the hero’s journey, which is a genre, and it’s a really popular genre, and I think you’ve given some really good reasons why I might not want to pick it as like the only available narrative for my life. I can think of other narratives that I might not want for my life. Maybe I don’t want to live out an academic satire, because that’s a little embarrassing for me. I kind of think that romantic comedy is actually a pretty like morally criticizable narrative, and I don’t like it. Do you think that there are better and worse genres to model your life, life after?

Helena de Bres
I mean, it depends how what you’re building into the idea of genre, right? There are certain very general shapes that you might point to, that may not be morally problematic, but nonetheless, there’s versions of them that are prevalent that are so the romantic comedy is, you know, super heteronormative structure. So you might think, oh, there’s something appealing about the more background, abstract features of that type of genre, but I don’t like the particular values that. And to be associated with it. I don’t know that I think of any genre as being inherently bad, but there’s certainly particular versions instances of those genres that you might worry about for ethical reasons.

Josh Landy
Yeah, you don’t have to write a bad romantic comedy, right? Yeats had this great line, being Irish, I have an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustains me through temporary periods of joy.

I’m not sure I’d want to adopt tragedy, but it’s really interesting to think about these different possibilities, right? But what about, let’s lean a bit more into the kind of question that James was asking. I mean, what about just setting aside the whole notion of narrative and focusing on these moments of awe, or focusing on just doing good, right? Not constructing some narrative for oneself, whether funding or creating that narrative, but just trying looking out into the world, seeing what needs to be done and trying to do it. This is something that the writer, Larissa MacFarquhar pointed out to me when I was trying to sell the virtues of narrative. She says, look at just do what needs to be done, right? What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with thinking about one’s character, create it, create turn yourself into a good person, and what needs some doing, good deeds, what needs to be done?

Helena de Bres
I mean, I’m a pluralist about values, so I think when you’re thinking about how to live, you want to think about how to live ethically. You want to think about how to live from the perspective of your own self interest or happiness, you might want to think about how to live esthetically, how to live a beautiful life. And I think another dimension is meaning. And I don’t think that you have to do all of those things. Maybe ethics you have to do. I think to lead a good life, you should lead a moral life. You should try to that. Maybe if you’re the kind of person who’s primarily focused on helping others or exhibiting certain kinds of virtue or producing value in the world. Maybe it doesn’t matter very much to you that you also live meaningfully. I think it’s kind of tricky, because one source of meaning often is the pursuit of ethically valuable projects. So saying, oh, you know, I don’t want to live meaningfully. I just want to do really important, good stuff in the world that sounds to me like a false dichotomy. Some more thinking to do there about what exactly the alternative is. I think so.

Ray Briggs
Helena, I want to think about another potential objection that somebody could give to the idea that narrative makes life meaningful. You might worry that not everybody has equal access to narrative. Like it’s great if you had the luxury of going to a liberal arts college and you’ve got a lot of leisure time to tell stories about yourself. But what if you’re working two jobs and you’re just sort of trying to attain a basic level of survival? Does that mean that your life is less meaningful? And isn’t that kind of elitist?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, this question comes up a lot in my class that I teach on meaning in life. So my students are at a liberal arts college. They tend to be relatively privileged, most of them, but they’re also very concerned about being too caught up in their own privilege. And they really don’t like the suggestion that some lives might be more meaningful than others, because they think it’s, yeah, it’s suggesting that, you know, some of us are living these noble, admirable, worthwhile existences, and other people you know aren’t. And that seems, it seems to be dissing those that you know at the lower end. And the thing I usually say to that is that it’s actually not a very progressive thing to say to someone you know, you’re doing fine, you’re destitute, you don’t have enough money, you’re oppressed in various ways. The government is messing up your life, but it’s fine. You’re living meaningfully. We’re not worried about that. I think really, the progressive thing to do is to say we want to make sure that everyone in our society has the material conditions needed to pursue relationships and projects that they care about. So that’s not saying that people who don’t have those resources don’t matter, or they’re worthless, or that, you know, they’re not important. It’s saying they are super important, and in order to, like, treat them decently as fellow members of our community, we need to make sure that they have what they need to pursue worthwhile lives, right?

Josh Landy
I mean, for me, it’s kind of a combo where I wouldn’t want, in any way to rule out the possibility for everyone to live a life that’s meaningful, while at the same time urging our, you know, the powers that be, to try to create a society in which it’s easier for people to live that life, to live the life they would really want to live if they were able to.

Helena de Bres
And I do think we do have to guard, as, you know, as philosophers, against this tendency to think that the most meaningful lives are ones that are involved. Turns out it’s a philosopher, as Plato suggested, you know, we’re at the top there. We should be reading a lot, and we should be living out, you know. So, yeah, I think, as I said earlier, I think there are many, many different ways to live a meaningful life, and some of them don’t look at all like the life of a privileged Liberal Arts professor, but they do require some resources. It is super hard to live meaningfully if you don’t have, you know, enough to eat.

Josh Landy
So what should society be doing? I mean, you know, some people think we’re living in a time when more people than ever are. Deprived of the ability to live a meaningful life. I worry a little bit about AI killing off a bunch of art related jobs, for example, whether or not we’re in a time of crisis, what do you what do you think that society should be doing to foster the conditions for people to live meaningful lives?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, that is a huge question. One part of it, at least, is that I think that we should recognize meaning as an important thing. You know, we live in a society that privileges, you know, instant gratification, entertainment, 24/7, you know, the most efficient way to get of getting to the most lucrative outcome. You know, all these goals that don’t feel very they feel superficial in many ways. So I think one thing we need to do is remind ourselves that being a human isn’t just a matter of accumulating a bunch of stuff. It’s also a matter of engaging in projects and relationships that really matter. So part of ensuring that our society continues to provide the conditions of meaning is that we need to make sure that we continue to emphasize its importance. And then on top of that, we need to make sure that everyone has the basic resources that they need to pursue things that matter to them and that are worthwhile.

Ray Briggs
Do you have a piece of advice for listeners of ours who are looking to lead more meaningful lives?

Helena de Bres
The account of meaning in life that appeals most to me is the one that Susan wolf offers. So she presents two alternatives, and she goes for a combo hybrid option. So one answer to the question, how do I have meaning in life is to say, just follow your dreams. I don’t know that that’s enough. As you know, if you’re the grass counter who’s spending his entire day pursuing his dream of counting grass, I’m not sure that you’re living a super meaningful life. The other option is to pursue something that’s larger than yourself, so try to find a goal that is intrinsically worthwhile. And she says, I don’t know that that’s quite right either, because it seems to matter that you care about it. It’s not it’s not easy to lead a meaningful life if you’re totally emotionally detached from the thing that you’re pursuing, even if it seems to be objectively worthwhile. So she says, We need two things. We need to smash those together. We need to pursue things that we care about that are also worthwhile. So meaning in life occurs when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. So my advice to someone looking to increase meaning in life is to think about the range of things that they love to do and then pick one that also seems to be objectively worthwhile. So if you can do both of those two things at once, then you’re a good way towards finding meaning in your own life.

Josh Landy
Well, that is fantastic advice, and what a wonderful way to end this conversation, Helena. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Helena de Bres
Thank you for having me. It was wonderful.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Helena De Bres, professor of philosophy at Wellesley College and author of “Philosophy in the First Person.” So, Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, Josh, I’m sort of torn between going out into the world and taking care of the people around me and spending a nice afternoon reading short stories, but I think those both seem like really great options.

Josh Landy
We can do a bit of both, right? And, you know, I think back to the listener Mark’s question about journaling, and which, you know, inevitably reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s lovely line, I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train. So, you know, can we do it all? I don’t know. We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our completely revamped website, philosophy talk.org. And while you’re there, you can also subscribe to our feed for free, or you can support us with a premium subscription and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
Now… a man who can tell his life story in one minute flat—it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shaoles
Ian Shoales… We just left a golden age of memoir. “Hillbilly Elegy” by JD Vance was leading that parade. I was going to read it, since Vance and I come from similar rural environments, and I wanted insight into my own story, which I hope will become a copyrighted feature. But then I saw the previews for the movie in which Glenn Close, playing Vance’s grandma, sports a crappy perm that made her a dead ringer with my Aunt Charlotte, long gone now, bless her heart, a bad perm is like a drug overdose, only it’s your hair, the whole thing. But a crimp in my appreciation. If Glenn Close had shaved her head and got a spider tattoo, would have been different. That would have just screamed methamphetamine to me, at least, and that’s what you want in this kind of story. Or, of course, all kinds of stories are big these days. Stories are important. In therapy, your personal growth, you keep journals, put yourself into your own story, own your life, or take somebody else’s story, embrace it through the miracle of hero worship, and next thing you know, you’re the next. Ronald Reagan. Popular stories these days are victim stories, people of color growing up with racism, people with health issues, learning to cope, weight loss strategies, immigrants dealing with a trauma, new country that hates them. Did I read that book anyway? The culture grew weary of itself, or conservatives grew weary of it. Made a lot of noise, which led to a backlash against woke, which is what Disney did to Star Wars. Also, Maga got rid of bei and made sure that white people got hiring priority. That might be a glorious story if White people were the very best at doing things. But even in the story to tell ourselves, that’s not true. Look at Macbeth. He’s not a model of resource management, the number one job of modern leadership. On the other hand, my father, an excellent white person, got a medal during World War Two for rearranging the filing system of the officer whom he was assigned. Changed the course of the war Well, changed. Course of logistics in his area of the supply chain of the war. Adi Murphy, of course, was the most decorated hero of World War Two because he killed a couple 100 Germans. My dad did his part. Our warriors and enforcers seem to be led by weenies right now, not to name names, incompetent at their jobs, there seem to be yelling at people who work for them. But okay, we have some real life stories, rags, rich, as you might say. Most recently, Barry Weiss, who went from being a discontented an opinion writer at The New York Times to maybe ruining CBS News, and she’s a lesbian. She’s in the good graces of the powers that be despite the ban on gays in the military or whatever. Conservatives have tried to make up their own stories from the cultural rubble left them by George Soros and Rue Paul, but they ended up with Jim Caviezel and other guys who want to be Walker, Texas Ranger when either too old, fat or they’ve gone off the deep end, like Steven Seagal. Woke may be problematic, but Maga remains a problem. Also. Trump’s promise to end woke may have gone over with Maga, but half of America kind of wants to be woke. Sure. Maybe we privately want to beat up blind people on the street because they’re in the way of fat, freezing guys as they wrestle tortilla wranglers on planes to Bolivia. That’s what Stephen Miller wants and hates anybody who says, Hey, bud, wait a sec. But what is his story? A Jewish Nazi? Oh, yeah, such things can be or maybe not. Trans are not women, bisexuals are not gay. Kamala Harris is fake black. Who gets to tell those stories? Free speech? I guess the murder of Charlie Kirk led to an hysterical insistence on him as a saintly figure, which doesn’t seem true to me. The great retribution system that is now our Justice Department has been accusing Trump’s enemies of the things for which he himself has been accused. Can’t find a lawyer. Can put it all together for him, but he has lauded the outfit with idiots so the system might work or will once the system has achieved true Idiocracy, I can’t let go. Barry Weiss, though, from opinionated ahead of CBS News. Why didn’t I get that job? I’m a dissatisfied minor league media presence. It’s because I’m not a lesbian, isn’t it? That’s my story. I’m sticking to it. I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2025.

Josh Landy
Our Executive Producer is James Kass. The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is the Director of Research and Advancement.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, Karen Ajlouni, Steve Choy, and Linda Fagan.

Josh Landy
Special thanks to Emma Lozma-Plum, Michael Aparicio, Tom Lockhart, Matt Porta, and John Lehman.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. Thank you for listening.

Ray Briggs
And thank you for thinking.

House, M.D.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Sex and the City
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Soul Men
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.