The Art of Insight

IntroductionOn Magic

with Shirley Wu

To live well is to cope with the ways in which life is hard while finding enough in one's life worth wanting.

—Kieran Setiya

One early morning in November of 2021, Alex, my youngest son, questioned me about the apparent meaninglessness of life. “What are we humans here for anyway?” he asked.

Alex has been a precocious old soul since he learned to talk. The week I was working on this preamble, he wrote an autobiographical poem that contains a haunting alliteration to define who he is: “I'm a lover of darkness, dragons, and dreams.”

At the time of our conversation we were both coming to terms with that darkness: healing, mustering our dragons for battle, and rebuilding our dreams. The pandemic years had been tough.

I remember myself thinking in silence for a moment. We were on our morning commute. Alex, sitting in the back of the car, was looking out at parents and kids passing by on their way to school. He was in a somber mood, and I guess he wasn't expecting a quick answer from Dad, who's usually so aloof and introverted.

But my answer poured out like a torrent. Life, I said, is indeed meaningless in itself. Meaning isn't a predetermined thing that exists beyond ourselves and our connections to others, or that we receive from higher powers. Meaning is something that we build by living through the myriad of little but immensely relevant events that cross our paths. It emerges from paying deep attention to the joys and beauty offered by ...