Why can a pleasant life still feel empty?
What it argues
Meaning requires both active engagement and objective worth: you must be gripped by something, and the thing must merit being gripped. Neither satisfaction alone nor worth alone is enough, which is why a pleasant life can feel empty and a worthy one can feel dead.
The probe
List your current projects. Mark each on engagement and on worth, nought to five. The quadrant with high worth and low engagement is your debt.
The source
Meaning in Life and Why It Matters — Susan Wolf, 2010. The link goes to the text or to a catalogue record for it, not to a summary. This one is the text itself.
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