This book is concerned with life’s “big questions”—indeed, the biggest ones: Do our lives have meaning? Is life worth living? How should we respond to the fact that we are going to die? Would it be better if we could live forever? May we, or should we, end our lives earlier—by suicide—than they would otherwise end?
It is difficult to imagine a thinking person who does not, at least one time or another, ponder questions of this kind. Responses to them vary, not only in detail but also in broad orientation. Some people provide ready and comforting answers, whether religious or secular; others find the questions to be insuperably perplexing; while yet others believe that the correct answers to the big questions are generally grim ones.
Although it is inadvisable to scare off one’s readers at the beginning of a book, I should disclose at the outset that my views fall mainly into the third category, which is almost certainly the least popular. I shall argue that the (right) answers to life’s big questions reveal that the human condition is a tragic predicament—one from which there is no escape. In a sentence: Life is bad, but so is death. Of course, life is not bad in every way. Neither is death bad in every way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful. Together, they constitute an existential vise—the wretched grip that enforces our predicament.
The details of the predicament will be presented in the six chapters that are in between this introduction and the conclusion. However, the broad contours can be summarized here.
First, life has no meaning from a cosmic perspective. Our lives may have meaning to one another (chapter 2), but they have no broader point or purpose (chapter 3). We are insignificant specks in a vast universe that is utterly indifferent to us. The limited meaning that our lives can have is ephemeral rather than enduring.
This is disturbing in itself, but it is even worse because, as I shall argue in chapter 4, our quality of life is as poor as it is. Some lives are obviously worse than others, but even the best lives, contrary to popular opinion, ultimately contain more bad than good. There are compelling explanations why this unfortunate feature of our condition is not widely recognized.
In response to life’s cosmic meaninglessness and its poor quality, some might be tempted to think that we must reject another popular opinion, namely that death is bad. If life is bad, then death, it might be argued, must be good—a welcome release from the horrors of life. However, as I argue in chapter 5, we should accept the dominant view that death is bad. The most famous challenges to this view are the Epicurean arguments that death is not bad for the person who dies. The Epicureans did not claim that death is good, but in rejecting their arguments and in endorsing the view that death is bad, I am led to the conclusion that rather than being a (cost-free) solution to the woes of life, death is the second jaw of our existential vise. Death does nothing to counter our cosmic meaninglessness and usually (though not always) detracts from the more limited meaning that is attainable. Moreover, while death does release us from suffering and, for that reason, is sometimes the least bad outcome, it is, even then, a serious bad. This is because the cost of the release is one’s annihilation.
