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The origin of life on Earth, explained

The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. What water, chemistry and temperature cycles fostered the chemical reactions that allowed life to emerge on our planet? Because life arose in the largely unknown surface conditions of Earth’s early history, answering these and other questions remains a challenge.

Several seminal experiments in this topic have been conducted at the University of Chicago, including the Miller-Urey experiment that suggested how the building blocks of life could form in a primordial soup.

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When did life on Earth begin?

Where did life on Earth begin?

What are the ingredients of life on earth, what are the major scientific theories for how life emerged, what is chirality and why is it biologically important, what research are uchicago scientists currently conducting on the origins of life, when did life on earth begin .

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Scientists think that by 4.3 billion years ago, Earth may have developed conditions suitable to support life. The oldest known fossils, however, are only 3.7 billion years old. During that 600 million-year window, life may have emerged repeatedly, only to be snuffed out by catastrophic collisions with asteroids and comets.

The details of those early events are not well preserved in Earth’s oldest rocks. Some hints come from the oldest zircons, highly durable minerals that formed in magma. Scientists have found traces of a form of carbon—an important element in living organisms— in one such 4.1 billion-year-old zircon . However, it does not provide enough evidence to prove life’s existence at that early date.

Two possibilities are in volcanically active hydrothermal environments on land and at sea.

Some microorganisms thrive in the scalding, highly acidic hot springs environments like those found today in Iceland, Norway and Yellowstone National Park. The same goes for deep-sea hydrothermal vents. These chimney-like vents form where seawater comes into contact with magma on the ocean floor, resulting in streams of superheated plumes. The microorganisms that live near such plumes have led some scientists to suggest them as the birthplaces of Earth’s first life forms.

Organic molecules may also have formed in certain types of clay minerals that could have offered favorable conditions for protection and preservation. This could have happened on Earth during its early history, or on comets and asteroids that later brought them to Earth in collisions. This would suggest that the same process could have seeded life on planets elsewhere in the universe.

The recipe consists of a steady energy source, organic compounds and water.

Sunlight provides the energy source at the surface, which drives photosynthesis. On the ocean floor, geothermal energy supplies the chemical nutrients that organisms need to live.

Also crucial are the elements important to life . For us, these are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. But there are several scientific mysteries about how these elements wound up together on Earth. For example, scientists would not expect a planet that formed so close to the sun to naturally incorporate carbon and nitrogen. These elements become solid only under very cold temperatures, such as exist in the outer solar system, not nearer to the sun where Earth is. Also, carbon, like gold, is rare at the Earth’s surface. That’s because carbon chemically bonds more often with iron than rock. Gold also bonds more often with metal, so most of it ends up in the Earth’s core. So, how did the small amounts found at the surface get there? Could a similar process also have unfolded on other planets?

The last ingredient is water. Water now covers about 70% of Earth’s surface, but how much sat on the surface 4 billion years ago? Like carbon and nitrogen, water is much more likely to become a part of solid objects that formed at a greater distance from the sun. To explain its presence on Earth, one theory proposes that a class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites formed far enough from the sun to have served as a water-delivery system.

There are several theories for how life came to be on Earth. These include:

Life emerged from a primordial soup

As a University of Chicago graduate student in 1952, Stanley Miller performed a famous experiment with Harold Urey, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. Their results explored the idea that life formed in a primordial soup.

Miller and Urey injected ammonia, methane and water vapor into an enclosed glass container to simulate what were then believed to be the conditions of Earth’s early atmosphere. Then they passed electrical sparks through the container to simulate lightning. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, soon formed. Miller and Urey realized that this process could have paved the way for the molecules needed to produce life.

Scientists now believe that Earth’s early atmosphere had a different chemical makeup from Miller and Urey’s recipe. Even so, the experiment gave rise to a new scientific field called prebiotic or abiotic chemistry, the chemistry that preceded the origin of life. This is the opposite of biogenesis, the idea that only a living organism can beget another living organism.

Seeded by comets or meteors

Some scientists think that some of the molecules important to life may be produced outside the Earth. Instead, they suggest that these ingredients came from meteorites or comets.

“A colleague once told me, ‘It’s a lot easier to build a house out of Legos when they’re falling from the sky,’” said Fred Ciesla, a geophysical sciences professor at UChicago. Ciesla and that colleague, Scott Sandford of the NASA Ames Research Center, published research showing that complex organic compounds were readily produced under conditions that likely prevailed in the early solar system when many meteorites formed.

Meteorites then might have served as the cosmic Mayflowers that transported molecular seeds to Earth. In 1969, the Murchison meteorite that fell in Australia contained dozens of different amino acids—the building blocks of life.

Comets may also have offered a ride to Earth-bound hitchhiking molecules, according to experimental results published in 2001 by a team of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By showing that amino acids could survive a fiery comet collision with Earth, the team bolstered the idea that life’s raw materials came from space.

In 2019, a team of researchers in France and Italy reported finding extraterrestrial organic material preserved in the 3.3 billion-year-old sediments of Barberton, South Africa. The team suggested micrometeorites as the material’s likely source. Further such evidence came in 2022 from samples of asteroid Ryugu returned to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. The count of amino acids found in the Ryugu samples now exceeds 20 different types .

In 1953, UChicago researchers published a landmark paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry that marked the discovery of the pro-chirality concept , which pervades modern chemistry and biology. The paper described an experiment showing that the chirality of molecules—or “handedness,” much the way the right and left hands differ from one another—drives all life processes. Without chirality, large biological molecules such as proteins would be unable to form structures that could be reproduced.

Today, research on the origin of life at UChicago is expanding. As scientists have been able to find more and more exoplanets—that is, planets around stars elsewhere in the galaxy—the question of what the essential ingredients for life are and how to look for signs of them has heated up.

Nobel laureate Jack Szostak joined the UChicago faculty as University Professor in Chemistry in 2022 and will lead the University’s new interdisciplinary Origins of Life Initiative to coordinate research efforts into the origin of life on Earth. Scientists from several departments of the Physical Sciences Division are joining the initiative, including specialists in chemistry, astronomy, geology and geophysics.

“Right now we are getting truly unprecedented amounts of data coming in: Missions like Hayabusa and OSIRIS-REx are bringing us pieces of asteroids, which helps us understand the conditions that form planets, and NASA’s new JWST telescope is taking astounding data on the solar system and the planets around us ,” said Prof. Ciesla. “I think we’re going to make huge progress on this question.”

Last updated Sept. 19, 2022.

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How we will discover the mysterious origins of life once and for all

Seventy years ago, three discoveries propelled our understanding of how life on Earth began. But has the biggest clue to life's origins been staring biologists in the face all along?

By Michael Marshall

30 October 2023

An illustration of the early surface of Earth with a volcano erupting in the background.

The constant changing landscape of Earth may be a vital part of the story of the origins of the first ecosystems.

MARK GARLICK/Spl/Alamy;

HOW did life on Earth begin? Until 70 years ago, generations of scientists had failed to throw much light on biology’s murky beginnings. But then came three crucial findings in quick succession.

In April 1953, the race to uncover the structure of DNA reached its climax. Geneticists soon realised that its double helix form could help explain how life replicates itself – a fundamental property thought to have appeared at or around the origin of life. Just three weeks later, news broke of the astonishing Miller-Urey experiment, which showed how a simple cocktail of chemicals could spontaneously generate amino acids, vital for building the molecules of life. Finally, in September 1953, we gained our first accurate estimate for the age of Earth, giving us a clearer idea of exactly how old life might be.

At that point, we seemed poised to finally understand life’s origins. Today, conclusive answers remain elusive. But the past few years have brought real signs of progress.

For instance, we have found that life’s ability to replicate is not wholly reliant on DNA. We also have a far better idea of the conditions on early Earth when life first appeared – and we are beginning to conduct experiments into how it emerged that are much more sophisticated than Miller-Urey.

A radical new theory rewrites the story of how life on Earth began

It has long been thought that the ingredients for life came together slowly, bit by bit. Now there is evidence it all happened at once in a chemical big bang

So, 70 years on from that incredible year of breakthroughs, how has our picture of life’s origins changed? And what remains to be figured out before we can satisfactorily answer biology’s ultimate question?

Definitions of life

“I think in the 50s we knew very little about life,” says …

Article amended on 3 November 2023

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The origin of life: what we know, what we can know and what we will never know

1 Department of Chemistry, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, 84105, Israel

Robert Pascal

2 Institut des Biomolécules Max Mousseron (UMR 5247, CNRS, Universités Montpellier 1 and Montpellier 2), Université Montpellier 2, Place E. Bataillon 34095, Montpellier Cedex 05, France

The origin of life (OOL) problem remains one of the more challenging scientific questions of all time. In this essay, we propose that following recent experimental and theoretical advances in systems chemistry, the underlying principle governing the emergence of life on the Earth can in its broadest sense be specified, and may be stated as follows: all stable (persistent) replicating systems will tend to evolve over time towards systems of greater stability. The stability kind referred to, however, is dynamic kinetic stability, and quite distinct from the traditional thermodynamic stability which conventionally dominates physical and chemical thinking. Significantly, that stability kind is generally found to be enhanced by increasing complexification, since added features in the replicating system that improve replication efficiency will be reproduced, thereby offering an explanation for the emergence of life's extraordinary complexity. On the basis of that simple principle, a fundamental reassessment of the underlying chemistry–biology relationship is possible, one with broad ramifications. In the context of the OOL question, this novel perspective can assist in clarifying central ahistoric aspects of abiogenesis, as opposed to the many historic aspects that have probably been forever lost in the mists of time.

2. Introduction

The origin of life (OOL) problem continues to be one of the most intriguing and challenging questions in science (for recent reviews on the OOL, see [ 1 – 6 ]). Its resolution would not only satisfy man's curiosity regarding this central existential issue, but would also shed light on a directly related topic—the precise nature of the physico-chemical relationship linking animate and inanimate matter. As one of us (A.P.) has noted previously [ 1 , 7 , 8 ], until the principles governing the process by which life on the Earth emerged can be uncovered, an understanding of life's essence, the basis for its striking characteristics, and outlining a feasible strategy for the synthesis of what could be classified as a simple life form will probably remain out of reach. In this essay, we will argue that recent developments in systems chemistry [ 9 – 11 ] have dramatically changed our ability to deal with the OOL problem by enabling the chemistry–biology connection to be clarified, at least in broad outline. The realization that abiogenesis—the chemical process by which simplest life emerged from inanimate beginnings—and biological evolution may actually be one single continuous physico-chemical process with an identifiable driving force opens up new avenues towards resolution of the OOL problem [ 1 , 7 , 12 , 13 ]. In fact that unification actually enables the basic elements of abiogenesis to be outlined, in much the same way that Darwin's biological theory outlined the basic mechanism for biological evolution. The goal of this commentary therefore is to discuss what aspects of the OOL problem can now be considered as resolved, what aspects require further study and what aspects may, in all probability, never be known.

3. Is the origin of life problem soluble in principle?

In addressing the OOL question, it first needs to be emphasized that the question has two distinct facets—historic and ahistoric, and the ability to uncover each of these two facets is quite different. Uncovering the historic facet is the more problematic one. Uncovering that facet would require specifying the original chemical system from which the process of abiogenesis began, together with the chemical pathway from that initiating system right through the extensive array of intermediate structures leading to simplest life. Regretfully, however, much of that historic information will probably never be known. Evolutionary processes are contingent, suggesting that any number of feasible pathways could have led from inanimate matter to earliest life, provided, of course, that those pathways were consistent with the underlying laws of physics and chemistry. The difficulty arises because historic events, once they have taken place, can only be revealed if their occurrence was recorded in some manner. Indeed, it is this historic facet of abiogenesis that makes the OOL problem so much more intractable than the parallel question of biological evolution. Biological evolution also has its historic and ahistoric facets. But whereas for biological evolution the historic record is to a degree accessible through palaeobiologic and phylogenetic studies, for the process of abiogenesis those methodologies have proved uninformative; there is no known geological record pertaining to prebiotic systems, and phylogenetic studies become less informative the further back one goes in attempting to trace out ancestral lineages. Phylogenetic studies presume the existence of organismal individuality and the genealogical (vertical) transfer of genetic information. However, the possibility that earliest life may have been communal [ 14 ] and dominated by horizontal gene transfer [ 15 – 17 ] suggests that information regarding the evolutionary stages that preceded the last universal common ancestor [ 18 ] would have to be considered highly speculative. Accordingly, the significance of such studies to the characterization of early life, let alone prebiotic systems, becomes highly uncertain.

The conclusion seems clear: speculation regarding the precise historic path from animate to inanimate—the identity of specific materials that were available at particular physical locations on the prebiotic Earth, together with the chemical structures of possible intermediate stages along the long road to life—may lead to propositions that are, though thought-provoking and of undeniable interest, effectively unfalsifiable, and therefore of limited scientific value.

Given that awkward reality, the focus of OOL research needs to remain on the ahistoric aspects—the principles that would explain the remarkable transformation of inanimate matter to simple life. There is good reason to think that the emergence of life on the Earth did not just involve a long string of random chemical events that fortuitously led to a simple living system. If life had emerged in such an arbitrary way, then the mechanistic question of abiogenesis would be fundamentally without explanation—a stupendously improbable chemical outcome whose likelihood of repetition would be virtually zero. However, the general view, now strongly supported by recent studies in systems chemistry, is that the process of abiogenesis was governed by underlying physico-chemical principles, and the central goal of OOL studies should therefore be to delineate those principles. Significantly, even if the underlying principles governing the transformation of inanimate to animate were to be revealed, that would still not mean that the precise historic path could be specified. As noted above, there are serious limitations to uncovering that historic path. The point however is that if the principles underlying life's emergence on the Earth could be more clearly delineated, then the mystery of abiogenesis would be dramatically transformed. No longer would the problem of abiogenesis be one of essence , but rather one of detail . The major mystery at the heart of the OOL debate would be broadly resolved and the central issue would effectively be replaced by a variety of chemical questions that deal with the particular mechanisms by which those underlying principles could have been expressed. Issues such as identifying historic transitions, the definition of life, would become to some extent arbitrary and ruled by scientific conventions, rather than by matters of principle.

4. The role of autocatalysis during abiogenesis

In the context of the OOL debate, there is one single and central historic fact on which there is broad agreement—that life's emergence was initiated by some autocatalytic chemical system. The two competing narratives within the OOL's long-standing debate—‘replication first’ or ‘metabolism first’—though differing in key elements, both build on that autocatalytic character (see [ 1 ] and references therein). The ‘replication first’ school of thought stresses the role of oligomeric compounds, which express that autocatalytic capability through their ability to self-replicate, an idea that can be traced back almost a century to the work of Troland [ 19 ], while the ‘metabolism first’ school of thought emphasizes the emergence of cyclic networks, as articulated by Kauffman [ 20 ] in the 1980s and reminiscent of the metabolic cycles found in all extant life. With respect to this issue, we have recently pointed out that these two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It could well be that both oligomeric entities and cyclic networks were crucial elements during life's emergence, thereby offering a novel perspective on this long-standing question [ 1 , 7 ]. However, once it is accepted that autocatalysis is a central element in the process of abiogenesis, it follows that the study of autocatalytic systems in general may help uncover the principles that govern their chemical behaviour, regardless of their chemical detail. Indeed, as we will now describe, the generally accepted supposition that life's origins emerged from some prebiotic autocatalytic process can be shown to lead to broad insights into the chemistry–biology connection and to the surprising revelation that the processes of abiogenesis and biological evolution are directly related to one another. Once established, that connection will enable the underlying principles that governed the emergence of life on the Earth to be uncovered without undue reliance on speculative historic suppositions regarding the precise nature of those prebiotic systems.

5. A previously unrecognized stability kind: dynamic kinetic stability

The realization that the autocatalytic character of the replication reaction can lead to exponential growth and is unsustainable has been long appreciated, going back at least to Thomas Malthus's classic treatise ‘An essay on the principle of population’, published in 1798 [ 21 ]. But the chemical consequences of that long-recognized powerful kinetic character, although described by Lotka already a century ago [ 22 ], do not seem to have been adequately appreciated. Recently, one of us (A.P.) has described a new stability kind in nature, seemingly overlooked in modern scientific thought, which we have termed dynamic kinetic stability ( DKS ) [ 1 , 7 , 23 , 24 ] . That stability kind, applicable solely to persistent replicating systems, whether chemical or biological, derives directly from the powerful kinetic character and the inherent unsustainability of the replication process. However, for the replication reaction to be kinetically unsustainable, the reverse reaction, in which the replicating system reverts back to its component building blocks, must be very slow when compared with the forward reaction; the replication reaction must be effectively irreversible. That condition, in turn, means the system must be maintained in a far-from-equilibrium state [ 25 ], and that continuing requirement is satisfied through the replicating system being open and continually fed activated component building blocks. Note that the above description is consistent with Prigogine's non-equilibrium thermodynamic approach, which stipulates that self-organized behaviour is associated with irreversible processes within the nonlinear regime [ 26 ]. From the above, it follows that the DKS term would not be applicable to an equilibrium mixture of some oligomeric replicating entity together with its interconverting component building blocks.

Given the above discussion, it is apparent that the DKS concept is quite distinct from the conventional stability kind in nature, thermodynamic stability. A key feature of DKS is that it characterizes populations of replicators , rather than the individual replicators which make up those populations. Individual replicating entities are inherently unstable , as reflected in their continual turnover, whereas a population of replicators can be remarkably stable, as expressed by the persistence of some replicating populations. Certain life forms (e.g. cyanobacteria) express this stability kind in dramatic fashion, having been able to maintain a conserved function and a readily recognized morphology over billions of years. Indeed, within the world of replicators, there is theoretical and empirical evidence for a selection rule that in some respects parallels the second law of thermodynamics in that less stable replicating systems tend to become transformed into more stable ones [ 1 , 8 ]. This stability kind, which is applicable to all persistent replicating systems, whether chemical or biological, is then able to place biological systems within a more general physico-chemical framework, thereby enabling a physico-chemical merging of replicating chemical systems with biological ones. Studies in systems chemistry in recent years have provided empirical support for such a view by demonstrating that chemical and biological replicators show remarkably similar reactivity patterns, thereby reaffirming the existence of a common underlying framework linking chemistry to biology [ 1 , 7 ].

6. Extending Darwinian theory to inanimate chemical systems

The recognition that a distinctly different stability kind, DKS, is applicable to both chemical and biological replicators, together with the fact that both replicator kinds express similar reaction characteristics, leads to the profound conclusion that the so-called chemical phase leading to simplest life and the biological phase appear to be one continuous physico-chemical process, as illustrated in scheme 1 .

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Unification of abiogenesis and biological evolution into a single continuous process governed by the drive toward greater DKS.

That revelation is valuable as it offers insights into abiogenesis from studies in biological evolution and, vice versa, it can provide new insights into the process of biological evolution from systems chemistry studies of simple replicating systems. A single continuous process necessarily means one set of governing principles, which in turn means that the two seemingly distinct processes of abiogenesis and evolution can be combined and addressed in concert. Significantly, that merging of chemistry and biology suggests that a general theory of evolution, expressed in physico-chemical terms rather than biological ones and applicable to both chemical and biological systems, may be formulated. Its essence may be expressed as follows: All stable ( persistent ) replicating systems will tend to evolve over time towards systems of greater DKS. As we have described in some detail in previous publications, there are both empirical and theoretical grounds for believing that oligomeric replicating systems which are less stable (less persistent) will tend to be transformed into more stable (more persistent) forms [ 1 , 7 , 8 , 24 ]. In fact that selection rule is just a particular application of the more general law of nature, almost axiomatic in character, that systems of all kinds tend from less stable to more stable. That law is inherent in the very definition of the term ‘stability’. So within the global selection rule in nature, normally articulated by the second law of thermodynamics, we can articulate a formulation specific to replicative systems, both chemical and biological— from DKS less stable to DKS more stable . A moment's thought then suggests that the Darwinian concept of ‘fitness maximization’ (i.e. less fit to more fit) is just a more specific expression of that general replicative rule as applied specifically to biological replicators. Whereas, in Darwinian terms, we say that living systems evolve to maximize fitness, the general theory is expressed in physico-chemical terms and stipulates that stable replicating systems, whether chemical or biological, tend to evolve so as to increase their stability, their DKS. Of course such a formulation implies that DKS is quantifiable. As we have previously discussed, quantification is possible, but only for related replicators competing for common resources, for example, a set of structurally related replicating molecules, or a set of genetically related bacterial life forms [ 1 , 7 ]. More generally, when assessing the DKS of replicating systems in a wider sense, one frequently must make do with qualitative or, at best, semi-quantitative measures.

Note that the general theory should not be considered as just one of changing terminology—‘DKS’ replacing ‘fitness’, ‘kinetic selection’ replacing ‘natural selection’. The physico-chemical description offers new insights as it allows the characterization of both the driving force and the mechanisms of evolution in more fundamental terms. The driving force is the drive of replicating systems towards greater stability, but the stability kind that is applicable in the replicative world. In fact that driving force can be thought of as a kind of second law analogue, though, as noted, the open character of replicating systems makes its quantification more difficult. And the mechanisms by which that drive is expressed can now be specified. These are complexification and selection , the former being largely overlooked in the traditional Darwinian view, while the latter is, of course, central to that view. A striking insight from this approach to abiogenesis follows directly: just as Darwinian theory broadly explained biological evolution, so an extended theory of evolution encompassing both chemical and biological replicators can be considered as broadly explaining abiogenesis. Thus, life on the Earth appears to have emerged through the spontaneous emergence of a simple (unidentified) replicating system, initially fragile, which complexified and evolved towards complex replicating systems exhibiting greater DKS. In fact, we would claim that in the very broadest of terms, the physico-chemical basis of abiogenesis can be considered explained.

But does that simplistic explanation for abiogenesis imply that the OOL problem can be considered resolved? Far from it. Let us now consider why.

7. What is still to be learned?

While Darwin's revolutionary theory changed our understanding of how biological systems relate to one another through the simple concept of natural selection, the Darwinian view has undergone considerable refinement and elaboration since its proposal over 150 years ago. First the genomic revolution, which provided Darwin's ideas with a molecular basis through the first decades of the twentieth century, transformed the subject and led to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, an amalgamation of classic Darwinism with population genetics and then with molecular genetics. But in more recent years, there is a growing realization that a molecular approach to understanding evolutionary dynamics is insufficient, that evolutionary biology's more fundamental challenge is to address the unresolved problem of complexity. How did biological complexity come about, and how can that complexity and its dynamic nature be understood? Our point is that Darwin's monumental thesis, with natural selection at its core, was just the beginning of a long process of refinement and elaboration, which has continued unabated to the present day.

Precisely the same process will need to operate with respect to the OOL problem. The DKS concept, simple in essence, does outline in the broadest terms the physico-chemical basis for abiogenesis. But that broad outline needs to be elaborated on through experimental investigation, so that the detailed mechanisms by which the DKS of simple chemical replicating systems could increase would be clarified. Already at this early stage, central elements of those mechanisms are becoming evident. Thus, there are preliminary indications that the process of abiogenesis was one of DKS enhancement through complexification [ 1 , 7 ]. More complex replicating systems, presenting a diversity of features and functions, appear to be able to replicate more effectively than simpler ones, and so are likely to be more stable in DKS terms (though this should not be interpreted to mean that any form of complexification will necessarily lead to enhanced DKS). The pertinent question is then: how does that process of complexification manifest itself? And this is where systems chemistry enters the scene [ 9 – 11 ]. By studying the dynamics of simple replicating molecular systems and the networks they establish, studies in system chemistry are beginning to offer insights into that process of replicative complexification. Following on from earlier work by Sievers & von Kiedrowski [ 27 ] and Lee et al . [ 28 ], more recent studies on RNA replicating systems by Lincoln & Joyce [ 29 ] and most recently by Vaidya et al . [ 30 ] suggest that network formation is crucial. Thus, Lincoln & Joyce [ 28 ] observed that a molecular network based on two cross-catalysing RNAs replicated rapidly and could be sustained indefinitely. By contrast, the most effective single molecule RNA replicator replicated slowly and was not sustainable. But in a more recent landmark experiment, Vaidya et al . [ 30 ] demonstrated that a cooperative cycle made up of three self-replicating RNAs could out-compete those same RNAs acting as individual replicators. The conclusion seems clear: molecular networks are more effective in establishing self-sustainable autocatalytic systems than single molecule replicators, just as was postulated by Eigen & Schuster [ 25 ] some 40 years ago.

Many key questions remain unanswered, however. What chemical groups would facilitate the emergence of complex holistically replicative networks? Are nucleic acids essential for the establishment of such networks, or could other chemical groups also express this capability? Is template binding the main mechanism by which molecular autocatalysis can take place, or can holistically autocatalytic sets be established through cycle closure without a reliance on template binding? How would the emergence of individual self-replicating entities within a larger holistically replicative network contribute to the stability of the network as a whole? How do kinetic and thermodynamic factors inter-relate in facilitating the maintenance of dynamically stable, but thermodynamically unstable, replicating systems [ 12 , 13 ]? As these questions suggest, our understanding of central issues remains rudimentary, and the road to discovery will probably be long and arduous. However, the key point of this essay has been to note that just as Darwin's simple concept of natural selection was able to provide a basis for an ongoing research programme in evolution, one that has been central to biological research for over 150 years, so the DKS concept may be able to offer a basis for ongoing studies in systems chemistry, one that may offer new insights into the rules governing evolutionary dynamics in simple replicating systems and, subsequently, for replicating systems of all kinds. Such a research programme, we believe, promises to further clarify the underlying relationship linking chemical and biological replicators.

In conclusion, it seems probably that we will never know the precise historic path by which life on the Earth emerged, but, very much in the Darwinian tradition, it seems we can now specify the essence of the ahistoric principles by which that process came about. Just as Darwin, in the very simplest of terms, pointed out how natural selection enabled simple life to evolve into complex life, so the recently proposed general theory of evolution [ 1 , 7 ] points out in simplest terms how simple, but fragile, replicating systems could have complexified into the intricate chemical systems of life. But, as discussed earlier, a detailed understanding of that process will have to wait until ongoing studies in systems chemistry reveal both the classes of chemical materials and the kinds of chemical pathways that simple replicating systems are able to follow in their drive towards greater complexity and replicative stability.

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The Meaning of Life

Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997). Consider, for instance, Aristotle on the human function, Aquinas on the beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good. Relatedly, think about Koheleth, the presumed author of the Biblical book Ecclesiastes, describing life as “futility” and akin to “the pursuit of wind,” Nietzsche on nihilism, as well as Schopenhauer when he remarks that whenever we reach a goal we have longed for we discover “how vain and empty it is.” While these concepts have some bearing on happiness and virtue (and their opposites), they are straightforwardly construed (roughly) as accounts of which highly ranked purposes a person ought to realize that would make her life significant (if any would).

Despite the venerable pedigree, it is only since the 1980s or so that a distinct field of the meaning of life has been established in Anglo-American-Australasian philosophy, on which this survey focuses, and it is only in the past 20 years that debate with real depth and intricacy has appeared. Two decades ago analytic reflection on life’s meaning was described as a “backwater” compared to that on well-being or good character, and it was possible to cite nearly all the literature in a given critical discussion of the field (Metz 2002). Neither is true any longer. Anglo-American-Australasian philosophy of life’s meaning has become vibrant, such that there is now way too much literature to be able to cite comprehensively in this survey. To obtain focus, it tends to discuss books, influential essays, and more recent works, and it leaves aside contributions from other philosophical traditions (such as the Continental or African) and from non-philosophical fields (e.g., psychology or literature). This survey’s central aim is to acquaint the reader with current analytic approaches to life’s meaning, sketching major debates and pointing out neglected topics that merit further consideration.

When the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people tend to pose one of three questions: “What are you talking about?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, and “Is life in fact meaningful?”. The literature on life's meaning composed by those working in the analytic tradition (on which this entry focuses) can be usefully organized according to which question it seeks to answer. This survey starts off with recent work that addresses the first, abstract (or “meta”) question regarding the sense of talk of “life’s meaning,” i.e., that aims to clarify what we have in mind when inquiring into the meaning of life (section 1). Afterward, it considers texts that provide answers to the more substantive question about the nature of meaningfulness (sections 2–3). There is in the making a sub-field of applied meaning that parallels applied ethics, in which meaningfulness is considered in the context of particular cases or specific themes. Examples include downshifting (Levy 2005), implementing genetic enhancements (Agar 2013), making achievements (Bradford 2015), getting an education (Schinkel et al. 2015), interacting with research participants (Olson 2016), automating labor (Danaher 2017), and creating children (Ferracioli 2018). In contrast, this survey focuses nearly exclusively on contemporary normative-theoretical approaches to life’s meanining, that is, attempts to capture in a single, general principle all the variegated conditions that could confer meaning on life. Finally, this survey examines fresh arguments for the nihilist view that the conditions necessary for a meaningful life do not obtain for any of us, i.e., that all our lives are meaningless (section 4).

1. The Meaning of “Meaning”

2.1. god-centered views, 2.2. soul-centered views, 3.1. subjectivism, 3.2. objectivism, 3.3. rejecting god and a soul, 4. nihilism, works cited, classic works, collections, books for the general reader, other internet resources, related entries.

One of the field's aims consists of the systematic attempt to identify what people (essentially or characteristically) have in mind when they think about the topic of life’s meaning. For many in the field, terms such as “importance” and “significance” are synonyms of “meaningfulness” and so are insufficiently revealing, but there are those who draw a distinction between meaningfulness and significance (Singer 1996, 112–18; Belliotti 2019, 145–50, 186). There is also debate about how the concept of a meaningless life relates to the ideas of a life that is absurd (Nagel 1970, 1986, 214–23; Feinberg 1980; Belliotti 2019), futile (Trisel 2002), and not worth living (Landau 2017, 12–15; Matheson 2017).

A useful way to begin to get clear about what thinking about life’s meaning involves is to specify the bearer. Which life does the inquirer have in mind? A standard distinction to draw is between the meaning “in” life, where a human person is what can exhibit meaning, and the meaning “of” life in a narrow sense, where the human species as a whole is what can be meaningful or not. There has also been a bit of recent consideration of whether animals or human infants can have meaning in their lives, with most rejecting that possibility (e.g., Wong 2008, 131, 147; Fischer 2019, 1–24), but a handful of others beginning to make a case for it (Purves and Delon 2018; Thomas 2018). Also under-explored is the issue of whether groups, such as a people or an organization, can be bearers of meaning, and, if so, under what conditions.

Most analytic philosophers have been interested in meaning in life, that is, in the meaningfulness that a person’s life could exhibit, with comparatively few these days addressing the meaning of life in the narrow sense. Even those who believe that God is or would be central to life’s meaning have lately addressed how an individual’s life might be meaningful in virtue of God more often than how the human race might be. Although some have argued that the meaningfulness of human life as such merits inquiry to no less a degree (if not more) than the meaning in a life (Seachris 2013; Tartaglia 2015; cf. Trisel 2016), a large majority of the field has instead been interested in whether their lives as individual persons (and the lives of those they care about) are meaningful and how they could become more so.

Focusing on meaning in life, it is quite common to maintain that it is conceptually something good for its own sake or, relatedly, something that provides a basic reason for action (on which see Visak 2017). There are a few who have recently suggested otherwise, maintaining that there can be neutral or even undesirable kinds of meaning in a person’s life (e.g., Mawson 2016, 90, 193; Thomas 2018, 291, 294). However, these are outliers, with most analytic philosophers, and presumably laypeople, instead wanting to know when an individual’s life exhibits a certain kind of final value (or non-instrumental reason for action).

Another claim about which there is substantial consensus is that meaningfulness is not all or nothing and instead comes in degrees, such that some periods of life are more meaningful than others and that some lives as a whole are more meaningful than others. Note that one can coherently hold the view that some people’s lives are less meaningful (or even in a certain sense less “important”) than others, or are even meaningless (unimportant), and still maintain that people have an equal standing from a moral point of view. Consider a consequentialist moral principle according to which each individual counts for one in virtue of having a capacity for a meaningful life, or a Kantian approach according to which all people have a dignity in virtue of their capacity for autonomous decision-making, where meaning is a function of the exercise of this capacity. For both moral outlooks, we could be required to help people with relatively meaningless lives.

Yet another relatively uncontroversial element of the concept of meaningfulness in respect of individual persons is that it is logically distinct from happiness or rightness (emphasized in Wolf 2010, 2016). First, to ask whether someone’s life is meaningful is not one and the same as asking whether her life is pleasant or she is subjectively well off. A life in an experience machine or virtual reality device would surely be a happy one, but very few take it to be a prima facie candidate for meaningfulness (Nozick 1974: 42–45). Indeed, a number would say that one’s life logically could become meaningful precisely by sacrificing one’s well-being, e.g., by helping others at the expense of one’s self-interest. Second, asking whether a person’s existence over time is meaningful is not identical to considering whether she has been morally upright; there are intuitively ways to enhance meaning that have nothing to do with right action or moral virtue, such as making a scientific discovery or becoming an excellent dancer. Now, one might argue that a life would be meaningless if, or even because, it were unhappy or immoral, but that would be to posit a synthetic, substantive relationship between the concepts, far from indicating that speaking of “meaningfulness” is analytically a matter of connoting ideas regarding happiness or rightness. The question of what (if anything) makes a person’s life meaningful is conceptually distinct from the questions of what makes a life happy or moral, although it could turn out that the best answer to the former question appeals to an answer to one of the latter questions.

Supposing, then, that talk of “meaning in life” connotes something good for its own sake that can come in degrees and that is not analytically equivalent to happiness or rightness, what else does it involve? What more can we say about this final value, by definition? Most contemporary analytic philosophers would say that the relevant value is absent from spending time in an experience machine (but see Goetz 2012 for a different view) or living akin to Sisyphus, the mythic figure doomed by the Greek gods to roll a stone up a hill for eternity (famously discussed by Albert Camus and Taylor 1970). In addition, many would say that the relevant value is typified by the classic triad of “the good, the true, and the beautiful” (or would be under certain conditions). These terms are not to be taken literally, but instead are rough catchwords for beneficent relationships (love, collegiality, morality), intellectual reflection (wisdom, education, discoveries), and creativity (particularly the arts, but also potentially things like humor or gardening).

Pressing further, is there something that the values of the good, the true, the beautiful, and any other logically possible sources of meaning involve? There is as yet no consensus in the field. One salient view is that the concept of meaning in life is a cluster or amalgam of overlapping ideas, such as fulfilling higher-order purposes, meriting substantial esteem or admiration, having a noteworthy impact, transcending one’s animal nature, making sense, or exhibiting a compelling life-story (Markus 2003; Thomson 2003; Metz 2013, 24–35; Seachris 2013, 3–4; Mawson 2016). However, there are philosophers who maintain that something much more monistic is true of the concept, so that (nearly) all thought about meaningfulness in a person’s life is essentially about a single property. Suggestions include being devoted to or in awe of qualitatively superior goods (Taylor 1989, 3–24), transcending one’s limits (Levy 2005), or making a contribution (Martela 2016).

Recently there has been something of an “interpretive turn” in the field, one instance of which is the strong view that meaning-talk is logically about whether and how a life is intelligible within a wider frame of reference (Goldman 2018, 116–29; Seachris 2019; Thomas 2019; cf. Repp 2018). According to this approach, inquiring into life’s meaning is nothing other than seeking out sense-making information, perhaps a narrative about life or an explanation of its source and destiny. This analysis has the advantage of promising to unify a wide array of uses of the term “meaning.” However, it has the disadvantages of being unable to capture the intuitions that meaning in life is essentially good for its own sake (Landau 2017, 12–15), that it is not logically contradictory to maintain that an ineffable condition is what confers meaning on life (as per Cooper 2003, 126–42; Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014), and that often human actions themselves (as distinct from an interpretation of them), such as rescuing a child from a burning building, are what bear meaning.

Some thinkers have suggested that a complete analysis of the concept of life’s meaning should include what has been called “anti-matter” (Metz 2002, 805–07, 2013, 63–65, 71–73) or “anti-meaning” (Campbell and Nyholm 2015; Egerstrom 2015), conditions that reduce the meaningfulness of a life. The thought is that meaning is well represented by a bipolar scale, where there is a dimension of not merely positive conditions, but also negative ones. Gratuitous cruelty or destructiveness are prima facie candidates for actions that not merely fail to add meaning, but also subtract from any meaning one’s life might have had.

Despite the ongoing debates about how to analyze the concept of life’s meaning (or articulate the definition of the phrase “meaning in life”), the field remains in a good position to make progress on the other key questions posed above, viz., of what would make a life meaningful and whether any lives are in fact meaningful. A certain amount of common ground is provided by the point that meaningfulness at least involves a gradient final value in a person’s life that is conceptually distinct from happiness and rightness, with exemplars of it potentially being the good, the true, and the beautiful. The rest of this discussion addresses philosophical attempts to capture the nature of this value theoretically and to ascertain whether it exists in at least some of our lives.

2. Supernaturalism

Most analytic philosophers writing on meaning in life have been trying to develop and evaluate theories, i.e., fundamental and general principles, that are meant to capture all the particular ways that a life could obtain meaning. As in moral philosophy, there are recognizable “anti-theorists,” i.e., those who maintain that there is too much pluralism among meaning conditions to be able to unify them in the form of a principle (e.g., Kekes 2000; Hosseini 2015). Arguably, though, the systematic search for unity is too nascent to be able to draw a firm conclusion about whether it is available.

The theories are standardly divided on a metaphysical basis, that is, in terms of which kinds of properties are held to constitute the meaning. Supernaturalist theories are views according to which a spiritual realm is central to meaning in life. Most Western philosophers have conceived of the spiritual in terms of God or a soul as commonly understood in the Abrahamic faiths (but see Mulgan 2015 for discussion of meaning in the context of a God uninterested in us). In contrast, naturalist theories are views that the physical world as known particularly well by the scientific method is central to life’s meaning.

There is logical space for a non-naturalist theory, according to which central to meaning is an abstract property that is neither spiritual nor physical. However, only scant attention has been paid to this possibility in the recent Anglo-American-Australasian literature (Audi 2005).

It is important to note that supernaturalism, a claim that God (or a soul) would confer meaning on a life, is logically distinct from theism, the claim that God (or a soul) exists. Although most who hold supernaturalism also hold theism, one could accept the former without the latter (as Camus more or less did), committing one to the view that life is meaningless or at least lacks substantial meaning. Similarly, while most naturalists are atheists, it is not contradictory to maintain that God exists but has nothing to do with meaning in life or perhaps even detracts from it. Although these combinations of positions are logically possible, some of them might be substantively implausible. The field could benefit from discussion of the comparative attractiveness of various combinations of evaluative claims about what would make life meaningful and metaphysical claims about whether spiritual conditions exist.

Over the past 15 years or so, two different types of supernaturalism have become distinguished on a regular basis (Metz 2019). That is true not only in the literature on life’s meaning, but also in that on the related pro-theism/anti-theism debate, about whether it would be desirable for God or a soul to exist (e.g., Kahane 2011; Kraay 2018; Lougheed 2020). On the one hand, there is extreme supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary for any meaning in life. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by this view, everyone’s life is meaningless. On the other hand, there is moderate supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary for a great or ultimate meaning in life, although not meaning in life as such. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by this view, everyone’s life could have some meaning, or even be meaningful, but no one’s life could exhibit the most desirable meaning. For a moderate supernaturalist, God or a soul would substantially enhance meaningfulness or be a major contributory condition for it.

There are a variety of ways that great or ultimate meaning has been described, sometimes quantitatively as “infinite” (Mawson 2016), qualitatively as “deeper” (Swinburne 2016), relationally as “unlimited” (Nozick 1981, 618–19; cf. Waghorn 2014), temporally as “eternal” (Cottingham 2016), and perspectivally as “from the point of view of the universe” (Benatar 2017). There has been no reflection as yet on the crucial question of how these distinctions might bear on each another, for instance, on whether some are more basic than others or some are more valuable than others.

Cross-cutting the extreme/moderate distinction is one between God-centered theories and soul-centered ones. According to the former, some kind of connection with God (understood to be a spiritual person who is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful and who is the ground of the physical universe) constitutes meaning in life, even if one lacks a soul (construed as an immortal, spiritual substance that contains one’s identity). In contrast, by the latter, having a soul and putting it into a certain state is what makes life meaningful, even if God does not exist. Many supernaturalists of course believe that God and a soul are jointly necessary for a (greatly) meaningful existence. However, the simpler view, that only one of them is necessary, is common, and sometimes arguments proffered for the complex view fail to support it any more than the simpler one.

The most influential God-based account of meaning in life has been the extreme view that one’s existence is significant if and only if one fulfills a purpose God has assigned. The familiar idea is that God has a plan for the universe and that one’s life is meaningful just to the degree that one helps God realize this plan, perhaps in a particular way that God wants one to do so. If a person failed to do what God intends her to do with her life (or if God does not even exist), then, on the current view, her life would be meaningless.

Thinkers differ over what it is about God’s purpose that might make it uniquely able to confer meaning on human lives, but the most influential argument has been that only God’s purpose could be the source of invariant moral rules (Davis 1987, 296, 304–05; Moreland 1987, 124–29; Craig 1994/2013, 161–67) or of objective values more generally (Cottingham 2005, 37–57), where a lack of such would render our lives nonsensical. According to this argument, lower goods such as animal pleasure or desire satisfaction could exist without God, but higher ones pertaining to meaning in life, particularly moral virtue, could not. However, critics point to many non-moral sources of meaning in life (e.g., Kekes 2000; Wolf 2010), with one arguing that a universal moral code is not necessary for meaning in life, even if, say, beneficent actions are (Ellin 1995, 327). In addition, there are a variety of naturalist and non-naturalist accounts of objective morality––and of value more generally––on offer these days, so that it is not clear that it must have a supernatural source in God’s will.

One recurrent objection to the idea that God’s purpose could make life meaningful is that if God had created us with a purpose in mind, then God would have degraded us and thereby undercut the possibility of us obtaining meaning from fulfilling the purpose. The objection harks back to Jean-Paul Sartre, but in the analytic literature it appears that Kurt Baier was the first to articulate it (1957/2000, 118–20; see also Murphy 1982, 14–15; Singer 1996, 29; Kahane 2011; Lougheed 2020, 121–41). Sometimes the concern is the threat of punishment God would make so that we do God’s bidding, while other times it is that the source of meaning would be constrictive and not up to us, and still other times it is that our dignity would be maligned simply by having been created with a certain end in mind (for some replies to such concerns, see Hanfling 1987, 45–46; Cottingham 2005, 37–57; Lougheed 2020, 111–21).

There is a different argument for an extreme God-based view that focuses less on God as purposive and more on God as infinite, unlimited, or ineffable, which Robert Nozick first articulated with care (Nozick 1981, 594–618; see also Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014). The core idea is that for a finite condition to be meaningful, it must obtain its meaning from another condition that has meaning. So, if one’s life is meaningful, it might be so in virtue of being married to a person, who is important. Being finite, the spouse must obtain his or her importance from elsewhere, perhaps from the sort of work he or she does. This work also must obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is meaningful, and so on. A regress on meaningful conditions is present, and the suggestion is that the regress can terminate only in something so all-encompassing that it need not (indeed, cannot) go beyond itself to obtain meaning from anything else. And that is God. The standard objection to this relational rationale is that a finite condition could be meaningful without obtaining its meaning from another meaningful condition. Perhaps it could be meaningful in itself, without being connected to something beyond it, or maybe it could obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is beautiful or otherwise valuable for its own sake but not meaningful (Nozick 1989, 167–68; Thomson 2003, 25–26, 48).

A serious concern for any extreme God-based view is the existence of apparent counterexamples. If we think of the stereotypical lives of Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa, and Pablo Picasso, they seem meaningful even if we suppose there is no all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good spiritual person who is the ground of the physical world (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 31–37, 49–50; Landau 2017). Even religiously inclined philosophers have found this hard to deny these days (Quinn 2000, 58; Audi 2005; Mawson 2016, 5; Williams 2020, 132–34).

Largely for that reason, contemporary supernaturalists have tended to opt for moderation, that is, to maintain that God would greatly enhance the meaning in our lives, even if some meaning would be possible in a world without God. One approach is to invoke the relational argument to show that God is necessary, not for any meaning whatsoever, but rather for an ultimate meaning. “Limited transcendence, the transcending of our limits so as to connect with a wider context of value which itself is limited, does give our lives meaning––but a limited one. We may thirst for more” (Nozick 1981, 618). Another angle is to appeal to playing a role in God’s plan, again to claim, not that it is essential for meaning as such, but rather for “a cosmic significance....intead of a significance very limited in time and space” (Swinburne 2016, 154; see also Quinn 2000; Cottingham 2016, 131). Another rationale is that by fulfilling God’s purpose, we would meaningfully please God, a perfect person, as well as be remembered favorably by God forever (Cottingham 2016, 135; Williams 2020, 21–22, 29, 101, 108). Still another argument is that only with God could the deepest desires of human nature be satisfied (e.g., Goetz 2012; Seachris 2013, 20; Cottingham 2016, 127, 136), even if more surface desires could be satisfied without God.

In reply to such rationales for a moderate supernaturalism, there has been the suggestion that it is precisely by virtue of being alone in the universe that our lives would be particularly significant; otherwise, God’s greatness would overshadow us (Kahane 2014). There has also been the response that, with the opportunity for greater meaning from God would also come that for greater anti-meaning, so that it is not clear that a world with God would offer a net gain in respect of meaning (Metz 2019, 34–35). For example, if pleasing God would greatly enhance meaning in our lives, then presumably displeasing God would greatly reduce it and to a comparable degree. In addition, there are arguments for extreme naturalism (or its “anti-theist” cousin) mentioned below (sub-section 3.3).

Notice that none of the above arguments for supernaturalism appeals to the prospect of eternal life (at least not explicitly). Arguments that do make such an appeal are soul-centered, holding that meaning in life mainly comes from having an immortal, spiritual substance that is contiguous with one’s body when it is alive and that will forever outlive its death. Some think of the afterlife in terms of one’s soul entering a transcendent, spiritual realm (Heaven), while others conceive of one’s soul getting reincarnated into another body on Earth. According to the extreme version, if one has a soul but fails to put it in the right state (or if one lacks a soul altogether), then one’s life is meaningless.

There are three prominent arguments for an extreme soul-based perspective. One argument, made famous by Leo Tolstoy, is the suggestion that for life to be meaningful something must be worth doing, that something is worth doing only if it will make a permanent difference to the world, and that making a permanent difference requires being immortal (see also Hanfling 1987, 22–24; Morris 1992, 26; Craig 1994). Critics most often appeal to counterexamples, suggesting for instance that it is surely worth your time and effort to help prevent people from suffering, even if you and they are mortal. Indeed, some have gone on the offensive and argued that helping people is worth the sacrifice only if and because they are mortal, for otherwise they could invariably be compensated in an afterlife (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 91–94). Another recent and interesting criticism is that the major motivations for the claim that nothing matters now if one day it will end are incoherent (Greene 2021).

A second argument for the view that life would be meaningless without a soul is that it is necessary for justice to be done, which, in turn, is necessary for a meaningful life. Life seems nonsensical when the wicked flourish and the righteous suffer, at least supposing there is no other world in which these injustices will be rectified, whether by God or a Karmic force. Something like this argument can be found in Ecclesiastes, and it continues to be defended (e.g., Davis 1987; Craig 1994). However, even granting that an afterlife is required for perfectly just outcomes, it is far from obvious that an eternal afterlife is necessary for them, and, then, there is the suggestion that some lives, such as Mandela’s, have been meaningful precisely in virtue of encountering injustice and fighting it.

A third argument for thinking that having a soul is essential for any meaning is that it is required to have the sort of free will without which our lives would be meaningless. Immanuel Kant is known for having maintained that if we were merely physical beings, subjected to the laws of nature like everything else in the material world, then we could not act for moral reasons and hence would be unimportant. More recently, one theologian has eloquently put the point in religious terms: “The moral spirit finds the meaning of life in choice. It finds it in that which proceeds from man and remains with him as his inner essence rather than in the accidents of circumstances turns of external fortune....(W)henever a human being rubs the lamp of his moral conscience, a Spirit does appear. This Spirit is God....It is in the ‘Thou must’ of God and man’s ‘I can’ that the divine image of God in human life is contained” (Swenson 1949/2000, 27–28). Notice that, even if moral norms did not spring from God’s commands, the logic of the argument entails that one’s life could be meaningful, so long as one had the inherent ability to make the morally correct choice in any situation. That, in turn, arguably requires something non-physical about one’s self, so as to be able to overcome whichever physical laws and forces one might confront. The standard objection to this reasoning is to advance a compatibilism about having a determined physical nature and being able to act for moral reasons (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009, 145–77). It is also worth wondering whether, if one had to have a spiritual essence in order to make free choices, it would have to be one that never perished.

Like God-centered theorists, many soul-centered theorists these days advance a moderate view, accepting that some meaning in life would be possible without immortality, but arguing that a much greater meaning would be possible with it. Granting that Einstein, Mandela, and Picasso had somewhat meaningful lives despite not having survived the deaths of their bodies (as per, e.g., Trisel 2004; Wolf 2015, 89–140; Landau 2017), there remains a powerful thought: more is better. If a finite life with the good, the true, and the beautiful has meaning in it to some degree, then surely it would have all the more meaning if it exhibited such higher values––including a relationship with God––for an eternity (Cottingham 2016, 132–35; Mawson 2016, 2019, 52–53; Williams 2020, 112–34; cf. Benatar 2017, 35–63). One objection to this reasoning is that the infinity of meaning that would be possible with a soul would be “too big,” rendering it difficult for the moderate supernaturalist to make sense of the intution that a finite life such as Einstein’s can indeed count as meaningful by comparison (Metz 2019, 30–31; cf. Mawson 2019, 53–54). More common, though, is the objection that an eternal life would include anti-meaning of various kinds, such as boredom and repetition, discussed below in the context of extreme naturalism (sub-section 3.3).

3. Naturalism

Recall that naturalism is the view that a physical life is central to life’s meaning, that even if there is no spiritual realm, a substantially meaningful life is possible. Like supernaturalism, contemporary naturalism admits of two distinguishable variants, moderate and extreme (Metz 2019). The moderate version is that, while a genuinely meaningful life could be had in a purely physical universe as known well by science, a somewhat more meaningful life would be possible if a spiritual realm also existed. God or a soul could enhance meaning in life, although they would not be major contributors. The extreme version of naturalism is the view that it would be better in respect of life’s meaning if there were no spiritual realm. From this perspective, God or a soul would be anti-matter, i.e., would detract from the meaning available to us, making a purely physical world (even if not this particular one) preferable.

Cross-cutting the moderate/extreme distinction is that between subjectivism and objectivism, which are theoretical accounts of the nature of meaningfulness insofar as it is physical. They differ in terms of the extent to which the human mind constitutes meaning and whether there are conditions of meaning that are invariant among human beings. Subjectivists believe that there are no invariant standards of meaning because meaning is relative to the subject, i.e., depends on an individual’s pro-attitudes such as her particular desires or ends, which are not shared by everyone. Roughly, something is meaningful for a person if she strongly wants it or intends to seek it out and she gets it. Objectivists maintain, in contrast, that there are some invariant standards for meaning because meaning is at least partly mind-independent, i.e., obtains not merely in virtue of being the object of anyone’s mental states. Here, something is meaningful (partially) because of its intrinsic nature, in the sense of being independent of whether it is wanted or intended; meaning is instead (to some extent) the sort of thing that merits these reactions.

There is logical space for an orthogonal view, according to which there are invariant standards of meaningfulness constituted by what all human beings would converge on from a certain standpoint. However, it has not been much of a player in the field (Darwall 1983, 164–66).

According to this version of naturalism, meaning in life varies from person to person, depending on each one’s variable pro-attitudes. Common instances are views that one’s life is more meaningful, the more one gets what one happens to want strongly, achieves one’s highly ranked goals, or does what one believes to be really important (Trisel 2002; Hooker 2008). One influential subjectivist has recently maintained that the relevant mental state is caring or loving, so that life is meaningful just to the extent that one cares about or loves something (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94, 2004). Another recent proposal is that meaningfulness consists of “an active engagement and affirmation that vivifies the person who has freely created or accepted and now promotes and nurtures the projects of her highest concern” (Belliotti 2019, 183).

Subjectivism was dominant in the middle of the twentieth century, when positivism, noncognitivism, existentialism, and Humeanism were influential (Ayer 1947; Hare 1957; Barnes 1967; Taylor 1970; Williams 1976). However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, inference to the best explanation and reflective equilibrium became accepted forms of normative argumentation and were frequently used to defend claims about the existence and nature of objective value (or of “external reasons,” ones obtaining independently of one’s extant attitudes). As a result, subjectivism about meaning lost its dominance. Those who continue to hold subjectivism often remain suspicious of attempts to justify beliefs about objective value (e.g., Trisel 2002, 73, 79, 2004, 378–79; Frankfurt 2004, 47–48, 55–57; Wong 2008, 138–39; Evers 2017, 32, 36; Svensson 2017, 54). Theorists are moved to accept subjectivism typically because the alternatives are unpalatable; they are reasonably sure that meaning in life obtains for some people, but do not see how it could be grounded on something independent of the mind, whether it be the natural or the supernatural (or the non-natural). In contrast to these possibilities, it appears straightforward to account for what is meaningful in terms of what people find meaningful or what people want out of their lives. Wide-ranging meta-ethical debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language are necessary to address this rationale for subjectivism.

There is a cluster of other, more circumscribed arguments for subjectivism, according to which this theory best explains certain intuitive features of meaning in life. For one, subjectivism seems plausible since it is reasonable to think that a meaningful life is an authentic one (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94). If a person’s life is significant insofar as she is true to herself or her deepest nature, then we have some reason to believe that meaning simply is a function of those matters for which the person cares. For another, it is uncontroversial that often meaning comes from losing oneself, i.e., in becoming absorbed in an activity or experience, as opposed to being bored by it or finding it frustrating (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94; Belliotti 2019, 162–70). Work that concentrates the mind and relationships that are engrossing seem central to meaning and to be so because of the subjective elements involved. For a third, meaning is often taken to be something that makes life worth continuing for a specific person, i.e., that gives her a reason to get out of bed in the morning, which subjectivism is thought to account for best (Williams 1976; Svensson 2017; Calhoun 2018).

Critics maintain that these arguments are vulnerable to a common objection: they neglect the role of objective value (or an external reason) in realizing oneself, losing oneself, and having a reason to live (Taylor 1989, 1992; Wolf 2010, 2015, 89–140). One is not really being true to oneself, losing oneself in a meaningful way, or having a genuine reason to live insofar as one, say, successfully maintains 3,732 hairs on one’s head (Taylor 1992, 36), cultivates one’s prowess at long-distance spitting (Wolf 2010, 104), collects a big ball of string (Wolf 2010, 104), or, well, eats one’s own excrement (Wielenberg 2005, 22). The counterexamples suggest that subjective conditions are insufficient to ground meaning in life; there seem to be certain actions, relationships, and states that are objectively valuable (but see Evers 2017, 30–32) and toward which one’s pro-attitudes ought to be oriented, if meaning is to accrue.

So say objectivists, but subjectivists feel the pull of the point and usually seek to avoid the counterexamples, lest they have to bite the bullet by accepting the meaningfulness of maintaining 3,732 hairs on one’s head and all the rest (for some who do, see Svensson 2017, 54–55; Belliotti 2019, 181–83). One important strategy is to suggest that subjectivists can avoid the counterexamples by appealing to the right sort of pro-attitude. Instead of whatever an individual happens to want, perhaps the relevant mental state is an emotional-perceptual one of seeing-as (Alexis 2011; cf. Hosseini 2015, 47–66), a “categorical” desire, that is, an intrinsic desire constitutive of one’s identity that one takes to make life worth continuing (Svensson 2017), or a judgment that one has a good reason to value something highly for its own sake (Calhoun 2018). Even here, though, objectivists will argue that it might “appear that whatever the will chooses to treat as a good reason to engage itself is, for the will, a good reason. But the will itself....craves objective reasons; and often it could not go forward unless it thought it had them” (Wiggins 1988, 136). And without any appeal to objectivity, it is perhaps likely that counterexamples would resurface.

Another subjectivist strategy by which to deal with the counterexamples is the attempt to ground meaningfulness, not on the pro-attitudes of an individual valuer, but on those of a group (Darwall 1983, 164–66; Brogaard and Smith 2005; Wong 2008). Does such an intersubjective move avoid (more of) the counterexamples? If so, does it do so more plausibly than an objective theory?

Objective naturalists believe that meaning in life is constituted at least in part by something physical beyond merely the fact that it is the object of a pro-attitude. Obtaining the object of some emotion, desire, or judgment is not sufficient for meaningfulness, on this view. Instead, there are certain conditions of the material world that could confer meaning on anyone’s life, not merely because they are viewed as meaningful, wanted for their own sake, or believed to be choiceworthy, but instead (at least partially) because they are inherently worthwhile or valuable in themselves.

Morality (the good), enquiry (the true), and creativity (the beautiful) are widely held instances of activities that confer meaning on life, while trimming toenails and eating snow––along with the counterexamples to subjectivism above––are not. Objectivism is widely thought to be a powerful general explanation of these particular judgments: the former are meaningful not merely because some agent (whether it is an individual, her society, or even God) cares about them or judges them to be worth doing, while the latter simply lack significance and cannot obtain it even if some agent does care about them or judge them to be worth doing. From an objective perspective, it is possible for an individual to care about the wrong thing or to be mistaken that something is worthwhile, and not merely because of something she cares about all the more or judges to be still more choiceworthy. Of course, meta-ethical debates about the existence and nature of value are again relevant to appraising this rationale.

Some objectivists think that being the object of a person’s mental states plays no constitutive role in making that person’s life meaningful, although they of course contend that it often plays an instrumental role––liking a certain activity, after all, is likely to motivate one to do it. Relatively few objectivists are “pure” in that way, although consequentialists do stand out as clear instances (e.g., Singer 1995; Smuts 2018, 75–99). Most objectivists instead try to account for the above intuitions driving subjectivism by holding that a life is more meaningful, not merely because of objective factors, but also in part because of propositional attitudes such as cognition, conation, and emotion. Particularly influential has been Susan Wolf’s hybrid view, captured by this pithy slogan: “Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (Wolf 2015, 112; see also Kekes 1986, 2000; Wiggins 1988; Raz 2001, 10–40; Mintoff 2008; Wolf 2010, 2016; Fischer 2019, 9–23; Belshaw 2021, 160–81). This theory implies that no meaning accrues to one’s life if one believes in, is satisfied by, or cares about a project that is not truly worthwhile, or if one takes up a truly worthwhile project but fails to judge it important, be satisfied by it, or care about it. A related approach is that, while subjective attraction is not necessary for meaning, it could enhance it (e.g., Audi 2005, 344; Metz 2013, 183–84, 196–98, 220–25). For instance, a stereotypical Mother Teresa who is bored by and alienated from her substantial charity work might have a somewhat significant existence because of it, even if she would have an even more significant existence if she felt pride in it or identified with it.

There have been several attempts to capture theoretically what all objectively attractive, inherently worthwhile, or finally valuable conditions have in common insofar as they bear on meaning in a person’s life. Over the past few decades, one encounters the proposals that objectively meaningful conditions are just those that involve: positively connecting with organic unity beyond oneself (Nozick 1981, 594–619); being creative (Taylor 1987; Matheson 2018); living an emotional life (Solomon 1993; cf. Williams 2020, 56–78); promoting good consequences, such as improving the quality of life of oneself and others (Singer 1995; Audi 2005; Smuts 2018, 75–99); exercising or fostering rational nature in exceptional ways (Smith 1997, 179–221; Gewirth 1998, 177–82; Metz 2013, 222–36); progressing toward ends that can never be fully realized because one’s knowledge of them changes as one approaches them (Levy 2005); realizing goals that are transcendent for being long-lasting in duration and broad in scope (Mintoff 2008); living virtuously (May 2015, 61–138; McPherson 2020); and loving what is worth loving (Wolf 2016). There is as yet no convergence in the field on one, or even a small cluster, of these accounts.

One feature of a large majority of the above naturalist theories is that they are aggregative or additive, objectionably treating a life as a mere “container” of bits of life that are meaningful considered in isolation from other bits (Brännmark 2003, 330). It has become increasingly common for philosophers of life’s meaning, especially objectivists, to hold that life as a whole, or at least long stretches of it, can substantially affect its meaningfulness beyond the amount of meaning (if any) in its parts.

For instance, a life that has lots of beneficence and otherwise intuitively meaning-conferring conditions but that is also extremely repetitive (à la the movie Groundhog Day ) is less than maximally meaningful (Taylor 1987; Blumenfeld 2009). Furthermore, a life that not only avoids repetition but also ends with a substantial amount of meaningful (or otherwise desirable) parts seems to have more meaning overall than one that has the same amount of meaningful (desirable) parts but ends with few or none of them (Kamm 2013, 18–22; Dorsey 2015). Still more, a life in which its meaningless (or otherwise undesirable parts) cause its meaningful (desirable) parts to come about through a process of personal growth seems meaningful in virtue of this redemptive pattern, “good life-story,” or narrative self-expression (Taylor 1989, 48–51; Wong 2008; Fischer 2009, 145–77; Kauppinen 2012; May 2015, 61–138; Velleman 2015, 141–73). These three cases suggest that meaning can inhere in life as a whole, that is, in the relationships between its parts, and not merely in the parts considered in isolation. However, some would maintain that it is, strictly speaking, the story that is or could be told of a life that matters, not so much the life-story qua relations between events themselves (de Bres 2018).

There are pure or extreme versions of holism present in the literature, according to which the only possible bearer of meaning in life is a person’s life as a whole, and not any isolated activities, relationships, or states (Taylor 1989, 48–51; Tabensky 2003; Levinson 2004). A salient argument for this position is that judgments of the meaningfulness of a part of someone’s life are merely provisional, open to revision upon considering how they fit into a wider perspective. So, for example, it would initially appear that taking an ax away from a madman and thereby protecting innocent parties confers some meaning on one’s life, but one might well revise that judgment upon learning that the intention behind it was merely to steal an ax, not to save lives, or that the madman then took out a machine gun, causing much more harm than his ax would have. It is worth considering how far this sort of case is generalizable, and, if it can be to a substantial extent, whether that provides strong evidence that only life as a whole can exhibit meaningfulness.

Perhaps most objectivists would, at least upon reflection, accept that both the parts of a life and the whole-life relationships among the parts can exhibit meaning. Supposing there are two bearers of meaning in a life, important questions arise. One is whether a certain narrative can be meaningful even if its parts are not, while a second is whether the meaningfulness of a part increases if it is an aspect of a meaningful whole (on which see Brännmark 2003), and a third is whether there is anything revealing to say about how to make tradeoffs between the parts and whole in cases where one must choose between them (Blumenfeld 2009 appears to assign lexical priority to the whole).

Naturalists until recently had been largely concerned to show that meaning in life is possible without God or a soul; they have not spent much time considering how such spiritual conditions might enhance meaning, but have, in moderate fashion, tended to leave that possibility open (an exception is Hooker 2008). Lately, however, an extreme form of naturalism has arisen, according to which our lives would probably, if not unavoidably, have less meaning in a world with God or a soul than in one without. Although such an approach was voiced early on by Baier (1957), it is really in the past decade or so that this “anti-theist” position has become widely and intricately discussed.

One rationale, mentioned above as an objection to the view that God’s purpose constitutes meaning in life, has also been deployed to argue that the existence of God as such would necessarily reduce meaning, that is, would consist of anti-matter. It is the idea that master/servant and parent/child analogies so prominent in the monotheist religious traditions reveal something about our status in a world where there is a qualitatively higher being who has created us with certain ends in mind: our independence or dignity as adult persons would be violated (e.g., Baier 1957/2000, 118–20; Kahane 2011, 681–85; Lougheed 2020, 121–41). One interesting objection to this reasoning has been to accept that God’s existence is necessarily incompatible with the sort of meaning that would come (roughly stated) from being one’s own boss, but to argue that God would also make greater sorts of meaning available, offering a net gain to us (Mawson 2016, 110–58).

Another salient argument for thinking that God would detract from meaning in life appeals to the value of privacy (Kahane 2011, 681–85; Lougheed 2020, 55–110). God’s omniscience would unavoidably make it impossible for us to control another person’s access to the most intimate details about ourselves, which, for some, amounts to a less meaningful life than one with such control. Beyond questioning the value of our privacy in relation to God, one thought-provoking criticism has been to suggest that, if a lack of privacy really would substantially reduce meaning in our lives, then God, qua morally perfect person, would simply avoid knowing everything about us (Tooley 2018). Lacking complete knowledge of our mental states would be compatible with describing God as “omniscient,” so the criticism goes, insofar as that is plausibly understood as having as much knowledge as is morally permissible.

Turn, now, to major arguments for thinking that having a soul would reduce life’s meaning, so that if one wants a maximally meaningful life, one should prefer a purely physical world, or at least one in which people are mortal. First and foremost, there has been the argument that an immortal life could not avoid becoming boring (Williams 1973), rendering life pointless according to many subjective and objective theories. The literature on this topic has become enormous, with the central reply being that immortality need not get boring (for more recent discussions, see Fischer 2009, 79–101, 2019, 117–42; Mawson 2019, 51–52; Williams 2020, 30–41, 123–29; Belshaw 2021, 182–97). However, it might also be worth questioning whether boredom is sufficient for meaninglessness. Suppose, for instance, that one volunteers to be bored so that many others will not be bored; perhaps this would be a meaningful sacrifice to make. Being bored for an eternity would not be blissful or even satisfying, to be sure, but if it served the function of preventing others from being bored for an eternity, would it be meaningful (at least to some degree)? If, as is commonly held, sacrificing one’s life could be meaningful, why not also sacrificing one’s liveliness?

Another reason given to reject eternal life is that it would become repetitive, which would substantially drain it of meaning (Scarre 2007, 54–55; May 2009, 46–47, 64–65, 71; Smuts 2011, 142–44; cf. Blumenfeld 2009). If, as it appears, there are only a finite number of actions one could perform, relationships one could have, and states one could be in during an eternity, one would have to end up doing the same things again. Even though one’s activities might be more valuable than rolling a stone up a hill forever à la Sisyphus, the prospect of doing them over and over again forever is disheartening for many. To be sure, one might not remember having done them before and hence could avoid boredom, but for some philosophers that would make it all the worse, akin to having dementia and forgetting that one has told the same stories. Others, however, still find meaning in such a life (e.g., Belshaw 2021, 197, 205n41).

A third meaning-based argument against immortality invokes considerations of narrative. If the pattern of one’s life as a whole substantially matters, and if a proper pattern would include a beginning, a middle, and an end, it appears that a life that never ends would lack the relevant narrative structure. “Because it would drag on endlessly, it would, sooner or later, just be a string of events lacking all form....With immortality, the novel never ends....How meaningful can such a novel be?” (May 2009, 68, 72; see also Scarre 2007, 58–60). Notice that this objection is distinct from considerations of boredom and repetition (which concern novelty ); even if one were stimulated and active, and even if one found a way not to repeat one’s life in the course of eternity, an immortal life would appear to lack shape. In reply, some reject the idea that a meaningful life must be akin to a novel, and intead opt for narrativity in the form of something like a string of short stories that build on each other (Fischer 2009, 145–77, 2019, 101–16). Others, though, have sought to show that eternity could still be novel-like, deeming the sort of ending that matters to be a function of what the content is and how it relates to the content that came before (e.g., Seachris 2011; Williams 2020, 112–19).

There have been additional objections to immortality as undercutting meaningfulness, but they are prima facie less powerful than the previous three in that, if sound, they arguably show that an eternal life would have a cost, but probably not one that would utterly occlude the prospect of meaning in it. For example, there have been the suggestions that eternal lives would lack a sense of preciousness and urgency (Nussbaum 1989, 339; Kass 2002, 266–67), could not exemplify virtues such as courageously risking one’s life for others (Kass 2002, 267–68; Wielenberg 2005, 91–94), and could not obtain meaning from sustaining or saving others’ lives (Nussbaum 1989, 338; Wielenberg 2005, 91–94). Note that at least the first two rationales turn substantially on the belief in immortality, not quite immortality itself: if one were immortal but forgot that one is or did not know that at all, then one could appreciate life and obtain much of the virtue of courage (and, conversely, if one were not immortal, but thought that one is, then, by the logic of these arguments, one would fail to appreciate limits and be unable to exemplify courage).

The previous two sections addressed theoretical accounts of what would confer meaning on a human person’s life. Although these theories do not imply that some people’s lives are in fact meaningful, that has been the presumption of a very large majority of those who have advanced them. Much of the procedure has been to suppose that many lives have had meaning in them and then to consider in virtue of what they have or otherwise could. However, there are nihilist (or pessimist) perspectives that question this supposition. According to nihilism (pessimism), what would make a life meaningful in principle cannot obtain for any of us.

One straightforward rationale for nihilism is the combination of extreme supernaturalism about what makes life meaningful and atheism about whether a spiritual realm exists. If you believe that God or a soul is necessary for meaning in life, and if you believe that neither is real, then you are committed to nihilism, to the denial that life can have any meaning. Athough this rationale for nihilism was prominent in the modern era (and was more or less Camus’ position), it has been on the wane in analytic philosophical circles, as extreme supernaturalism has been eclipsed by the moderate variety.

The most common rationales for nihilism these days do not appeal to supernaturalism, or at least not explicitly. One cluster of ideas appeals to what meta-ethicists call “error theory,” the view that evaluative claims (in this case about meaning in life, or about morality qua necessary for meaning) characteristically posit objectively real or universally justified values, but that such values do not exist. According to one version, value judgments often analytically include a claim to objectivity but there is no reason to think that objective values exist, as they “would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe” (Mackie 1977/1990, 38). According to a second version, life would be meaningless if there were no set of moral standards that could be fully justified to all rational enquirers, but it so happens that such standards cannot exist for persons who can always reasonably question a given claim (Murphy 1982, 12–17). According to a third, we hold certain beliefs about the objectivity and universality of morality and related values such as meaning because they were evolutionarily advantageous to our ancestors, not because they are true. Humans have been “deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a distinterested, objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey” (Ruse and Wilson 1986, 179; cf. Street 2015). One must draw on the intricate work in meta-ethics that has been underway for the past several decades in order to appraise these arguments.

In contrast to error-theoretic arguments for nihilism, there are rationales for it accepting that objective values exist but denying that our lives can ever exhibit or promote them so as to obtain meaning. One version of this approach maintains that, for our lives to matter, we must be in a position to add objective value to the world, which we are not since the objective value of the world is already infinite (Smith 2003). The key premises for this view are that every bit of space-time (or at least the stars in the physical universe) have some positive value, that these values can be added up, and that space is infinite. If the physical world at present contains an infinite degree of value, nothing we do can make a difference in terms of meaning, for infinity plus any amount of value remains infinity. One way to question this argument, beyond doubting the value of space-time or stars, is to suggest that, even if one cannot add to the value of the universe, meaning plausibly comes from being the source of certain values.

A second rationale for nihilism that accepts the existence of objective value is David Benatar’s (2006, 18–59) intriguing “asymmetry argument” for anti-natalism, the view that it is immoral to bring new people into existence because doing so would always be on balance bad for them. For Benatar, the bads of existing (e.g., pains) are real disadvantages relative to not existing, while the goods of existing (pleasures) are not real advantages relative to not existing, since there is in the latter state no one to be deprived of them. If indeed the state of not existing is no worse than that of experiencing the benefits of existence, then, since existing invariably brings harm in its wake, it follows that existing is always worse compared to not existing. Although this argument is illustrated with experiential goods and bads, it seems generalizable to non-experiential ones, including meaning in life and anti-matter. The literature on this argument has become large (for a recent collection, see Hauskeller and Hallich 2022).

Benatar (2006, 60–92, 2017, 35–63) has advanced an additional argument for nihilism, one that appeals to Thomas Nagel’s (1986, 208–32) widely discussed analysis of the extremely external standpoint that human persons can take on their lives. There exists, to use Henry Sidgwick’s influential phrase, the “point of view of the universe,” that is, the standpoint that considers a human being’s life in relation to all times and all places. When one takes up this most external standpoint and views one’s puny impact on the world, little of one’s life appears to matter. What one does in a certain society on Earth over 75 years or so just does not amount to much, when considering the billions of temporal years and billions of light-years that make up space-time. Although this reasoning grants limited kinds of meaning to human beings, from a personal, social, or human perspective, Benatar both denies that the greatest sort of meaning––a cosmic one––is available to them and contends that this makes their lives bad, hence the “nihilist” tag. Some have objected that our lives could in fact have a cosmic significance, say, if they played a role in God’s plan (Quinn 2000, 65–66; Swinburne 2016, 154), were the sole ones with a dignity in the universe (Kahane 2014), or engaged in valuable activities that could be appreciated by anyone anywhere anytime (Wolf 2016, 261–62). Others naturally maintain that cosmic significance is irrelevant to appraising a human life, with some denying that it would be a genuine source of meaning (Landau 2017, 93–99), and others accepting that it would be but maintaining that the absence of this good would not count as a bad or merit regret (discussed in Benatar 2017, 56–62; Williams 2020, 108–11).

Finally, a distinguishable source of nihilism concerns the ontological, as distinct from axiological, preconditions for meaning in life. Perhaps most radically, there are those who deny that we have selves. Do we indeed lack selves, and, if we do, is a meaningful life impossible for us (see essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018; Le Bihan 2019)? Somewhat less radically, there are those who grant that we have selves, but deny that they are in charge in the relevant way. That is, some have argued that we lack self-governance or free will of the sort that is essential for meaning in life, at least if determinism is true (Pisciotta 2013; essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018). Non-quantum events, including human decisions, appear to be necessited by a prior state of the world, such that none could have been otherwise, and many of our decisions are a product of unconscious neurological mechanisms (while quantum events are of course utterly beyond our control). If none of our conscious choices could have been avoided and all were ultimately necessited by something external to them, perhaps they are insufficient to merit pride or admiration or to constitute narrative authorship of a life. In reply, some maintain that a compatibilism between determinism and moral responsibility applies with comparable force to meaning in life (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009, 145–77), while others contend that incompatibilism is true of moral responsibility but not of meaning (Pereboom 2014).

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Delon, N., 2021, “ The Meaning of Life ”, a bibliography on PhilPapers.
Metz, T., 2021, “ Life, Meaning of ”, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , E. Mason (ed.).
O’Brien, W., 2021, “ The Meaning of Life: Early Continental and Analytic Perspectives ”, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , J. Fieser and B. Dowden (eds.).
Seachris, J., 2021, “ Meaning of Life: The Analytic Perspective ”, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , J. Fieser and B. Dowden (eds.).

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Early Life on Earth – Animal Origins

In the beginning.

Today we take for granted that we live among diverse communities of animals that feed on each other. Our ecosystems are structured by feeding relationships like killer whales eating seals, which eat squid, which feed on krill. These and other animals require oxygen to extract energy from their food. But that’s not how life on Earth used to be.

With an environment devoid of oxygen and high in methane, for much of its history Earth would not have been a welcoming place for animals. The earliest life forms we know of were microscopic organisms (microbes) that left signals of their presence in rocks about 3.7 billion years old. The signals consisted of a type of carbon molecule that is produced by living things.

Evidence of microbes was also preserved in the hard structures (“stromatolites”) they made, which date to 3.5 billion years ago. Stromatolites are created as sticky mats of microbes trap and bind sediments into layers. Minerals precipitate inside the layers, creating durable structures even as the microbes die off. Scientists study today’s, rare living stromatolite reefs to better understand Earth’s earliest life forms.

An Oxygen Atmosphere

When cyanobacteria evolved at least 2.4 billion years ago, they set the stage for a remarkable transformation. They became Earth’s first photo-synthesizers, making food using water and the Sun’s energy, and releasing oxygen as a result. This catalyzed a sudden, dramatic rise in oxygen, making the environment less hospitable for other microbes that could not tolerate oxygen.

Evidence for this Great Oxidation Event is recorded in changes in seafloor rocks. When oxygen is around, iron reacts chemically with it (it gets oxidized) and gets removed from the system. Rocks dating to before the event are striped with bands of iron . Rocks dating to after the event do not have iron bands, showing that oxygen was now in the picture.

After the initial pulse of oxygen, it stabilized at lower levels where it would remain for a couple billion years more. In fact, as cyanobacteria died and drifted down through the water, the decomposition of their bodies probably reduced oxygen levels. So, the ocean was still not a suitable environment for most lifeforms that need ample oxygen.

Multicellular Life

However, other innovations were occurring. While they can process lots of chemicals, microbes did not have the specialized cells that are needed for complex bodies. Animal bodies have various cells – skin, blood, bone – which contain organelles, each doing a distinct job. Microbes are just single cells with no organelles and no nuclei to package their DNA.

Something revolutionary happened as microbes began living inside other microbes, functioning as organelles for them. Mitochondria, the organelles that process food into energy, evolved from these mutually beneficial relationships. Also, for the first time, DNA became packaged in nuclei. The new complex cells (“eukaryotic cells”) boasted specialized parts playing specialized roles that supported the whole cell.

Cells also began living together, probably because certain benefits could be obtained. Groups of cells might be able to feed more efficiently or gain protection from simply being bigger. Living collectively, cells began to support the needs of the group by each cell doing a specific job. Some cells were tasked with making junctions to hold the group together, while other cells made digestive enzymes that could break down food.

The First Animals

These clusters of specialized, cooperating cells eventually became the first animals , which DNA evidence suggests evolved around 800 million years ago. Sponges were among the earliest animals. While chemical compounds from sponges are preserved in rocks as old as 700 million years, molecular evidence points to sponges developing even earlier.

Oxygen levels in the ocean were still low compared to today, but sponges are able to tolerate conditions of low oxygen. Although, like other animals, they require oxygen to metabolize, they don’t need much because they are not very active. They feed while sitting still by extracting food particles from water that is pumped through their bodies by specialized cells.

The simple body plan of a sponge consists of layers of cells around water-filled cavities, supported by hard skeletal parts. The evolution of ever more complex and diverse body plans would eventually lead to distinct groups of animals.

The assembly instructions for an animal’s body plan are in its genes. Some genes act like orchestra conductors, controlling the expression of many other genes at specific places and times to correctly assemble the components. While they were not played out immediately, there is evidence that parts of instructions for complex bodies were present even in the earliest animals.

Thanks to their hard skeletons, sponges became the first reef builders on Earth. Scientists like Smithsonian’s Dr. Klaus Ruetzler are working to understand the evolution of the thousands of sponge species living on Earth today.

Ediacaran Biota

By about 580 million years ago (the Ediacaran Period) there was a proliferation of other organisms, in addition to sponges. These varied seafloor creatures - with bodies shaped like fronds, ribbons, and even quilts - lived alongside sponges for 80 million years. Their fossil evidence can be found in sedimentary rocks around the world.

However, the body plans of most Ediacaran animals did not look like modern groups. Smithsonian’s Dr. Douglas Erwin , using comparative developmental evidence, has examined whether any of the fossilized Ediacaran animals were related to modern animals.

By the end of the Ediacaran, oxygen levels rose, approaching levels sufficient to sustain oxygen-based life. The early sponges may actually have helped boost oxygen by eating bacteria, removing them from the decomposition process. Tracks of an organism named Dickinsonia costata suggest that it may have been moved along the sea bottom, presumably feasting on mats of microbes.

The End-Ediacaran Extinction

However, about 541 million years ago, most of the Ediacaran creatures disappeared, signaling a major environmental change that Douglas Erwin and other scientists are still working to understand. Evolving animal body plans, feeding relationships, and environmental engineering may have played a role.

Burrows found in the fossil record, dating to the end of the Ediacaran, reveal that worm-like animals had begun to excavate the ocean bottom. These early environmental engineers disturbed and maybe aerated the sediment, disrupting conditions for other Ediacaran animals. As environmental conditions deteriorated for some animals, they improved for others, potentially catalyzing a change-over in species.

The Cambrian Explosion

The Cambrian Period (541-485 million years ago) witnessed a wild explosion of new life forms. Along with new burrowing lifestyles came hard body parts like shells and spines. Hard body parts allowed animals to more drastically engineer their environments, such as digging burrows. A shift also occurred towards more active animals, with defined heads and tails for directional movement to chase prey. Active feeding by well-armored animals like trilobites may have further disrupted the sea floor that the soft Ediacaran creatures had lived on.

( Watch video, "The Cambrian Explosion of Life with Paleontologist Karma Nanglu." )

Unique feeding styles partitioned the environment, making room for more diversification of life. In 1909 the Smithsonian’s fourth Secretary, Charles Doolittle Walcott, discovered the Burgess Shale fossils that revealed the unprecedented biodiversity of Cambrian life. While Waptia scoured the ocean bottom, priapulid worms burrowed into the sediment, Wiwaxia attached to sponges, and Anomalocaris cruised above.

Many of these odd-looking organisms were evolutionary experiments, such as the 5-eyed Opabinia. However, some groups, such as the trilobites, thrived and dominated Earth for hundreds of millions of years but eventually went extinct. Stromatolite reef-building bacteria also declined, and reefs made by organisms called brachiopods arose as conditions on Earth continued to change. Today’s dominant reef-builders, the hard corals, did not emerge until a couple hundred million years later

However, despite all the changes that were to come, by the end of the Cambrian nearly all existing animal types, or phyla, (mollusks, arthropods, annelids, etc.) were established, and food webs were emerging, forming the foundation for the ecosystems on Earth today.

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How did life begin?

Some things are alive and some things are not. Seems like an easy and obvious concept, but drawing the line that separates “alive” from “not alive” is not quite as straightforward as you might think. What makes something alive? Well, if you Google “properties of life,” you will see that there are seven (or eight, or nine, or maybe even ten) things that everyone “agrees” are key—things like growth, the ability to reproduce, response to stimuli and the environment, maintaining homeostasis, and, often, cellular organization.

So, a quick quiz. A rock? Not alive. An oak tree? Alive. Water? Not alive. Single-celled bacteria? Alive. An RNA virus? Well, now things get interesting.

Most viruses are simple. They are composed of an outer shell or membrane that surrounds some genetic material: sometimes DNA, sometimes RNA, sometimes both. They generally can’t, however, reproduce on their own—one of the essential properties of life. Instead, they co-opt the reproduction machinery of the cells they infect, making the cell make more viruses. So, there is some disagreement among scientists about whether viruses count as alive or not, but because they contain genetic material, they are, at least, likely to be related to other life on Earth. All life that we know of shares the use of DNA or RNA to carry genetic information, which suggests a shared origin; viruses are somehow connected to the evolutionary tree of life—which brings us to a second line between life and no life.

If we think about the history of the Earth, at some point in the past there was no life and now the place is practically bursting at the seams with it. How did that happen? That is a question that has perplexed humanity for millennia. Two Eberly College of Science researchers have brought the diverse expertise of their labs together to explore some possible answers.

Life in its simplest form could be thought of as a collection of molecules that perform chemical reactions and that are somehow compartmentalized, isolating them from their environment. Christine Keating , professor of chemistry, studies physical chemistry and the self-assembly of molecules. As an undergrad she studied chemistry and biology, so she gravitated toward studying the materials chemistry of life and how cells might have evolved. Phil Bevilacqua , head of the Department of Chemistry and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, has been studying RNA for nearly 30 years. RNA can both carry genetic information and perform chemical reactions, making it an attractive candidate for playing a role in early life.

“There was this old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial where one person had chocolate and another had peanut butter and they bumped into each other,” said Keating. “The chocolate got into the peanut butter and they were like, ‘This is amazing.’ I think of our collaboration like one of us had the chocolate and one of us had the peanut butter. Our research really complements each other’s to be able to look at possible scenarios for the evolution of early life.”

It’s an RNA world

Or at least it was. Maybe.

“How life actually began is basically unknowable,” said Bevilacqua. “There is no fossil record of the early steps that led to life, and we can’t go back to observe what was going on. What we can do, though, is use what we know about the Earth three to four billion years ago and what we know about the simplest forms of life to build models and test hypotheses. We can begin to narrow down what might have been possible and eliminate ideas that probably aren’t.”

One of the leading hypotheses about the origin of life on Earth leans heavily on the role of RNA. RNA is DNA’s lesser known little brother; it stands for ribonucleic acid (DNA is deoxyribonucleic acid ). Both molecules are long strings composed of four basic subunits, and it’s the sequence of these units that encodes genetic information.

The four subunits of DNA are adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine; they are called nucleotides or bases, but we often just refer to them as A, T, C, and G. The DNA molecule is double stranded. Think of a twisted ladder: The side rails of the ladder are the two strands, and the rungs represent the bonds that hold them together. The two strands are complementary to each other: If there is an A on one side of the rung, the other side will have a T; and if there is a C on one side, the other will have a G.

RNA shares three of the four subunits with DNA but has uracil (U) instead of thymine (T) and is single stranded. Because sections of the RNA molecule can be complementary to other sections, the molecule can fold up on itself, bonding in a way similar to double-stranded DNA, with U complementing A. The resulting three-dimensional structures of RNA molecules can allow it to do more than just encode information; it can carry out functions that are nowadays mostly associated with proteins.

“RNA became implicated in early life scenarios in the late 1960s,” said Bevilacqua. “It was recognized that the complex structures that RNA forms could potentially perform catalysis—it could drive chemical reactions. So, you have a single molecule that sort of solved the ‘chicken and egg’ question of which came first in the origin of life: genetic information or catalysis? Work in the 1980s that led to a Nobel Prize demonstrated that RNA can in fact do both, so it became a prime candidate for how early life could have evolved in what is known as the RNA world hypothesis .”

The research in Bevilacqua’s lab focuses on understanding the functions of RNA at the molecular level. His group studies the mechanisms of RNA enzymes—RNA molecules that have functions similar to protein enzymes in chemical reactions—known as ribozymes . Their research helped to establish the role played by ribozymes in proton transfer and RNA cleavage, and they are currently studying the role of metal ions and other cofactors in these mechanisms. They also study the precise mechanisms of how RNA molecules fold in cells. Studying the role of RNA in early life came later.

“Because I work on RNA catalysis, I’ve always been interested in its potential role in early life, but I never took it too seriously,” said Bevilacqua. “It would come up as the last sentence of a discussion in a paper: ‘This versatility of RNA to perform reactions could relate to the RNA world hypothesis.’ But in thinking of what it would take to go from a bunch of molecules floating around with the ability to perform reactions to something that could be called early life, I started to work with Chris, putting together her expertise in protocells with my expertise in RNA.”

Compartmentalize it!

If you think about a modern cell with its hundreds of components—organelles, proteins, DNA, and RNA—working together seamlessly to perform its varied functions, it can be hard to imagine how it could have evolved. But we know that it must have. Before there were modern cells, there had to be earlier, simpler ones. And before that, there had to exist the components to form them.

We can imagine an early, prelife Earth in which chemical reactions are occurring that begin to produce molecules that resemble things like RNA. But even if these early molecules could potentially encode genetic information and perform catalysis, they would be floating around in the proverbial primordial soup, and the chance they would find each other and actually do these things seems incredibly slim. A necessary step, therefore, in the early evolution of what would become life was to increase the chances that these molecules would come together where they could begin to interact in more and more-complex ways. One way to do that was to compartmentalize them.

Coacervate droplets with multiple compartments

“We were studying the self-assembly of molecules, what molecules can do on their own, and it’s kind of amazing what you get for free,” said Keating. “An example is lipid self-assembly. Lipids are fatty compounds that are insoluble in water. If you have some lipids and you add water—boom! Vesicles form. It’s amazing to watch.”

Among other things, Keating’s group studies artificial cells. Somewhat counterintuitively, she decided to start by recreating the cell’s cytoplasm—the goo on the inside that is often ignored—rather than its membrane. Even without membranes, you could get compartments through liquid-liquid phase separation.

“We always knew that if we were going to make artificial cells, it needed to be in a way that we could learn about real cells,” said Keating. “So, starting with the cytoplasm—where everything within the cell takes place—made sense, even though people may think it’s the boring part. We were kind of amazed at how quickly things got interesting.”

Macromolecules (big molecules—like RNA, for example) would concentrate into different liquid phases within the artificial cytoplasm.

“Without really trying, we found a solution to one of the big problems in studying the origin of life, which is, ‘How do you put stuff in your compartment?’” said Keating. “You can make a membrane really easily, like with lipids, but it’s incredibly difficult to get things inside of them. With our system, you get these phase-separated droplets—called coacervates —in which macromolecules collect, and you can concentrate them from a really dilute solution. What better to study in this system than RNA, which is where Phil comes in.”

Two great tastes that taste great together

Coacervate droplets, with inset showing RNA molecules concentrated inside the droplets

“Working with Chris, we really started to think about how it all began, how did life start, how do you compartmentalize molecules to facilitate the types of reactions we were studying,” said Bevilacqua. “We began to look at what’s possible, and not only that but what would be feasible and probable. I was coming from one angle and she was coming from another, and there was a confluence of our two approaches that really made sense.”

The collaboration is already paying dividends. Recently, the two groups published a paper demonstrating that not only could RNA be assembled from its constituent parts inside of membraneless compartments but the concentration of the RNAs in the compartments also enhanced the enzymatic activity of ribozymes.

Whether or not these particular steps actually took place during life’s evolution on Earth, the collaboration of Keating’s and Bevilacqua’s research groups is advancing our understanding of what might have happened. They go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

“I’d like to lay claim to being the chocolate in the Reese’s cup,” said Keating.

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The History of Life: A Very Short Introduction

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4 (page 69) p. 69 The origin of life on land

Published: November 2008
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‘The origin of life on land’ shows that life on land is significant for two reasons: firstly, life on land represents most of modern biodiversity and secondly, life has changed the face of the Earth; before life on land, there were no soils. Earliest fungi have been dated to the Precambrian, but the first green plants on land are dated to the Ordovician, 450 million years ago, and the first vascular plants to the Mid-Silurian, 425 million years ago. Adaptation to life on land involved new ways of obtaining nutrients and water, prevention of dessication, and structural support. The earliest land animals show a transition from fish to tetrapods in the Devonian period.

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Module 3: History of Life

Why it matters: history of life, why discuss the history of life on earth.

Human beings are just one of countless examples of life on Earth. The sheer amount of diversity can seem overwhelming. However, over the years, scientists have developed tools and methods to organize all known living organisms. With the phylogenetic tree and the taxonomic classification system, scientists have grouped and organized organisms by domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.

The term kingdom is likely familiar to you, and you may even know the genus and species names of some organisms, as these names are used to create scientific names such as Canis lupus familiaris (dogs) and Felis catus (cats). But how does this type of organization matter in everyday life?

Evolutionary biologists could list many reasons why understanding phylogeny is important to everyday life in human society. For botanists, phylogeny acts as a guide to discovering new plants that can be used to benefit people. Think of all the ways humans use plants—food, medicine, and clothing are a few examples. If a plant contains a compound that is effective in treating disease, scientists might want to examine all of the relatives of that plant for other useful drugs.

Learning Outcomes

Explain the theory of evolution
Define species and identify how species form
Discuss the ways populations evolve
Read and analyze a phylogenetic tree that documents evolutionary relationships
Why It Matters: History of Life. Authored by : Shelli Carter and Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
Biology 2e. Provided by : OpenStax. Located at : http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected] . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/biology-2e/pages/1-introduction

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Question of the Month

What is the meaning of life, the following answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. sorry if your answer doesn’t appear: we received enough to fill twelve pages….

Why are we here? Do we serve a greater purpose beyond the pleasure or satisfaction we get from our daily activities – however mundane or heroic they may be? Is the meaning of life internal to life, to be found inherently in life’s many activities, or is it external, to be found in a realm somehow outside of life, but to which life leads? In the internal view it’s the satisfaction and happiness we gain from our actions that justify life. This does not necessarily imply a selfish code of conduct. The external interpretation commonly makes the claim that there is a realm to which life leads after death. Our life on earth is evaluated by a supernatural being some call God, who will assign to us some reward or punishment after death. The meaning of our life, its purpose and justification, is to fulfill the expectations of God, and then to receive our final reward. But within the internal view of meaning, we can argue that meaning is best found in activities that benefit others, the community, or the Earth as a whole. It’s just that the reward for these activities has to be found here, in the satisfactions that they afford within this life, instead of in some external spirit realm.

An interesting way to contrast the internal and external views is to imagine walking through a beautiful landscape. Your purpose in walking may be just to get somewhere else – you may think there’s a better place off in the distance. In this case the meaning of your journey through the landscape is external to the experience of the landscape itself. On the other hand, you may be intensely interested in what the landscape holds. It may be a forest, or it may contain farms, villages. You may stop along the way, study, learn, converse, with little thought about why you are doing these things other than the pleasure they give you. You may stop to help someone who is sick: in fact, you may stay many years, and found a hospital. What then is the meaning of your journey? Is it satisfying or worthwhile only if you have satisfied an external purpose – only if it gets you somewhere else? Why, indeed, cannot the satisfactions and pleasures of the landscape, and of your deeds, be enough?

Greg Studen, Novelty, Ohio

A problem with this question is that it is not clear what sort of answer is being looked for. One common rephrasing is “What is it that makes life worth living?”. There are any number of subjective answers to this question. Think of all the reasons why you are glad you are alive (assuming you are), and there is the meaning of your life. Some have attempted to answer this question in a more objective way: that is to have an idea of what constitutes the good life . It seems reasonable to say that some ways of living are not conducive to human flourishing. However, I am not convinced that there is one right way to live. To suggest that there is demonstrates not so much arrogance as a lack of imagination.

Another way of rephrasing the question is “What is the purpose of life?” Again we all have our own subjective purposes but some would like to think there is a higher purpose provided for us, perhaps by a creator. It is a matter of debate whether this would make life a thing of greater value or turn us into the equivalent of rats in a laboratory experiment. Gloster’s statement in King Lear comes to mind: “As flies to wanton boys we are to the gods – they kill us for their sport.” But why does there have to be a purpose to life separate from those purposes generated within it? The idea that life needs no external justification has been described movingly by Richard Taylor. Our efforts may ultimately come to nothing but “the day was sufficient to itself, and so was the life.” ( Good and Evil , 1970) In the “why are we here?” sense of the question there is no answer. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that life is meaningless. Life is meaningful to humans, therefore it has meaning.

Rebecca Linton, Leicester

When the question is in the singular we search for that which ties all values together in one unity, traditionally called ‘the good’. Current consideration of the good demands a recognition of the survival crises which confront mankind. The threats of nuclear war, environmental poisoning and other possible disasters make it necessary for us to get it right. For if Hannah Arendt was correct concerning the ‘banality of evil’ which affected so many Nazi converts and contaminated the German population by extension, we may agree with her that both Western rational philosophy and Christian teaching let the side down badly in the 20th century.

If we then turn away from Plato’s philosophy, balanced in justice, courage, moderation and wisdom; from Jewish justice and Christian self-denial; if we recognize Kant’s failure to convince populations to keep his three universal principles, then shall we look to the moral relativism of the Western secular minds which admired Nietzsche? Stalin’s purges of his own constituents in the USSR tainted this relativist approach to the search for the good. Besides, if nothing is absolute, but things have value only relative to other things, how do we get a consensus on the best or the worst? What makes your social mores superior to mine – and why should I not seek to destroy your way? We must also reject any hermit, monastic, sect or other loner criteria for the good life. Isolation will not lead to any long-term harmony or peace in the Global Village.

If with Nietzsche we ponder on the need for power in one’s life, but turn in the opposite direction from his ‘superman’ ideal, we will come to some form of the Golden Rule [‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’]. However, we must know this as an experiential reality. There is life-changing power in putting oneself in the place of the other person and feeling for and with them. We call this feeling empathy .

Persons who concentrate on empathy should develop emotional intelligence. When intellectual intelligence does not stand in the way of this kind of personal growth, but contributes to it, we can call this balance maturity . Surely the goal or meaning of human life is therefore none other than finding oneself becoming a mature adult free to make one’s own decisions, yet wanting everyone in the world to have this same advantage. This is good!

Ernie Johns, Owen Sound, Ontario

‘Meaning’ is a word referring to what we have in mind as ‘signification’, and it relates to intention and purpose. ‘Life’ is applied to the state of being alive; conscious existence. Mind, consciousness, words and what they signify, are thus the focus for the answer to the question. What seems inescapable is that there is no meaning associated with life other than that acquired by our consciousness, inherited via genes, developed and given content through memes (units of culture). The meanings we believe life to have are then culturally and individually diverse. They may be imposed through hegemony; religious or secular, benign or malign; or identified through deliberate choice, where this is available. The range is vast and diverse; from straightforward to highly complex. Meaning for one person may entail supporting a football team; for another, climbing higher and higher mountains; for another, being a parent; for another, being moved by music, poetry, literature, dance or painting; for another the pursuit of truth through philosophy; for another through religious devotions, etc. But characteristic of all these examples is a consciousness that is positively and constructively absorbed, engaged, involved, fascinated, enhanced and fulfilled. I would exclude negative and destructive desires; for example of a brutal dictator who may find torturing others absorbing and engaging and thus meaningful. Such cases would be too perverse and morally repugnant to regard as anything other than pathological.

The meaning of life for individuals may diminish or fade as a consequence of decline or difficult or tragic circumstances. Here it might, sadly, be difficult to see any meaning of life at all. The meaning is also likely to change from one phase of life to another, due to personal development, new interests, contexts, commitments and maturity.

Colin Brookes, Woodhouse Eaves, Leicestershire

It is clearly internet shopping, franchised fast food and surgically-enhanced boobs. No, this is not true. I think the only answer is to strip back every layer of the physical world, every learnt piece of knowledge, almost everything that seems important in our modern lives. All that’s left is simply existence. Life is existence: it seems ‘good’ to be part of life. But really that’s your lot! We should just be thankful that our lifespan is longer than, say, a spider, or your household mog.

Our over-evolved human minds want more, but unfortunately there is nothing more. And if there is some deity or malignant devil, then you can be sure they’ve hidden any meaning pretty well and we won’t see it in our mortal lives. So, enjoy yourself; be nice to people, if you like; but there’s no more meaning than someone with surgically-enhanced boobs, shopping on the net while eating a Big Mac.

Simon Maltman, By email

To ask ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is a poor choice of words and leads to obfuscation rather than clarity. Why so?

To phrase the question in this fashion implies that meaning is something that inheres in an object or experience – that it is a quality which is as discernible as the height of a door or the solidity of matter. That is not what meaning is like. It is not a feature of a particular thing, but rather the relationship between a perceiver and a thing, a subject and an object, and so requires both. There is no one meaning of, say, a poem, because meaning is generated by it being read and thought about by a subject. As subjects differ so does the meaning: different people evaluate ideas and concepts in different ways, as can be seen from ethical dilemmas. But it would be wrong to say that all these meanings are completely different, as there are similarities between individuals, not least because we belong to the same species and are constructed and programmed in basically the same way. We all have feelings of fear, attachment, insecurity and passion, etc.

So to speak of ‘the meaning of life’, is an error. It would be more correct to refer to the ‘meanings of life’, but as there are currently around six billion humans on Earth, and new psychological and cultural variations coming into being all the time, to list and describe all of these meanings would be a nigh on impossible task.

To ‘find meaning in life’ is a better way of approaching the issue, ie, whilst there is no single meaning of life, every person can live their life in a way which brings them as much fulfilment and contentment as possible. To use utilitarian language, the best that one can hope for is a life which contains as great an excess of pleasure over pain as possible, or alternatively, a life in which as least time as possible is devoted to activities which do not stimulate, or which do nothing to promote the goals one has set for oneself.

Steve Else, Swadlincote, Derbyshire

The meaning of life is not being dead.

Tim Bale, London

The question is tricky because of its hidden premise that life has meaning per se . A perfectly rational if discomforting position is given by Nietzsche, that someone in the midst of living is not in a position to discern whether it has meaning or not, and since we cannot step outside of the process of living to assess it, this is therefore not a question that bears attention.

However, if we choose to ignore the difficulties of evaluating a condition while inside it, perhaps one has to ask the prior question, what is the meaning of meaning ? Is ‘meaning’ given by the greater cosmos? Or do we in our freedom construct the category ‘meaning’ and then fill in the contours and colours? Is meaning always identical with purpose? I might decide to dedicate my life to answering this particular question, granting myself an autonomously devised purpose. But is this identical with the meaning of my life? Or can I live a meaningless life with purpose? Or shall meaning be defined by purpose? Some metaphysics offer exactly this corollary – that in pursuing one’s proper good, and thus one’s meaning, one is pursuing one’s telos or purpose. The point of these two very brief summaries of approaches to the question is to show the hazards in this construction of the question.

Karen Zoppa, The University of Winnipeg

One thing one can hardly fail to notice about life is that it is self-perpetuating. Palaeontology tells us that life has been perpetuating itself for billions of years. What is the secret of this stunning success? Through natural selection, life forms adapt to their environment, and in the process they acquire, one might say they become , knowledge about that environment, the world in which they live and of which they are part. As Konrad Lorenz put it, “Life itself is a process of acquiring knowledge.” According to this interpretation of evolution, the very essence of life (its meaning?) is the pursuit of knowledge : knowledge about the real world that is constantly tested against that world. What works and is in that sense ‘true’, is perpetuated. Life is tried and proven knowledge that has withstood the test of geological time. From this perspective, adopting the pursuit of knowledge as a possible meaning of one’s life seems, literally, a natural choice. The history of science and philosophy is full of examples of people who have done just that, and in doing so they have helped human beings to earn the self-given title of Homo sapiens – man of knowledge.

Axel Winter, Wynnum, Queensland

Life is a stage and we are the actors, said William Shakespeare, possibly recognizing that life quite automatically tells a story just as any play tells a story. But we are more than just actors; we are the playwright too, creating new script with our imaginations as we act in the ongoing play. Life is therefore storytelling. So the meaning of life is like the meaning of ‘the play’ in principle: not a single play with its plot and underlying values and information, but the meaning behind the reason for there being plays with playwright, stage, actors, props, audience, and theatre. The purpose of the play is self-expression , the playwright’s effort to tell a story. Life, a grand play written with mankind’s grand imagination, has this same purpose.

But besides being the playwright, you are the audience too, the recipient of the playwrights’ messages. As playwright, actor, and audience you are an heir to both growth and self-expression. Your potential for acquiring knowledge and applying it creatively is unlimited. These two concepts may be housed under one roof: Liberty. Liberty is the freedom to think and to create. “Give me liberty or give me death,” said Patrick Henry, for without liberty life has no meaningful purpose. But with liberty life is a joy. Therefore liberty is the meaning of life.

Ronald Bacci, Napa, CA

The meaning of life is understood according to the beliefs that people adhere to. However, all human belief systems are accurate or inaccurate to varying degrees in their description of the world. Moreover, belief systems change over time: from generation to generation; from culture to culture; and era to era. Beliefs that are held today, even by large segments of the population, did not exist yesterday and may not exist tomorrow. Belief systems, be they religious or secular, are therefore arbitrary. If the meaning of life is wanted, a meaning that will transcend the test of time or the particulars of individual beliefs, then an effort to arrive at a truly objective determination must be made. So in order to eliminate the arbitrary, belief systems must be set aside. Otherwise, the meaning of life could not be determined.

Objectively however, life has no meaning because meaning or significance cannot be obtained without reference to some (arbitrary) belief system. Absent a subjective belief system to lend significance to life, one is left with the ‘stuff’ of life, which, however offers no testimony as to its meaning. Without beliefs to draw meaning from, life has no meaning, but is merely a thing ; a set of facts that, in and of themselves, are silent as to what they mean. Life consists of a series of occurrences in an infinite now, divorced of meaning except for what may be ascribed by constructed belief systems. Without such beliefs, for many the meaning of life is nothing .

Surely, however, life means something . And indeed it does when an individual willfully directs his/her consciousness at an aspect of life, deriving from it an individual interpretation, and then giving this interpretation creative expression. Thus the meaning in the act of giving creative expression to what may be ephemeral insights. Stated another way, the meaning of life is an individual’s acts of creation . What, exactly is created, be it artistic or scientific, may speak to the masses, or to nobody, and may differ from individual to individual. The meaning of life, however, is not the thing created, but the creative act itself ; namely, that of willfully imposing an interpretation onto the stuff of life, and projecting a creative expression from it.

Raul Casso, Laredo, Texas

Rather than prattle on and then discover that I am merely deciding what ‘meaning’ means, I will start out with the assumption that by ‘meaning’ we mean ‘purpose.’ And because I fear that ‘purpose’ implies a Creator, I will say ‘best purpose.’ So what is the best purpose for which I can live my life? The best purpose for which I can live my life is, refusing all the easy ways to destroy. This is not as simple as it sounds. Refusing to destroy life – to murder – wouldn’t just depend on our lack of homicidal impulses, but also on our willingness to devote our time to finding out which companies have murdered union uprisers; to finding out whether animals are killed out of need or greed or ease; to finding the best way to refuse to fund military murder, if we find our military to be murdering rather than merely protecting. Refusing to destroy resources, to destroy loves, to destroy rights, turns out to be a full-time job. Oh sure, we can get cocky and say “Well, oughtn’t we destroy injustice? Or bigotry? Or hatred?” But we would be only fooling ourselves. They’re all already negatives: to destroy injustice, bigotry, and hatred is to refuse the destruction of justice, understanding, and love. So, it turns out, we finally say “Yes” to life, when we come out with a resounding, throat-wrecking “NO!”

Carrie Snider, By email

I propose that the knowledge we have now accumulated about life discloses quite emphatically that we are entirely a function of certain basic laws as they operate in the probably unique conditions prevailing here on Earth.

The behaviour of the most elementary forms of matter we know, subatomic particles, seems to be guided by four fundamental forces, of which electromagnetism is probably the most significant here, in that through the attraction and repulsion of charged particles it allows an almost infinite variation of bonding: it allows atoms to form molecules, up the chain to the molecules of enormous length and complexity we call as nucleic acids, and proteins. All these are involved in a constant interaction with surrounding chemicals through constant exchanges of energy. From these behaviour patterns we can deduce certain prime drives or purposes of basic matter, namely:

1. Combination (bonding).

2. Survival of the combination, and of any resulting organism.

3. Extension of the organism, usually by means of replication.

4. Acquisition of energy.

Since these basic drives motivate everything that we’re made of, all the energy, molecules and chemistry that form our bodies, our brains and nervous systems, then whatever we think, say and do is a function of the operation of those basic laws Therefore everything we think, say and do will be directed towards our survival, our replication and our demand for energy to fuel these basic drives. All our emotions and our rational thinking, our loves and hates, our art, science and engineering are refinements of these basic drives. The underlying drive for bonding inspires our need for interaction with other organisms, particularly other human beings, as we seek ever wider and stronger links conducive to our better survival. Protection and extension of our organic integrity necessitates our dependence on and interaction with everything on Earth.

Our consciousness is also necessarily a function of these basic drives, and when the chemistry of our cells can no longer operate due to disease, ageing or trauma, we lose consciousness and die. Since I believe we are nothing more than physics and chemistry, death terminates our life once and for all. There is no God, there is no eternal life. But optimistically, there is the joy of realising that we have the power of nature within us, and that by co-operating with our fellow man, by nurturing the resources of the world, by fighting disease, starvation, poverty and environmental degradation, we can all conspire to improve life and celebrate not only its survival on this planet, but also its proliferation. So the purpose of life is just that: to involve all living things in the common purpose of promoting and enjoying what we are – a wondrous expression of the laws of Nature, the power of the Universe.

Peter F. Searle, Topsham, Devon

“What is the meaning of life?” is hard to get a solid grip on. One possible translation of it is “What does it all mean?” One might spend a lifetime trying to answer such a heady question. Answering it requires providing an account of the ultimate nature of the world, our minds, value and how all these natures interrelate. I’d prefer to offer a rather simplistic answer to a possible interpretation of our question. When someone asks “What is the meaning of life?,” they may mean “What makes life meaningful?” This is a question I believe one can get a grip on without developing a systematic philosophy.

The answer I propose is actually an old one. What makes a human life have meaning or significance is not the mere living of a life, but reflecting on the living of a life.

Even the most reflective among us get caught up in pursuing ends and goals. We want to become fitter; we want to read more books; we want to make more money. These goal-oriented pursuits are not meaningful or significant in themselves. What makes a life filled with them either significant or insignificant is reflecting on why one pursues those goals. This is second-order reflection; reflection on why one lives the way one does. But it puts one in a position to say that one’s life has meaning or does not.

One discovers this meaning or significance by evaluating one’s life and meditating on it; by taking a step back from the everyday and thinking about one’s life in a different way. If one doesn’t do this, then one’s life has no meaning or significance. And that isn’t because one has the wrong sorts of goals or ends, but rather has failed to take up the right sort of reflective perspective on one’s life. This comes close to Socrates’ famous saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. I would venture to say that the unexamined life has no meaning.

Casey Woodling, Gainesville, FL

For the sake of argument, let’s restrict the scope of the discussion to the human species, and narrow down the choices to

1) There is no meaning of life, we simply exist;

2) To search for the meaning of life; and

3) To share an intimate connection with humankind: the notion of love.

Humans are animals with an instinct for survival. At a basic level, this survival requires food, drink, rest and procreation. In this way, the meaning of life could be to continue the process of evolution. This is manifested in the modern world as the daily grind.

Humans also have the opportunity and responsibility of consciousness. With our intellect comes curiosity, combined with the means to understand complex problems. Most humans have, at some point, contemplated the meaning of life. Some make it a life’s work to explore this topic. For them and those like them, the question may be the answer.

Humans are a social species. We typically seek out the opposite sex to procreate. Besides the biological urge or desire, there is an interest in understanding others. We might simply gain pleasure in connecting with someone in an intimate way. Whatever the specific motivation, there is something that we crave, and that is to love and be loved.

The meaning of life may never be definitively known. The meaning of life may be different for each individual and/or each species. The truth of the meaning of life is likely in the eye of the beholder. There were three choices given at the beginning of this essay, and for me, the answer is all of the above.

Jason Hucsek, San Antonio, TX

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Education and Communications
Autobiographies

How to Write a Life Story Essay

Last Updated: April 14, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Alicia Cook . Alicia Cook is a Professional Writer based in Newark, New Jersey. With over 12 years of experience, Alicia specializes in poetry and uses her platform to advocate for families affected by addiction and to fight for breaking the stigma against addiction and mental illness. She holds a BA in English and Journalism from Georgian Court University and an MBA from Saint Peter’s University. Alicia is a bestselling poet with Andrews McMeel Publishing and her work has been featured in numerous media outlets including the NY Post, CNN, USA Today, the HuffPost, the LA Times, American Songwriter Magazine, and Bustle. She was named by Teen Vogue as one of the 10 social media poets to know and her poetry mixtape, “Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately” was a finalist in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. There are 11 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 102,144 times.

A life story essay involves telling the story of your life in a short, nonfiction format. It can also be called an autobiographical essay. In this essay, you will tell a factual story about some element of your life, perhaps for a college application or for a school assignment.

Preparing to Write Your Essay

Step 1 Determine the goal of your essay.

If you are writing a personal essay for a college application, it should serve to give the admissions committee a sense of who you are, beyond the basics of your application file. Your transcript, your letters of recommendation, and your resume will provide an overview of your work experience, interests, and academic record. Your essay allows you to make your application unique and individual to you, through your personal story. [2] X Research source
The essay will also show the admissions committee how well you can write and structure an essay. Your essay should show you can create a meaningful piece of writing that interests your reader, conveys a unique message, and flows well.
If you are writing a life story for a specific school assignment, such as in a composition course, ask your teacher about the assignment requirements.

Include important events, such as your birth, your childhood and upbringing, and your adolescence. If family member births, deaths, marriages, and other life moments are important to your story, write those down as well.
Focus on experiences that made a big impact on you and remain a strong memory. This may be a time where you learned an important life lesson, such as failing a test or watching someone else struggle and succeed, or where you felt an intense feeling or emotion, such as grief over someone’s death or joy over someone’s triumph.

Have you faced a challenge in your life that you overcame, such as family struggles, health issues, a learning disability, or demanding academics?
Do you have a story to tell about your cultural or ethnic background, or your family traditions?
Have you dealt with failure or life obstacles?
Do you have a unique passion or hobby?
Have you traveled outside of your community, to another country, city, or area? What did you take away from the experience and how will you carry what you learned into a college setting?

Remind yourself of your accomplishments by going through your resume. Think about any awards or experiences you would like spotlight in your essay. For example, explaining the story behind your Honor Roll status in high school, or how you worked hard to receive an internship in a prestigious program.
Remember that your resume or C.V. is there to list off your accomplishments and awards, so your life story shouldn't just rehash them. Instead, use them as a jumping-off place to explain the process behind them, or what they reflect (or do not reflect) about you as a person.

The New York Times publishes stellar examples of high school life story essays each year. You can read some of them on the NYT website. [8] X Research source

Writing Your Essay

Step 1 Structure your essay around a key experience or theme.

For example, you may look back at your time in foster care as a child or when you scored your first paying job. Consider how you handled these situations and any life lessons you learned from these lessons. Try to connect past experiences to who you are now, or who you aspire to be in the future.
Your time in foster care, for example, may have taught you resilience, perseverance and a sense of curiosity around how other families function and live. This could then tie into your application to a Journalism program, as the experience shows you have a persistent nature and a desire to investigate other people’s stories or experiences.

Certain life story essays have become cliche and familiar to admission committees. Avoid sports injuries stories, such as the time you injured your ankle in a game and had to find a way to persevere. You should also avoid using an overseas trip to a poor, foreign country as the basis for your self transformation. This is a familiar theme that many admission committees will consider cliche and not unique or authentic. [11] X Research source
Other common, cliche topics to avoid include vacations, "adversity" as an undeveloped theme, or the "journey". [12] X Research source

Try to phrase your thesis in terms of a lesson learned. For example, “Although growing up in foster care in a troubled neighborhood was challenging and difficult, it taught me that I can be more than my upbringing or my background through hard work, perseverance, and education.”
You can also phrase your thesis in terms of lessons you have yet to learn, or seek to learn through the program you are applying for. For example, “Growing up surrounded by my mother’s traditional cooking and cultural habits that have been passed down through the generations of my family, I realized I wanted to discover and honor the traditions of other, ancient cultures with a career in archaeology.”
Both of these thesis statements are good because they tell your readers exactly what to expect in clear detail.

An anecdote is a very short story that carries moral or symbolic weight. It can be a poetic or powerful way to start your essay and engage your reader right away. You may want to start directly with a retelling of a key past experience or the moment you realized a life lesson.
For example, you could start with a vivid memory, such as this from an essay that got its author into Harvard Business School: "I first considered applying to Berry College while dangling from a fifty-food Georgia pine tree, encouraging a high school classmate, literally, to make a leap of faith." [15] X Research source This opening line gives a vivid mental picture of what the author was doing at a specific, crucial moment in time and starts off the theme of "leaps of faith" that is carried through the rest of the essay.
Another great example clearly communicates the author's emotional state from the opening moments: "Through seven-year-old eyes I watched in terror as my mother grimaced in pain." This essay, by a prospective medical school student, goes on to tell about her experience being at her brother's birth and how it shaped her desire to become an OB/GYN. The opening line sets the scene and lets you know immediately what the author was feeling during this important experience. It also resists reader expectations, since it begins with pain but ends in the joy of her brother's birth.
Avoid using a quotation. This is an extremely cliche way to begin an essay and could put your reader off immediately. If you simply must use a quotation, avoid generic quotes like “Spread your wings and fly” or “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’”. Choose a quotation that relates directly to your experience or the theme of your essay. This could be a quotation from a poem or piece of writing that speaks to you, moves you, or helped you during a rough time.

Step 5 Let your personality and voice come through.

Always use the first person in a personal essay. The essay should be coming from you and should tell the reader directly about your life experiences, with “I” statements.
For example, avoid something such as “I had a hard time growing up. I was in a bad situation.” You can expand this to be more distinct, but still carry a similar tone and voice. “When I was growing up in foster care, I had difficulties connecting with my foster parents and with my new neighborhood. At the time, I thought I was in a bad situation I would never be able to be free from.”

For example, consider this statement: "I am a good debater. I am highly motivated and have been a strong leader all through high school." This gives only the barest detail, and does not allow your reader any personal or unique information that will set you apart from the ten billion other essays she has to sift through.
In contrast, consider this one: "My mother says I'm loud. I say you have to speak up to be heard. As president of my high school's debate team for the past three years, I have learned to show courage even when my heart is pounding in my throat. I have learned to consider the views of people different than myself, and even to argue for them when I passionately disagree. I have learned to lead teams in approaching complicated issues. And, most importantly for a formerly shy young girl, I have found my voice." This example shows personality, uses parallel structure for impact, and gives concrete detail about what the author has learned from her life experience as a debater.

An example of a passive sentence is: “The cake was eaten by the dog.” The subject (the dog) is not in the expected subject position (first) and is not "doing" the expected action. This is confusing and can often be unclear.
An example of an active sentence is: “The dog ate the cake.” The subject (the dog) is in the subject position (first), and is doing the expected action. This is much more clear for the reader and is a stronger sentence.

Step 8 Apply the Into, Through, and Beyond approach.

Lead the reader INTO your story with a powerful beginning, such as an anecdote or a quote.
Take the reader THROUGH your story with the context and key parts of your experience.
End with the BEYOND message about how the experience has affected who you are now and who you want to be in college and after college.

Editing Your Essay

Step 1 Put your first draft aside for a few days.

For example, a sentence like “I struggled during my first year of college, feeling overwhelmed by new experiences and new people” is not very strong because it states the obvious and does not distinguish you are unique or singular. Most people struggle and feel overwhelmed during their first year of college. Adjust sentences like this so they appear unique to you.
For example, consider this: “During my first year of college, I struggled with meeting deadlines and assignments. My previous home life was not very structured or strict, so I had to teach myself discipline and the value of deadlines.” This relates your struggle to something personal and explains how you learned from it.

It can be difficult to proofread your own work, so reach out to a teacher, a mentor, a family member, or a friend and ask them to read over your essay. They can act as first readers and respond to any proofreading errors, as well as the essay as a whole.

Expert Q&A

↑ http://education.seattlepi.com/write-thesis-statement-autobiographical-essay-1686.html
↑ https://study.com/learn/lesson/autobiography-essay-examples-steps.html
↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201101/writing-compelling-life-story-in-500-words-or-less
↑ Alicia Cook. Professional Writer. Expert Interview. 11 December 2020.
↑ https://mycustomessay.com/blog/how-to-write-an-autobiography-essay.html
↑ https://www.ahwatukee.com/community_focus/article_c79b33da-09a5-11e3-95a8-001a4bcf887a.html
↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/10/your-money/four-stand-out-college-essays-about-money.html
↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY9AdFx0L4s
↑ https://www.medina-esc.org/Downloads/Practical%20Advice%20Writing%20College%20App%20Essay.pdf
↑ http://www.businessinsider.com/successful-harvard-business-school-essays-2012-11?op=1
↑ http://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/passive_sentences.htm

About This Article

A life story essay is an essay that tells the story of your life in a short, nonfiction format. Start by coming up with a thesis statement, which will help you structure your essay. For example, your thesis could be about the influence of your family's culture on your life or how you've grown from overcoming challenging circumstances. You can include important life events that link to your thesis, like jobs you’ve worked, friendships that have influenced you, or sports competitions you’ve won. Consider starting your essay with an anecdote that introduces your thesis. For instance, if you're writing about your family's culture, you could start by talking about the first festival you went to and how it inspired you. Finish by writing about how the experiences have affected you and who you want to be in the future. For more tips from our Education co-author, including how to edit your essay effectively, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Essays About History: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

History is the study of past events and is essential to an understanding of life and the future; discover essays about history in our guide.

In the thousands of years, humans have been on earth, our ancestors have left different marks on the world, reminders of the times they lived in. Curiosity is in our nature, and we study our history on this planet by analyzing these marks, whether they be ancient artifacts, documents, or grand monuments.

History is essential because it tells us about our past. It helps us to understand how we evolved on this planet and, perhaps, how we may develop in the future. It also reminds us of our ancestors’ mistakes so that we do not repeat them. It is an undisputed fact that history is essential to human society, particularly in the world we live in today.

If you are writing essays about history, start by reading the examples below.

5 Examples On Essays About History

1. history of malta by suzanne pittman, 2. why study history by jeff west, 3. history a reflection of the past, and a teacher for the future by shahara mcgee, 4. the most successful crusade by michael stein, 5. god, plagues and pestilence – what history can teach us about living through a pandemic by robyn j. whitaker, writing prompts for essays about history, 1. what we can learn from history, 2. analyzing a historical source, 3. reflection on a historical event, 4. your country’s history, 5. your family history, 6. the impact of war on participating nations, 7. the history of your chosen topic.

“The famous biblical figure St. Paul came to Malta due to his ship getting wrecked and he first set foot on Malta at the beautiful location of what it know called St. Paul’s bay. St Paul spread Christianity throughout Malta which at the time has a mostly pagan population and the vast majority of Malta inhabitants have remained Christian since the days that St Paul walked the streets of Malta.”

Short but informative, Pittman’s essay briefly discusses key events in the history of Malta, including its founding, the spread of Christianity, and the Arab invasion of the country. She also references the Knights of Malta and their impact on the country.

“Every person across the face of this Earth has been molded into what they are today by the past. Have you ever wondered sometime about why humanity is the way it is, or why society works the way it does? In order to find the answer, you must follow back the footprints to pinpoint the history of the society as a whole.”

West’s essay explains history’s importance and why it should be studied. Everything is how it is because of past events, and we can better understand our reality with context from the past. We can also learn more about ourselves and what the future may hold for us. West makes essential points about the importance of history and gives important insight into its relevance.

“While those stories are important, it is vital and a personal moral imperative, to share the breadth and depth of Black History, showing what it is and means to the world. It’s not just about honoring those few known for the 28 days of February. It’s about everyday seizing the opportunities before us to use the vastness of history to inspire, educate and develop our youth into the positive and impactful leaders we want for the future.”

In her essay, McGee explains the importance of history, mainly black history, to the past and the future. She writes about how being connected to your culture, history, and society can give you a sense of purpose. In addition, she reflects on the role black history had in her development as a person; she was able to learn more about black history than just Martin Luther King Jr. She was able to understand and be proud of her heritage, and she wishes to use history to inspire people for the future.

“Shortly afterwards, Egyptians and Khwarazmians defeated an alliance of Crusaders-States and Syrians near Gaza. After Gaza, the Crusaders States were finished as a political force, although some cities along the coast hung on for more than forty years. The Egyptian Ayyubids occupied Jerusalem itself in 1247. The city now was not much more than a heap of ruins, becoming an unimportant backwater for a long time.”

Stein describes the Sixth Crusade, during which Emperor Frederick II could resolve the conflict through diplomacy, even gaining Christian control of Jerusalem by negotiating with the Sultan. He describes important figures, including the Popes of the time and Frederick himself, and the events leading up to and after the Crusade. Most importantly, his essay explains why this event is noteworthy: it was largely peaceful compared to the other Crusades and most conflicts of the time.

“Jillings describes the arrest of a Scottish preacher in 1603 for refusing to comply with the government’s health measures because he thought they were of no use as it was all up to God. The preacher was imprisoned because he was viewed as dangerous: his individual freedoms and beliefs were deemed less important than the safety of the community as a whole.”

In her essay, Whitaker explains the relevance of history in policymaking and attitudes toward the COVID-19 pandemic. She first discusses the human tendency to blame others for things beyond our control, giving historical examples involving discrimination against particular groups based on race or sexual orientation. She then describes the enforcement of health measures during the black plague, adding that religion and science do not necessarily contradict each other. From a historical perspective, we might just feel better about the situations we are in, as these issues have repeatedly afflicted humanity.

In your essay, write about the lessons we can learn from studying history. What has history taught us about human nature? What mistakes have we made in the past that we can use to prevent future catastrophes? Explain your position in detail and support it with sufficient evidence.

We have been left with many reminders of our history, including monuments, historical documents, paintings, and sculptures. First, choose a primary historical source, explain what it is, and discuss what you can infer about the period it is from. Then, provide context by using external sources, such as articles.

What historical event interests you? Choose one, whether it be a devastating war, the establishment of a new country, or a groundbreaking new invention, and write about it. Explain what exactly transpired in the event and explain why you chose it. You can also include possible lessons you could learn from it. You can use documentaries, history books, and online sources to understand the topic better.

Research the history of a country of your choice and write your essay on it. Include how it was formed, essential people, and important events. The country need not be your home country; choose any country and write clearly. You can also focus on a specific period in your country’s history if you wish to go more in-depth.

For a personal angle on your essay, you can write about your family’s history if there is anything you feel is noteworthy about it. Do you have any famous ancestors? Did any family members serve in the military? If you have the proper sources, discuss as much as you can about your family history and perhaps explain why it is essential to you.

Essays About History: The impact of war on participating nations

Throughout history, war has always hurt one or both sides. Choose one crucial historical war and write about its effects. Briefly discuss what occurred in the war and how it ended, and describe its impact on either or both sides. Feel free to focus on one aspect, territory, culture, or the economy.

From the spread of Christianity to the horrible practice of slavery, research any topic you wish and write about its history. How did it start, and what is its state today? You need not go too broad; the scope of your essay is your decision, as long as it is written clearly and adequately supported.

For help with your essay, check our round-up of best essay writing apps .If you’re looking for inspiration, check out our round-up of essay topics about nature .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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What is ‘lived experience’?

The term is ubiquitous and double-edged. It is both a key source of authentic knowledge and a danger to true solidarity

Patrick J Casey

History of science

The missing conversation

To the detriment of the public, scientists and historians don’t engage with one another. They must begin a new dialogue

Lorraine Daston & Peter Harrison

Ecology and environmental sciences

The ancient Hawaiian myth that sparked a modern ecological breakthrough

The ends of knowledge

Academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and whether some of those should come to an end

Rachael Scarborough King & Seth Rudy

Thinkers and theories

Wittgenstein in the classroom

The philosopher understood that learning – of a concept, of ourselves, of each other – is the undertaking of a whole life

Calum Jacobs

The ancient world

The great libraries of Rome

Passersby could wander at will into grand public libraries in imperial Rome. Could they trust what they found inside?

Fabio Fernandes

Philosophy of science

Why not scientism?

Science is not the only form of knowledge but it is the best, being the most successful epistemic enterprise in history

Moti Mizrahi

Meaning beyond definition

In science our concepts have neat, hard edges. In poetry our concepts stretch and expand. Both are necessary for knowledge

James Camien McGuiggan

Known unknowables

The ancient Sceptics used doubt as a way of investigating the world. Later thinkers undermined even that possibility

Mahdi Ranaee

History of ideas

The herd in the head

It is enormously empowering – even intoxicating – to lose yourself to a crowd. That is why we need contrarians

Costica Bradatan

Metaphysics

This essay isn’t true

Alethic nihilism is the theory that nothing is true. There is much to gain by taking this radical idea seriously

David Liggins

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Economic history

Jesuits in the boardroom

As corporations struggle to survive in a more uncertain world, they should look to the success of the Society of Jesus

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Palaeontology

A dinosaur is a story

As Brontosaurus tells us, in science as in fiction, the stories we tell to understand the world are always being revised

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A sliver of reality

Science and mathematics may never fully capture the physical universe. Are there hard limits to human intelligence?

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Imaginology

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Truth is real

For a century, the idea of truth has been deflated, becoming terrain from which philosophers fled. They must return – urgently

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Scepticism as a way of life

The desire for certainty is often foolish and sometimes dangerous. Scepticism undermines it, both in oneself and in others

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Help inform the discussion

Abraham Lincoln: Life in Brief

When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, seven slave states left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, and four more joined when hostilities began between the North and South. A bloody civil war then engulfed the nation as Lincoln vowed to preserve the Union, enforce the laws of the United States, and end the secession. The war lasted for more than four years with a staggering loss of more than 600,000 Americans dead. Midway through the war, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves within the Confederacy and changed the war from a battle to preserve the Union into a battle for freedom. He was the first Republican President, and Union victory ended forever the claim that state sovereignty superseded federal authority. Killed by an assassin's bullet less than a week after the surrender of Confederate forces, Lincoln left the nation a more perfect Union and thereby earned the admiration of most Americans as the country's greatest President.

Born dirt-poor in a log cabin in Kentucky in 1809, Lincoln grew up in frontier Kentucky and Indiana, where he was largely self-educated, with a taste for jokes, hard work, and books. He served for a time as a soldier in the Black Hawk War, taught himself law, and held a seat in the Illinois state legislature as a Whig politician in the 1830s and 1840s. From state politics, he moved to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1847, where he voiced his opposition to the U.S. war with Mexico. In the mid-1850s, Lincoln left the Whig Party to join the new Republican Party. In 1858, he went up against one of the most popular politicians in the nation, Senator Stephen Douglas, in a contest for the U.S. Senate. Lincoln lost that election, but his spectacular performance against Douglas in a series of nationally covered debates made him a contender for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination.

Fighting for Unity and Freedom

In the 1860 campaign for President, Lincoln firmly expressed his opposition to slavery and his determination to limit the expansion of slavery westward into the new territories acquired from Mexico in 1850. His election victory created a crisis for the nation, as many Southern Democrats feared that it would just be a matter of time before Lincoln would move to kill slavery in the South. Rather than face a future in which black people might become free citizens, much of the white South supported secession. This reasoning was based upon the doctrine of states' rights, which placed ultimate sovereignty with the states.

Lincoln vowed to preserve the Union even if it meant war. He eventually raised an army and navy of nearly three million Northern men to face a Southern army of more than two million soldiers. In battles fought from Virginia to California (but mainly in Virginia, in the Mississippi River Valley, and along the border states) a great civil war tore the United States apart. In pursuing victory, Lincoln assumed extralegal powers over the press, declared martial law in areas where no military action justified it, quelled draft riots with armed soldiers, and drafted soldiers to fight for the Union cause. No President in history had ever exerted so much executive authority, but he did so not for personal power but in order to preserve the Union. In 1864, as an example of his limited personal ambitions, Lincoln refused to call off national elections, preferring to hold the election even if he lost the vote rather than destroy the democratic basis upon which he rested his authority. With the electoral support of Union soldiers, many of whom were given short leaves to return home to vote, and thanks to the spectacular victory of Union troops in General Sherman's capture of Atlanta, Lincoln was decisively reelected.

What started as a war to preserve the Union and vindicate democracy became a battle for freedom and a war to end slavery when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863. Although the Proclamation did not free all slaves in the nation—indeed, no slaves outside of the Confederacy were affected by the Proclamation—it was an important symbolic gesture that identified the Union with freedom and the death of slavery. As part of the Proclamation, Lincoln also urged black males to join the Union forces as soldiers and sailors. By the end of the war, nearly two hundred thousand African Americans had fought for the Union cause, and Lincoln referred to them as indispensable in ensuring Union victory.

Personal Tragedies and Triumphs

While the war raged, Lincoln also suffered great personal anguish over the death of his beloved son and the depressed mental condition of his wife, Mary. The pain of war and personal loss affected him deeply, and he often expressed his anguish by turning to humor and by speaking eloquently about the meaning of the great war which raged across the land. His Gettysburg Address, delivered after the Battle of Gettysburg, as well as his second inaugural in 1865, are acknowledged to be among the great orations in American history.

Almost all historians judge Lincoln as the greatest President in American history because of the way he exercised leadership during the war and because of the impact of that leadership on the moral and political character of the nation. He conceived of his presidential role as unique under the Constitution in times of crisis. Lincoln was convinced that within the branches of government, the presidency alone was empowered not only to uphold the Constitution, but also to preserve, protect, and defend it. In the end, however, Lincoln is measured by his most lasting accomplishments: the preservation of the Union, the vindication of democracy, and the death of slavery—accomplishments achieved by acting "with malice towards none" in the pursuit of a more perfect and equal union.

Michael Burlingame

Professor Emeritus of History Connecticut College

More Resources

Abraham lincoln presidency page, abraham lincoln essays, life in brief (current essay), life before the presidency, campaigns and elections, domestic affairs, foreign affairs, death of the president, family life, the american franchise, impact and legacy.

Essay on Life for Students and Children

500+ words essay on life.

First of all, Life refers to an aspect of existence. This aspect processes acts, evaluates, and evolves through growth. Life is what distinguishes humans from inorganic matter. Some individuals certainly enjoy free will in Life. Others like slaves and prisoners don’t have that privilege. However, Life isn’t just about living independently in society. It is certainly much more than that. Hence, quality of Life carries huge importance. Above all, the ultimate purpose should be to live a meaningful life. A meaningful life is one which allows us to connect with our deeper self.

Why is Life Important?

One important aspect of Life is that it keeps going forward. This means nothing is permanent. Hence, there should be a reason to stay in dejection. A happy occasion will come to pass, just like a sad one. Above all, one must be optimistic no matter how bad things get. This is because nothing will stay forever. Every situation, occasion, and event shall pass. This is certainly a beauty of Life.

Many people become very sad because of failures . However, these people certainly fail to see the bright side. The bright side is that there is a reason for every failure. Therefore, every failure teaches us a valuable lesson. This means every failure builds experience. This experience is what improves the skills and efficiency of humans.

Probably a huge number of individuals complain that Life is a pain. Many people believe that the word pain is a synonym for Life. However, it is pain that makes us stronger. Pain is certainly an excellent way of increasing mental resilience. Above all, pain enriches the mind.

The uncertainty of death is what makes life so precious. No one knows the hour of one’s death. This probably is the most important reason to live life to the fullest. Staying in depression or being a workaholic is an utter wastage of Life. One must certainly enjoy the beautiful blessings of Life before death overtakes.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Improve Quality of Life?

Most noteworthy, optimism is the ultimate way of enriching life. Optimism increases job performance, self-confidence, creativity, and skills. An optimistic person certainly can overcome huge hurdles.

Meditation is another useful way of improving Life quality. Meditation probably allows a person to dwell upon his past. This way one can avoid past mistakes. It also gives peace of mind to an individual. Furthermore, meditation reduces stress and tension.

Pursuing a hobby is a perfect way to bring meaning to life. Without a passion or interest, an individual’s life would probably be dull. Following a hobby certainly brings new energy to life. It provides new hope to live and experience Life.

In conclusion, Life is not something that one should take for granted. It’s certainly a shame to see individuals waste away their lives. We should be very thankful for experiencing our lives. Above all, everyone should try to make their life more meaningful.

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Ruby Bridges: a Pioneering Journey through the Tides of History

This essay about Ruby Bridges explores her early life and the significant role she played in the Civil Rights Movement. Born into segregation-era America, Bridges became an emblem of courage and resilience as the first African American student to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Despite facing hostility and isolation, Bridges’ determination to receive an education and challenge racial injustice resonates as a powerful example of individual agency in the face of adversity. Through her story, the essay highlights the transformative power of education and the enduring legacy of those who dare to stand up against oppression.

How it works

In the rich tapestry of American history, one thread stands out boldly: the story of Ruby Bridges. Born amidst the cotton fields and magnolia blossoms of rural Mississippi on a September day in 1954, Ruby’s early life was woven with the fibers of struggle and perseverance that defined her journey through the labyrinth of segregation and towards the beacon of equality.

Within the confines of her modest home, nestled beneath the canopy of towering oak trees, Ruby Bridges’ childhood unfolded against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South.

The daughter of hardworking parents, Abon and Lucille Bridges, Ruby’s upbringing was imbued with the values of resilience and fortitude. Though the specter of discrimination loomed large, casting shadows across the landscape of her youth, Ruby’s parents nurtured within her a seed of hope – a belief in the transformative power of education to transcend the barriers of race and prejudice.

The winds of change began to whisper through the corridors of history in the early 1960s, as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum and swept across the nation like a mighty river breaking free from its banks. It was amidst this tumultuous tide that Ruby Bridges found herself thrust into the spotlight, a symbol of courage and resilience in the face of bigotry and hatred. At the tender age of six, Ruby became a pioneer, the first African American child to cross the threshold of William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana, and integrate its hallowed halls.

The journey from her modest home to the schoolhouse door was fraught with peril, as Ruby braved a gauntlet of jeers and taunts hurled by those who sought to keep her chained by the shackles of segregation. Yet, like a beacon of light cutting through the darkness, Ruby pressed forward, her tiny footsteps leaving an indelible mark on the pages of history. Flanked by federal marshals, she walked with head held high, her eyes fixed firmly on the horizon of a brighter tomorrow.

Inside the walls of William Frantz Elementary, Ruby Bridges’ presence was a catalyst for change, sparking conversations and challenging assumptions about race and equality. Despite the hostility and isolation she faced, Ruby’s thirst for knowledge remained unquenched, her spirit unbroken. She sat alone in her classroom, a solitary figure amidst rows of empty desks, as other parents withdrew their children in protest. Yet, through it all, Ruby’s teacher, Barbara Henry, stood by her side, a beacon of hope in a sea of uncertainty.

The saga of Ruby Bridges transcends the boundaries of time and place, resonating with individuals of all backgrounds and generations. Her courage in the face of adversity serves as a reminder of the power of one individual to effect change, to bend the arc of history towards justice. Through her journey, Ruby Bridges became more than a symbol – she became a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit, a reminder that, in the face of darkness, even the smallest flicker of hope can illuminate the path forward.

Today, as we look back on Ruby Bridges’ early life and the indelible mark she left on the pages of history, let us not only celebrate her bravery but also heed the lessons of her journey. Let us remember that the struggle for equality is not a sprint but a marathon, a journey of many steps and countless obstacles. And let us draw inspiration from Ruby’s unwavering commitment to justice, as we continue to strive towards a world where all are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

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Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control

The private and public seductions of the world’s biggest pop neuroscientist..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

For the past three years, one of the biggest podcasters on the planet has told a story to millions of listeners across half a dozen shows: There was a little boy, and the boy’s family was happy, until one day, the boy’s family fell apart. The boy was sent away. He foundered, he found therapy, he found science, he found exercise. And he became strong.

Today, Andrew Huberman is a stiff, jacked 48-year-old associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is given to delivering three-hour lectures on subjects such as “the health of our dopaminergic neurons.” His podcast is revelatory largely because it does not condescend, which has not been the way of public-health information in our time. He does not give the impression of someone diluting science to universally applicable sound bites for the slobbering masses. “Dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or it’s released volumetrically, but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the density of those G-protein-coupled receptors,” is how he explains the effect of coffee before exercise in a two-hour-and-16-minute deep dive that has, as of this writing, nearly 8.9 million views on YouTube.

In This Issue

Falling for dr. huberman.

Millions of people feel compelled to hear him draw distinctions between neuromodulators and classical neurotransmitters. Many of those people will then adopt an associated “protocol.” They will follow his elaborate morning routine. They will model the most basic functions of human life — sleeping, eating, seeing — on his sober advice. They will tell their friends to do the same. “He’s not like other bro podcasters,” they will say, and they will be correct; he is a tenured Stanford professor associated with a Stanford lab; he knows the difference between a neuromodulator and a neurotransmitter. He is just back from a sold-out tour in Australia, where he filled the Sydney Opera House. Stanford, at one point, hung signs (AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY) apparently to deter fans in search of the lab.

With this power comes the power to lift other scientists out of their narrow silos and turn them, too, into celebrities, but these scientists will not be Huberman, whose personal appeal is distinct. Here we have a broad-minded professor puppyishly enamored with the wonders of biological function, generous to interviewees (“I love to be wrong”), engaged in endearing attempts to sound like a normal person (“Now, we all have to eat, and it’s nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact”).

This is a world in which the soft art of self-care is made concrete, in which Goop-adjacent platitudes find solidity in peer review. “People go, ‘Oh, that feels kind of like weenie stuff,’” Huberman tells Joe Rogan. “The data show that gratitude, and avoiding toxic people and focusing on good-quality social interactions … huge increases in serotonin.” “Hmmm,” Rogan says. There is a kindness to the way Huberman reminds his audience always of the possibilities of neuroplasticity: They can change. He has changed. As an adolescent, he says, he endured the difficult divorce of his parents, a Stanford professor who worked in the tech industry and a children’s-book author. The period after the separation was, he says, one of “pure neglect.” His father was gone, his mother “totally checked out.” He was forced, around age 14, to endure a month of “youth detention,” a situation that was “not a jail,” but harrowing in its own right.

“The thing that really saved me,” Huberman tells Peter Attia, “was this therapy thing … I was like, Oh, shit … I do have to choke back a little bit here. It’s a crazy thing to have somebody say, ‘Listen,’ like, to give you the confidence, like, ‘We’re gonna figure this out. We’re gonna figure this out. ’ There’s something very powerful about that. It wasn’t like, you know, ‘Everything will be okay.’ It was like, We’re gonna figure this out. ”

The wayward son would devote himself to therapy and also to science. He would turn Rancid all the way up and study all night long. He would be tenured at Stanford with his own lab, severing optic nerves in mice and noting what grew back.

Huberman has been in therapy, he says, since high school. He has, in fact, several therapists, and psychiatrist Paul Conti appears on his podcast frequently to discuss mental health. Therapy is “hard work … like going to the gym and doing an effective workout.” The brain is a machine that needs tending. Our cells will benefit from the careful management of stress. “I love mechanism, ” says Huberman; our feelings are integral to the apparatus. There are Huberman Husbands (men who optimize), a phenomenon not to be confused with #DaddyHuberman (used by women on TikTok in the man’s thrall).

A prophet must constrain his self-revelation. He must give his story a shape that ultimately tends toward inner strength, weakness overcome. For Andrew Huberman to become your teacher and mine, as he very much was for a period this fall — a period in which I diligently absorbed sun upon waking, drank no more than once a week, practiced physiological sighs in traffic, and said to myself, out loud in my living room, “I also love mechanism”; a period during which I began to think seriously, for the first time in my life, about reducing stress, and during which both my husband and my young child saw tangible benefit from repeatedly immersing themselves in frigid water; a period in which I realized that I not only liked this podcast but liked other women who liked this podcast — he must be, in some way, better than the rest of us.

Huberman sells a dream of control down to the cellular level. But something has gone wrong. In the midst of immense fame, a chasm has opened between the podcaster preaching dopaminergic restraint and a man, with newfound wealth, with access to a world unseen by most professors. The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you.

Some of Andrew’s earliest Instagram posts are of his lab. We see smiling undergraduates “slicing, staining, and prepping brains” and a wall of framed science publications in which Huberman-authored papers appear: Nature, Cell Reports, The Journal of Neuroscience. In 2019, under the handle @hubermanlab, Andrew began posting straightforward educational videos in which he talks directly into the camera about subjects such as the organizational logic of the brain stem. Sometimes he would talk over a simple anatomical sketch on lined paper; the impression was, as it is now, of a fast-talking teacher in conversation with an intelligent student. The videos amassed a fan base, and Andrew was, in 2020, invited on some of the biggest podcasts in the world. On Lex Fridman Podcast, he talked about experiments his lab was conducting by inducing fear in people. On The Rich Roll Podcast, the relationship between breathing and motivation. On The Joe Rogan Experience, experiments his lab was conducting on mice.

He was a fluid, engaging conversationalist, rich with insight and informed advice. In a year of death and disease, when many felt a sense of agency slipping away, Huberman had a gentle plan. The subtext was always the same: We may live in chaos, but there are mechanisms of control.

By then he had a partner, Sarah, which is not her real name. Sarah was someone who could talk to anyone about anything. She was dewy and strong and in her mid-40s, though she looked a decade younger, with two small kids from a previous relationship. She had old friends who adored her and no trouble making new ones. She came across as scattered in the way she jumped readily from topic to topic in conversation, losing the thread before returning to it, but she was in fact extremely organized. She was a woman who kept track of things. She was an entrepreneur who could organize a meeting, a skill she would need later for reasons she could not possibly have predicted. When I asked her a question in her home recently, she said the answer would be on an old phone; she stood up, left for only a moment, and returned with a box labeled OLD PHONES.

Sarah’s relationship with Andrew began in February 2018 in the Bay Area, where they both lived. He messaged her on Instagram and said he owned a home in Piedmont, a wealthy city separate from Oakland. That turned out not to be precisely true; he lived off Piedmont Avenue, which was in Oakland. He was courtly and a bit formal, as he would later be on the podcast. In July, in her garden, Sarah says she asked to clarify the depth of their relationship. They decided, she says, to be exclusive.

Both had devoted their lives to healthy living: exercise, good food, good information. They cared immoderately about what went into their bodies. Andrew could command a room and clearly took pleasure in doing so. He was busy and handsome, healthy and extremely ambitious. He gave the impression of working on himself; throughout their relationship, he would talk about “repair” and “healthy merging.” He was devoted to his bullmastiff, Costello, whom he worried over constantly: Was Costello comfortable? Sleeping properly? Andrew liked to dote on the dog, she says, and he liked to be doted on by Sarah. “I was never sitting around him,” she says. She cooked for him and felt glad when he relished what she had made. Sarah was willing to have unprotected sex because she believed they were monogamous.

On Thanksgiving in 2018, Sarah planned to introduce Andrew to her parents and close friends. She was cooking. Andrew texted repeatedly to say he would be late, then later. According to a friend, “he was just, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be there. Oh, I’m going to be running hours late.’ And then of course, all of these things were planned around his arrival and he just kept going, ‘Oh, I’m going to be late.’ And then it’s the end of the night and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry this and this happened.’”

Huberman disappearing was something of a pattern. Friends, girlfriends, and colleagues describe him as hard to reach. The list of reasons for not showing up included a book, time-stamping the podcast, Costello, wildfires, and a “meetings tunnel.” “He is flaky and doesn’t respond to things,” says his friend Brian MacKenzie, a health influencer who has collaborated with him on breathing protocols. “And if you can’t handle that, Andrew definitely is not somebody you want to be close to.” “He in some ways disappeared,” says David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who calls Andrew “prodigiously smart” and “intensely engaging.” “I mean, I recently got a really nice email from him. Which I was touched by. I really was.”

In 2018, before he was famous, Huberman invited a Colorado-based investigative journalist and anthropologist, Scott Carney, to his home in Oakland for a few days; the two would go camping and discuss their mutual interest in actionable science. It had been Huberman, a fan of Carney’s book What Doesn’t Kill Us, who initially reached out, and the two became friendly over phone and email. Huberman confirmed Carney’s list of camping gear: sleeping bag, bug spray, boots.

When Carney got there, the two did not go camping. Huberman simply disappeared for most of a day and a half while Carney stayed home with Costello. He puttered around Huberman’s place, buying a juice, walking through the neighborhood, waiting for him to return. “It was extremely weird,” says Carney. Huberman texted from elsewhere saying he was busy working on a grant. (A spokesperson for Huberman says he clearly communicated to Carney that he went to work.) Eventually, instead of camping, the two went on a few short hikes.

Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,” says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a memory that one feels the need to watch what one says; a stray comment could surface three years later. And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but I can tell something I said sent him down a path that he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I need to wait for him to come back. ”

Andrew Huberman declined to be interviewed for this story. Through a spokesman, Huberman says he did not become exclusive with Sarah until late 2021, that he was not doted on, that tasks between him and Sarah were shared “based on mutual agreement and proficiency,” that their Thanksgiving plans were tentative, and that he “maintains a very busy schedule and shows up to the vast majority of his commitments.”

In the fall of 2020, Huberman sold his home in Oakland and rented one in Topanga, a wooded canyon enclave contiguous with Los Angeles. When he came back to Stanford, he stayed with Sarah, and when he was in Topanga, Sarah was often with him.

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man. “I experienced his rage,” Sarah recalls, “as two to three days of yelling in a row. When he was in this state, he would go on until 11 or 12 at night and sometimes start again at two or three in the morning.”

The relationship struck Sarah’s friends as odd. At one point, Sarah said, “I just want to be with my kids and cook for my man.” “I was like, Who says that? ” says a close friend. “I mean, I’ve known her for 30 years. She’s a powerful, decisive, strong woman. We grew up in this very feminist community. That’s not a thing either of us would ever say.”

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”

Sarah was not the only person who experienced the extent of Andrew’s anger. In 2019, Carney sent Huberman materials from his then-forthcoming book, The Wedge, in which Huberman appears. He asked Huberman to confirm the parts in which he was mentioned. For months, Huberman did not respond. Carney sent a follow-up email; if Huberman did not respond, he would assume everything was accurate. In 2020, after months of saying he was too busy to review the materials, Huberman called him and, Carney says, came at him in a rage. “I’ve never had a source I thought was friendly go bananas,” says Carney. Screaming, Huberman threatened to sue and accused Carney of “violating Navy OpSec.”

It had become, by then, one of the most perplexing relationships of Carney’s life. That year, Carney agreed to Huberman’s invitation to swim with sharks on an island off Mexico. First, Carney would have to spend a month of his summer getting certified in Denver. He did, at considerable expense. Huberman then canceled the trip a day before they were set to leave. “I think Andrew likes building up people’s expectations,” says Carney, “and then he actually enjoys the opportunity to pull the rug out from under you.”

In January 2021, Huberman launched his own podcast. Its reputation would be directly tied to his role as teacher and scientist. “I’d like to emphasize that this podcast,” he would say every episode, with his particular combination of formality and discursiveness, “is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.”

“I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts to repair that,” Huberman would say on an episode in 2024. “Loneliness,” his interviewee said, “is a need state.” In 2021, the country was in the later stages of a need state: bored, alone, powerless. Huberman offered not only hours of educative listening but a plan to structure your day. A plan for waking. For eating. For exercising. For sleep. At a time when life had shifted to screens, he brought people back to their corporeal selves. He advised a “physiological sigh” — two short breaths in and a long one out — to reduce stress. He pulled countless people from their laptops and put them in rhythm with the sun. “Thank you for all you do to better humanity,” read comments on YouTube. “You may have just saved my life man.” “If Andrew were science teacher for everyone in the world,” someone wrote, “no one would have missed even a single class.”

Asked by Time last year for his definition of fun, Huberman said, “I learn and I like to exercise.” Among his most famous episodes is one in which he declares moderate drinking decidedly unhealthy. As MacKenzie puts it, “I don’t think anybody or anything, including Prohibition, has ever made more people think about alcohol than Andrew Huberman.” While he claims repeatedly that he doesn’t want to “demonize alcohol,” he fails to mask his obvious disapproval of anyone who consumes alcohol in any quantity. He follows a time-restricted eating schedule. He discusses constraint even in joy, because a dopamine spike is invariably followed by a drop below baseline; he explains how even a small pleasure like a cup of coffee before every workout reduces the capacity to release dopamine. Huberman frequently refers to the importance of “social contact” and “peace, contentment, and delight,” always mentioned as a triad; these are ultimately leveraged for the one value consistently espoused: physiological health.

In August 2021, Sarah says she read Andrew’s journal and discovered a reference to cheating. She was, she says, “gutted.” “I hear you are saying you are angry and hurt,” he texted her the same day. “I will hear you as much as long as needed for us.”

Andrew and Sarah wanted children together. Optimizers sometimes prefer not to conceive naturally; one can exert more control when procreation involves a lab. Sarah began the first of several rounds of IVF. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies that he and Sarah had decided to have children together, clarifying that they “decided to create embryos by IVF.”)

In 2021, she tested positive for a high-risk form of HPV, one of the variants linked to cervical cancer. “I had never tested positive,” she says, “and had been tested regularly for ten years.” (A spokesperson for Huberman says he has never tested positive for HPV. According to the CDC, there is currently no approved test for HPV in men.) When she brought it up, she says, he told her you could contract HPV from many things.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about truth-telling and deception,” Andrew told evolutionary psychologist David Buss on a November 2021 episode of Huberman Lab called “How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in Short & Long Term.” They were talking about regularities across cultures in mate preferences.

“Could you tell us,” Andrew asked, “about how men and women leverage deception versus truth-telling and communicating some of the things around mate choice selection?”

“Effective tactics for men,” said a gravel-voiced, 68-year-old Buss, “are often displaying cues to long-term interest … men tend to exaggerate the depths of their feelings for a woman.”

“Let’s talk about infidelity in committed relationships,” Andrew said, laughing. “I’m guessing it does happen.”

“Men who have affairs tend to have affairs with a larger number of affair partners,” said Buss. “And so which then by definition can’t be long-lasting. You can’t,” added Buss wryly, “have the long-term affairs with six different partners.”

“Yeah,” said Andrew, “unless he’s, um,” and here Andrew looked into the distance. “Juggling multiple, uh, phone accounts or something of that sort.”

“Right, right, right, and some men try to do that, but I think it could be very taxing,” said Buss.

By 2022, Andrew was legitimately famous. Typical headlines read “I tried a Stanford professor’s top productivity routine” and “Google CEO Uses ‘Nonsleep Deep Rest’ to Relax.” Reese Witherspoon told the world that she was sure to get ten minutes of sunlight in the morning and tagged Andrew. When he was not on his own podcast, Andrew was on someone else’s. He kept the place in Topanga, but he and Sarah began splitting rent in Berkeley. In June 2022, they fully combined lives; Sarah relocated her family to Malibu to be with him.

According to Sarah, Andrew’s rage intensified with cohabitation. He fixated on her decision to have children with another man. She says he told her that being with her was like “bobbing for apples in feces.” “The pattern of your 11 years, while rooted in subconscious drives,” he told her in December 2021, “creates a nearly impossible set of hurdles for us … You have to change.”

Sarah was, in fact, changing. She felt herself getting smaller, constantly appeasing. She apologized, again and again and again. “I have been selfish, childish, and confused,” she said. “As a result, I need your protection.” A spokesperson for Huberman denies Sarah’s accounts of their fights, denies that his rage intensified with cohabitation, denies that he fixated on Sarah’s decision to have children with another man, and denies that he said being with her was like bobbing for apples in feces. A spokesperson said, “Dr. Huberman is very much in control of his emotions.”

The first three rounds of IVF did not produce healthy embryos. In the spring of 2022, enraged again about her past, Andrew asked Sarah to explain in detail what he called her bad choices, most especially having her second child. She wrote it out and read it aloud to him. A spokesperson for Huberman denies this incident and says he does not regard her having a second child as a bad choice.

I think it’s important to recognize that we might have a model of who someone is,” says Dossett, “or a model of how someone should conduct themselves. And if they do something that is out of sync with that model, it’s like, well, that might not necessarily be on that person. Maybe it’s on us. Our model was just off.”

Huberman’s specialty lies in a narrow field: visual-system wiring. How comfortable one feels with the science propagated on Huberman Lab depends entirely on how much leeway one is willing to give a man who expounds for multiple hours a week on subjects well outside his area of expertise. His detractors note that Huberman extrapolates wildly from limited animal studies, posits certainty where there is ambiguity, and stumbles when he veers too far from his narrow realm of study, but even they will tend to admit that the podcast is an expansive, free (or, as he puts it, “zero-cost”) compendium of human knowledge. There are quack guests, but these are greatly outnumbered by profound, complex, patient, and often moving descriptions of biological process.

Huberman Lab is premised on the image of a working scientist. One imagines clean white counters, rodents in cages, postdocs peering into microscopes. “As scientists,” Huberman says frequently. He speaks often, too, of the importance of mentorship. He “loves” reading teacher evaluations. On the web, one can visit the lab and even donate. I have never met a Huberman listener who doubted the existence of such a place, and this appears to be by design. In a glowing 2023 profile in Stanford magazine, we learn “Everything he does is inspired by this love,” but do not learn that Huberman lives 350 miles and a six-hour drive from Stanford University, making it difficult to drop into the lab. Compounding the issue is the fact that the lab, according to knowledgeable sources, barely exists.

“Is a postdoc working on her own funding, alone, a ‘lab?’” asks a researcher at Stanford. There had been a lab — four rooms on the second floor of the Sherman Fairchild Science Building. Some of them smelled of mice. It was here that researchers anesthetized rodents, injected them with fluorescence, damaged their optic nerves, and watched for the newly bright nerves to grow back.

The lab, says the researcher, was already scaling down before COVID. It was emptying out, postdocs apparently unsupervised, a quarter-million-dollar laser-scanning microscope gathering dust. Once the researcher saw someone come in and reclaim a $3,500 rocker, a machine for mixing solutions.

Shortly before publication, a spokesperson for Stanford said, “Dr. Huberman’s lab at Stanford is operational and is in the process of moving from the Department of Neurobiology to the Department of Ophthalmology,” and a spokesperson for Huberman says the equipment in Dr. Huberman’s lab remained in use until the last postdoc moved to a faculty position.

On every episode of his “zero-cost” podcast, Huberman gives a lengthy endorsement of a powder formerly known as Athletic Greens and now as AG1. It is one thing to hear Athletic Greens promoted by Joe Rogan; it is perhaps another to hear someone who sells himself as a Stanford University scientist just back from the lab proclaim that this $79-a-month powder “covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.” In an industry not noted for its integrity, AG1 is, according to writer and professional debunker Derek Beres, “one of the most egregious players in the space.” Here we have a powder that contains, according to its own marketing, 75 active ingredients, far more than the typical supplement, which would seem a selling point but for the inconveniences of mass. As performance nutritionist Adam McDonald points out, the vast number of ingredients indicates that each ingredient, which may or may not promote good health in a certain dose, is likely included in minuscule amounts, though consumers are left to do the math themselves; the company keeps many of the numbers proprietary. “We can be almost guaranteed that literally every supplement or ingredient within this proprietary blend is underdosed,” explains McDonald; the numbers, he says, don’t appear to add up to anything research has shown to be meaningful in terms of human health outcomes. And indeed, “the problem with most of the probiotics is they’re typically not concentrated enough to actually colonize,” one learns from Dr. Layne Norton in a November 2022 episode of Huberman Lab. (AG1 argues that probiotics are effective and that the 75 ingredients are “included not only for their individual benefit, but for the synergy between them — how ingredients interact in complex ways, and how combinations can lead to additive effects.”) “That’s the good news about podcasts,” Huberman said when Wendy Zukerman of Science Vs pointed out that her podcast would never make recommendations based on such tenuous research. “People can choose which podcast they want to listen to.”

Whenever Sarah had suspicions about Andrew’s interactions with another woman, he had a particular way of talking about the woman in question. She says he said the women were stalkers, alcoholics, and compulsive liars. He told her that one woman tore out her hair with chunks of flesh attached to it. He told her a story about a woman who fabricated a story about a dead baby to “entrap” him. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies the account of the denigration of women and the dead-baby story and says the hair story was taken out of context.) Most of the time, Sarah believed him; the women probably were crazy. He was a celebrity. He had to be careful.

It was in August 2022 that Sarah noticed she and Andrew could not go out without being thronged by people. On a camping trip in Washington State that same month, Sarah brought syringes and a cooler with ice packs. Every day of the trip, he injected the drugs meant to stimulate fertility into her stomach. This was round four.

Later that month, Sarah says she grabbed Andrew’s phone when he had left it in the bathroom, checked his texts, and found conversations with someone we will call Eve. Some of them took place during the camping trip they had just taken.

“Your feelings matter,” he told Eve on a day when he had injected his girlfriend with hCG. “I’m actually very much a caretaker.” And later: “I’m back on grid tomorrow and would love to see you this weekend.”

Caught having an affair, Andrew was apologetic. “The landscape has been incredibly hard,” he said. “I let the stress get to me … I defaulted to self safety … I’ve also sat with the hardest of feelings.” “I hear your insights,” he said, “and honestly I appreciate them.”

Sarah noticed how courteous he was with Eve. “So many offers,” she pointed out, “to process and work through things.”

Eve is an ethereally beautiful actress, the kind of woman from whom it is hard to look away. Where Sarah exudes a winsome chaotic energy, Eve is intimidatingly collected. Eve saw Andrew on Raya in 2020 and messaged him on Instagram. They went for a swim in Venice, and he complimented her form. “You’re definitely,” he said, “on the faster side of the distribution.” She found him to be an extraordinary listener, and she liked the way he appeared to be interested in her internal life. He was busy all the time: with his book, and eventually the podcast; his dog; responsibilities at Stanford. “I’m willing to do the repair work on this,” he said when she called him out for standing her up, or, “This sucks, but doesn’t deter my desire and commitment to see you, and establish clear lines of communication and trust.” Despite his endless excuses for not showing up, he seemed, to Eve, to be serious about deepening their relationship, which lasted on and off for two years. Eve had the impression that he was not seeing anyone else: She was willing to have unprotected sex.

As their relationship intensified over the years, he talked often about the family he one day wanted. “Our children would be amazing,” he said. She asked for book recommendations and he suggested, jokingly, Huberman: Why We Made Babies. “I’m at the stage of life where I truly want to build a family,” he told her. “That’s a resounding theme for me.” “How to mesh lives,” he said in a voice memo. “A fundamental question.” One time she heard him say, on Joe Rogan, that he had a girlfriend. She texted him to ask about it, and he responded immediately. He had a stalker, he said, and so his team had decided to invent a partner for the listening public. (“I later learned,” Eve tells me with characteristic equanimity, “that this was not true.”)

In September 2022, Eve noticed that Sarah was looking at her Instagram stories; not commenting or liking, just looking. Impulsively, Eve messaged her. “Is there anything you’d rather ask me directly?” she said. They set up a call. “Fuck you Andrew,” she messaged him.

Sarah moved out in August 2023 but says she remained in a committed relationship with Huberman. (A spokesperson for Huberman says they were separated.) At Thanksgiving that year, she noticed he was “wiggly” every time a cell phone came out at the table — trying to avoid, she suspected, being photographed. She says she did not leave him until December. According to Sarah, the relationship ended, as it had started, with a lie. He had been at her place for a couple of days and left for his place to prepare for a Zoom call; they planned to go Christmas shopping the next day. Sarah showed up at his house and found him on the couch with another woman. She could see them through the window. “If you’re going to be a cheater,” she advises me later, “do not live in a glass house.”

On January 11, a woman we’ll call Alex began liking all of Sarah’s Instagram posts, seven of them in a minute. Sarah messaged her: “I think you’re friends with my ex, Andrew Huberman. Are you one of the woman he cheated on me with?” Alex is an intense, direct, highly educated woman who lives in New York; she was sleeping with Andrew; and she had no idea there had been a girlfriend. “Fuck,” she said. “I think we should talk.” Over the following weeks, Sarah and Alex never stopped texting. “She helped me hold my boundary against him,” says Sarah, “keep him blocked. She said, ‘You need to let go of the idea of him.’” Instead of texting Andrew, Sarah texted Alex. Sometimes they just talked about their days and not about Andrew at all. Sarah still thought beautiful Eve, on the other hand, “might be crazy,” but they talked some more and brought her into the group chat. Soon there were others. There was Mary: a dreamy, charismatic Texan he had been seeing for years. Her friends called Andrew “bread crumbs,” given his tendency to disappear. There was a fifth woman in L.A., funny and fast-talking. Alex had been apprehensive; she felt foolish for believing Andrew’s lies and worried that the other women would seem foolish, therefore compounding her shame. Foolish women were not, however, what she found. Each of the five was assertive and successful and educated and sharp-witted; there had been a type, and they were diverse expressions of that type. “I can’t believe how crazy I thought you were,” Mary told Sarah. No one struck anyone else as a stalker. No one had made up a story about a dead baby or torn out hair with chunks in it. “I haven’t slept with anyone but him for six years,” Sarah told the group. “If it makes you feel any better,” Alex joked, “according to the CDC,” they had all slept with one another.

The women compared time-stamped screenshots of texts and assembled therein an extraordinary record of deception.

There was a day in Texas when, after Sarah left his hotel, Andrew slept with Mary and texted Eve. They found days in which he would text nearly identical pictures of himself to two of them at the same time. They realized that the day before he had moved in with Sarah in Berkeley, he had slept with Mary, and he had also been with her in December 2023, the weekend before Sarah caught him on the couch with a sixth woman.

They realized that on March 21, 2021, a day of admittedly impressive logistical jujitsu, while Sarah was in Berkeley, Andrew had flown Mary from Texas to L.A. to stay with him in Topanga. While Mary was there, visiting from thousands of miles away, he left her with Costello. He drove to a coffee shop, where he met Eve. They had a serious talk about their relationship. They thought they were in a good place. He wanted to make it work.

“Phone died,” he texted Mary, who was waiting back at the place in Topanga. And later, to Eve: “Thank you … For being so next, next, level gorgeous and sexy.”

“Sleep well beautiful,” he texted Sarah.

“The scheduling alone!” Alex tells me. “I can barely schedule three Zooms in a day.”

In the aggregate, Andrew’s therapeutic language took on a sinister edge. It was communicating a commitment that was not real, a profound interest in the internality of women that was then used to manipulate them.

“Does Huberman have vices?” asks an anonymous Reddit poster.

“I remember him saying,” reads the first comment, “that he loves croissants.”

While Huberman has been criticized for having too few women guests on his podcast, he is solicitous and deferential toward those he interviews. In a January 2023 episode, Dr. Sara Gottfried argues that “patriarchal messaging” and white supremacy contribute to the deterioration of women’s health, and Andrew responds with a story about how his beloved trans mentor, Ben Barres, had experienced “intense suppression/oppression” at MIT before transitioning. “Psychology is influencing biology,” he says with concern. “And you’re saying these power dynamics … are impacting it.”

In private, he could sometimes seem less concerned about patriarchy. Multiple women recall him saying he preferred the kind of relationship in which the woman was monogamous but the man was not. “He told me,” says Mary, “that what he wanted was a woman who was submissive, who he could slap in the ass in public, and who would be crawling on the floor for him when he got home.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.) The women continued to compare notes. He had his little ways of checking in: “Good morning beautiful.” There was a particular way he would respond to a sexy picture: “Mmmmm hi there.”

A spokesperson for Huberman insisted that he had not been monogamous with Sarah until late 2021, but a recorded conversation he had with Alex suggested that in May of that year he had led Sarah to believe otherwise. “Well, she was under the impression that we were exclusive at that time,” he said. “Women are not dumb like that, dude,” Alex responded. “She was under that impression? Then you were giving her that impression.” Andrew agreed: “That’s what I meant. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put it on her.”

The kind of women to whom Andrew Huberman was attracted; the kind of women who were attracted to him — these were women who paid attention to what went into their bodies, women who made avoiding toxicity a central focus of their lives. They researched non-hormone-disrupting products, avoided sugar, ate organic. They were disgusted by the knowledge that they had had sex with someone who had an untold number of partners. All of them wondered how many others there were. When Sarah found Andrew with the other woman, there had been a black pickup truck in the driveway, and she had taken a picture. The women traced the plates, but they hit a dead end and never found her.

Tell us about the dark triad,” he had said to Buss in November on the trip in which he slept with Mary.

“The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics,” said Buss. “So narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” Such people “feign cooperation but then cheat on subsequent moves. They view other people as pawns to be manipulated for their own instrumental gains.” Those “who are high on dark-triad traits,” he said, “tend to be good at the art of seduction.” The vast majority of them were men.

Andrew told one of the women that he wasn’t a sex addict; he was a love addict. Addiction, Huberman says, “is a progressing narrowing of things that bring you joy.” In August 2021, the same month Sarah first learned of Andrew’s cheating, he released an episode with Anna Lembke, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Lembke, the author of a book called Dopamine Nation, gave a clear explanation of the dopaminergic roots of addiction.

“What happens right after I do something that is really pleasurable,” she says, “and releases a lot of dopamine is, again, my brain is going to immediately compensate by downregulating my own dopamine receptors … And that’s that comedown, or the hangover or that aftereffect, that moment of wanting to do it more.” Someone who waits for the feeling to pass, she explained, will reregulate, go back to baseline. “If I keep indulging again and again and again,” she said, “ultimately I have so much on the pain side that I’ve essentially reset my brain to what we call anhedonic or lacking-in-joy type of state, which is a dopamine deficit state.” This is a state in which nothing is enjoyable: “Everything sort of pales in comparison to this one drug that I want to keep doing.”

“Just for the record,” Andrew said, smiling, “Dr. Lembke has … diagnosed me outside the clinic, in a playful way, of being work addicted. You’re probably right!”

Lembke laughed. “You just happen to be addicted,” she said gently, “to something that is really socially rewarded.”

What he failed to understand, he said, was people who ruined their lives with their disease. “I like to think I have the compassion,” he said, “but I don’t have that empathy for taking a really good situation and what from the outside looks to be throwing it in the trash.”

At least three ex-girlfriends remain friendly with Huberman. He “goes deep very quickly,” says Keegan Amit, who dated Andrew from 2010 to 2017 and continues to admire him. “He has incredible emotional capacity.” A high-school girlfriend says both she and he were “troubled” during their time together, that he was complicated and jealous but “a good person” whom she parted with on good terms. “He really wants to get involved emotionally but then can’t quite follow through,” says someone he dated on and off between 2006 and 2010. “But yeah. I don’t think it’s …” She hesitates. “I think he has such a good heart.”

Andrew grew up in Palo Alto just before the dawn of the internet, a lost city. He gives some version of his origin story on The Rich Roll Podcast ; he repeats it for Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia. He tells Time magazine and Stanford magazine. “Take the list of all the things a parent shouldn’t do in a divorce,” he recently told Christian bowhunter Cameron Hanes. “They did them all.” “You had,” says Wendy Zukerman in her bright Aussie accent, “a wayward childhood.” “I think it’s very easy for people listening to folks with a bio like yours,” says Tim Ferriss, “to sort of assume a certain trajectory, right? To assume that it has always come easy.” His father and mother agree that “after our divorce was an incredibly hard time for Andrew,” though they “do not agree” with some of his characterization of his past; few parents want to be accused of “pure neglect.”

Huberman would not provide the name of the detention center in which he says he was held for a month in high school. In a version of the story Huberman tells on Peter Attia’s podcast, he says, “We lost a couple of kids, a couple of kids killed themselves while we were there.” ( New York was unable to find an account of this event.)

Andrew attended Gunn, a high-performing, high-pressure high school. Classmates describe him as always with a skateboard; they remember him as pleasant, “sweet,” and not particularly academic. He would, says one former classmate, “drop in on the half-pipe,” where he was “encouraging” to other skaters. “I mean, he was a cool, individual kid,” says another classmate. “There was one year he, like, bleached his hair and everyone was like, ‘Oh, that guy’s cool.’” It was a wealthy place, the kind of setting where the word au pair comes up frequently, and Andrew did not stand out to his classmates as out of control or unpredictable. They do not recall him getting into street fights, as Andrew claims he did. He was, says Andrew’s father, “a little bit troubled, yes, but it was not something super-serious.”

What does seem certain is that in his adolescence, Andrew became a regular consumer of talk therapy. In therapy, one learns to tell stories about one’s experience. A story one could tell is: I overcame immense odds to be where I am. Another is: The son of a Stanford professor, born at Stanford Hospital, grows up to be a Stanford professor.

I have never,” says Amit, “met a man more interested in personal growth.” Andrew’s relationship to therapy remains intriguing. “We were at dinner once,” says Eve, “and he told me something personal, and I suggested he talk to his therapist. He laughed it off like that wasn’t ever going to happen, so I asked him if he lied to his therapist. He told me he did all the time.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.)

“People high on psychopathy are good at deception,” says Buss. “I don’t know if they’re good at self-deception.” With repeated listening to the podcast, one discerns a man undergoing, in public, an effort to understand himself. There are hours of talking about addiction, trauma, dopamine, and fear. Narcissism comes up consistently. One can see attempts to understand and also places where those attempts swerve into self-indulgence. On a recent episode with the Stanford-trained psychiatrist Paul Conti, Andrew and Conti were describing the psychological phenomenon of “aggressive drive.” Andrew had an example to share: He once canceled an appointment with a Stanford colleague. There was no response. Eventually, he received a reply that said, in Andrew’s telling, “Well, it’s clear that you don’t want to pursue this collaboration.”

Andrew was, he said to Conti, “shocked.”

“I remember feeling like that was pretty aggressive,” Andrew told Conti. “It stands out to me as a pretty salient example of aggression.”

“So to me,” said Huberman, “that seems like an example of somebody who has a, well, strong aggressive drive … and when disappointed, you know, lashes back or is passive.”

“There’s some way in which the person doesn’t feel good enough no matter what this person has achieved. So then there is a sense of the need and the right to overcontrol.”

“Sure,” said Huberman.

“And now we’re going to work together, right, so I’m exerting significant control over you, right? And it may be that he’s not aware of it.”

“In this case,” said Andrew, “it was a she.”

This woman, explained Conti, based entirely on Andrew’s description of two emails, had allowed her unhealthy “excess aggression” to be “eclipsing the generative drive.” She required that Andrew “bowed down before” her “in the service of the ego” because she did not feel good about herself.

This conversation extends for an extraordinary nine minutes, both men egging each other on, diagnosis after diagnosis, salient, perhaps, for reasons other than those the two identify. We learn that this person lacks gratitude, generative drive, and happiness; she suffers from envy, low “pleasure drive,” and general unhappiness. It would appear, at a distance, to be an elaborate fantasy of an insane woman built on a single behavior: At some point in time, a woman decided she did not want to work with a man who didn’t show up.

There is an argument to be made that it does not matter how a helpful podcaster conducts himself outside of the studio. A man unable to constrain his urges may still preach dopaminergic control to others. Morning sun remains salutary. The physiological sigh, employed by this writer many times in the writing of this essay, continues to effect calm. The large and growing distance between Andrew Huberman and the man he continues to be may not even matter to those who buy questionable products he has recommended and from which he will materially benefit, or listeners who imagined a man in a white coat at work in Palo Alto. The people who definitively find the space between fantasy and reality to be a problem are women who fell for a podcaster who professed deep, sustained concern for their personal growth, and who, in his skyrocketing influence, continued to project an image of earnest self-discovery. It is here, in the false belief of two minds in synchronicity and exploration, that deception leads to harm. They fear it will lead to more.

“There’s so much pain,” says Sarah, her voice breaking. “Feeling we had made mistakes. We hadn’t been enough. We hadn’t been communicating. By making these other women into the other, I hadn’t really given space for their hurt. And let it sink in with me that it was so similar to my own hurt.”

Three of the women on the group text met up in New York in February, and the group has only grown closer. On any given day, one of the five can go into an appointment and come back to 100 texts. Someone shared a Reddit thread in which a commenter claimed Huberman had a “stable full a hoes,” and another responded, “I hope he thinks of us more like Care Bears,” at which point they assigned themselves Care Bear names. “Him: You’re the only girl I let come to my apartment,” read a meme someone shared; under it was a yellow lab looking extremely skeptical. They regularly use Andrew’s usual response to explicit photos (“Mmmmm”) to comment on pictures of one another’s pets. They are holding space for other women who might join.

“This group has radicalized me,” Sarah tells me. “There has been so much processing.” They are planning a weekend together this summer.

“It could have been sad or bitter,” says Eve. “We didn’t jump in as besties, but real friendships have been built. It has been, in a strange and unlikely way, quite a beautiful experience.”

Additional reporting by Amelia Schonbek and Laura Thompson.

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Why THE BATMAN is so beautiful. | A Cinematography Video Essay

Posted: May 28, 2024 | Last updated: May 28, 2024

#thebatman #film #videoessayDirector Matt Reeves and cinematographer Greig Fraser have created an immersive world draped in darkness and mystery that makes most modern blockbusters look like amateur student films, and it’s an answer to a trend that’s cursed the entire filmmaking industry which is to make every shot look clean. But what makes The Batman dirty then? What’s so unique about how The Batman was shot that makes it so… beautiful? In this video we’re going to dive into the approach Matt Reeves and Greg Fraser took to bring their Batman to life, the lenses they used, their cinematic references, the lighting, color grading, and an interesting new approach to digital cinema with 35mm film. We also do a recreation of The Batman using an anamorphic lens and the Sony A7iv to show how you can apply the principles from The Batman to your own work. This is The Cinematography of The Batman. Chat with me about this video on Twitter: twitter.com/impatricktCheck out Dolby's Full Conversation with the filmmaking team of The Batman:https://youtu.be/S2GkwC6neiU00:00 - Intro00:54 - Intro & Context01:54 - Cinematic References02:12 - The Lenses02:34 - Make The Frame Dirty02:53 - Angles & Framing03:30 - SE7EN04:09 - I Am The Shadows04:40 - Color04:53 - Gotham City05:45 - Why So Real?06:15 - VFX06:37 - Color Grading07:36 - Thesis10:16 - The Batman Recreation11:49 - Free PizzaCamera: SONY A7iv: <a href="https://geni.us/ptsonya7iv">https://geni.us/ptsonya7iv</a> (affiliate link)35mm F1.8 Lens: <a href="https://geni.us/pt35mmsony">https://geni.us/pt35mmsony</a> (affiliate link)Voiceover Mic: <a href="https://geni.us/ptvideomicII">https://geni.us/ptvideomicII</a> (affiliate link)Dialogue Mic: <a href="https://geni.us/ptvideomicntg">https://geni.us/ptvideomicntg</a> (affiliate link)The Batman is an upcoming American superhero film based on DC Comics featuring the character Batman. Produced by DC Films and 6th & Idaho, and set for distribution by Warner Bros. Pictures, it is intended to be a reboot of the Batman film franchise. The film is being directed by Matt Reeves, who wrote the screenplay with Peter Craig, and stars Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne / Batman, alongside Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard, Barry Keoghan, Jayme Lawson, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell. Set in his second year of fighting crime, the film sees Batman uncover corruption in Gotham City while facing a serial killer known as The Riddler.

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Not a thing to do, but take a trip down memory lane! That ’70s Show managed to cultivate some of the most iconic moments in pop culture history. It’s also responsible for catapulting its younger stars Topher Grace, Laura Prepon, Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, Wilmer Valderrama and Danny Masterson into the spotlight. Created by Mark Brazill, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner, That ’70s Show centered on a group of teens growing up in the suburbs of Wisconsin in the 1970s. It ran for seven seasons on Fox from 1998 to 2006. Debra Jo Rupp, Kurtwood Smith, Don Stark, Tanya Roberts, Lisa Robin Kelly and Tommy Chong also appeared on the series. “[We] had no idea what was ahead of us, or if it would even last … but we knew it was gonna be fun,” Valderrama reflected via Instagram in August 2018, while celebrating the show’s 20-year anniversary. “We spent 8 years and 200 episodes together, we traveled the world … [and] we grew up together. We were a family, and will always be.” Grace, the series lead, and Kutcher both left the series after seven seasons. Though Josh Meyers stepped in during their absence, both actors returned for the series finale in 2006. The success of That ’70s Show also led to the release of That ’80s Show in 2002. The spinoff series featured Glenn Howerton of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame in the early days of his career. The sitcom was short-lived as it was canceled that year after one season. For more hot celebrity news, listen to Us Weekly editors dish on top topics & trends with these clips from the Hot Hollywood Podcast! Despite That ’70s Show’s continued popularity today through cable reruns and Netflix streaming, fans shouldn’t expect to see the series revived in the same fashion as Roseanne and Full House. Grace previously hinted that the likelihood of the entire cast returning for a revival is slim. “That cast has gone on to such amazing things. Each person individually has had such great success,” he explained to Newsweek in September 2018. “I would absolutely love to do it to spend time with those guys, but I don’t want to think about it too much. It’d be too fun of an idea, and I doubt it would happen.” Scroll down to see what the cast has been up to since the series wrapped!

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Is There a Constitutional Right to Talk About Abortion?

A woman peering over a barrier with an empty speech bubble coming out of her mouth.

By Linda Greenhouse

Ms. Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.

There has hardly ever been as fierce a defender of free speech as the current Supreme Court.

Since John Roberts became chief justice almost 19 years ago, the court has expanded the protective net of the First Amendment to cover such activities as selling videos depicting animal torture, spending unlimited amounts of money in support of political candidates and refusing to pay dues (or a dues-like fee) to a public employee union.

This last decision, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Council 31, overturned a 41-year-old precedent and led a dissenting justice, Elena Kagan, to accuse the majority of “weaponizing the First Amendment.” In the 303 Creative case last year, the court gave a Christian web designer the First Amendment right not to do business with would-be customers whose same-sex wedding websites would violate her views about marriage.

The court’s version of free speech has become a powerful tool against government regulation. Six years ago, effectively striking down a California law, the court gave so-called crisis pregnancy centers — offices that try to imitate abortion clinics but strive to persuade women to continue their pregnancies — a First Amendment right not to provide information on where a woman could actually get an abortion. The state said the notice was needed to help women who came to such centers under the false impression that they provided abortions. In his majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said the “unduly burdensome” requirement amounted to unconstitutionally compelled speech.

Now the question is whether the court’s solicitude toward those who would rather not talk about abortion extends in the other direction. What about state laws that prohibit rather than require offering information about where to get an abortion?

While there is not yet such a case on the Supreme Court’s docket, lower courts have been tightening a First Amendment noose around efforts by anti-abortion states to curb the flow of information about how to obtain legal abortion care across state lines. Federal District Courts in Indiana and Alabama both ruled this month that while states in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise can ban abortion, they cannot make it illegal to give abortion-related advice, including advice to minors seeking abortions without parental consent.

A federal magistrate judge issued a similar ruling last November on Idaho’s abortion law, one of the most extreme in the country, which makes it a crime to assist a minor in obtaining an abortion in any state without a parent’s consent. Idaho could criminalize abortion, the judge, Debora Grasham, wrote. “What the state cannot do,” she went on, “is craft a statute muzzling the speech and expressive activities of a particular viewpoint with which the state disagrees under the guise of parental rights.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard Idaho’s appeal on May 7.

With the Supreme Court extremely unlikely to revisit its decision 23 months ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that eradicated the constitutional right to abortion, the question of how far states can go to prevent their citizens from finding alternative ways to terminate a pregnancy will become increasingly urgent. In his concurring opinion in the Dobbs case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the question of whether a state could now “bar a resident of that state from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion.” The answer was “no,” he continued, “based on the constitutional right to interstate travel.” It is worth noting that Justice Kavanaugh wrote only for himself; none of the other conservatives who made up the Dobbs majority joined him. “Other abortion-related legal questions may emerge in the future,” Justice Kavanaugh offered noncommittally.

The future arrived quickly enough in the form of the two abortion-related cases awaiting decision before the court’s current term, which concludes at the end of June or in early July. Both are anomalous in that they involve questions of federal rather than state authority.

One, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , concerns the government’s approval of the expanded use of the medication that first received F.D.A. approval 24 years ago. Medication abortion now accounts for more than half of abortions in the United States. The case contains an off-ramp for the court that, based on the argument in March, the justices appear likely to take: Because the anti-abortion doctors, dentists and medical groups who challenged the F.D.A. suffered no harm from the availability of the medication, and are unlikely to suffer harm in the future, they never had standing to bring the case in the first place.

The other, Moyle v. United States, results from a clash between the federal government and Idaho over whether federal law requires the state to provide emergency abortion care in its hospitals. The outcome largely depends on whether the court accepts the Biden administration’s view that there is no abortion exception to the law at issue, which prohibits hospitals from turning away people who need emergency care.

In the abortion cases in Indiana, Idaho and Alabama that may yet find their way to the Supreme Court, the justices would face the acute dilemma of reconciling their fealty to the First Amendment with the profound anti-abortion sentiment the Dobbs majority opinion displayed.

In defending their laws, the states argue that what they are prohibiting is not actually speech but conduct, namely inducing criminal activity. Rejecting this argument in the Indiana case, Judge Sarah Evans Barker of Federal District Court wrote that the Planned Parenthood affiliate that challenged the law simply “seeks to provide truthful information to clients regarding out-of-state options and medical referrals to out-of-state providers for abortion services that are legal in those states.” A prohibition on providing such information, the judge said, “does not further any interest Indiana may have in investigating criminal conduct within its borders.” In the Alabama case, another Federal District Court judge, Myron Thompson, observed that “unable to proscribe out-of-state abortions, the attorney general interprets state law as punishing the speech necessary to obtain them.”

From the cases they are in the process of deciding this term, the justices are well aware that their effort to wash their hands of the nettlesome business of abortion has failed. One or more of the First Amendment cases is likely to reach the court during its next term. I wonder if the justices have a clue about how much pain lies ahead when they have to decide whether the right to speak inevitably encompasses the right to choose.

Linda Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Datebook: The Art World’s Summer Happenings to Add to Your Calendar

By Art in America

Art in America

a bold red, pink, and yellow graphic with the words "date" and "book" stacked on top of each other

The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019–2022 by Peter Schjeldahl

collection of various blank white books on white background. each one is shot separately

Few who read Peter Schjeldahl’s essay “The Art of Dying” when it was published in the New Yorker in late 2019 will ever forget its gimlet-eyed stare-down with death, but even more stirring was the fact that the fabled art critic managed to keep writing for nearly three years more. This book starts with the namesake masterpiece and collects all the rest of his words for the magazine until the end. On sale May 14

“Hilary Heron: A Retrospective” at the Irish Museum of Modern Art

In her 1949 sculpture Flight into Egypt , the Irish modernist Hilary Heron represented an episode from the book of Matthew as a highly abstracted form riding a barely visible horse on the march. The sculpture was, for her, a way of bringing the past into the present, and was intended to encompass the existentialist themes broached by others around her, including a distant relative, the playwright Samuel Beckett. The first Heron retrospective in decades will be mounted in Dublin, the city where she was born. May 24–Nov. 3

“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” at the The Broad

In mixed-media paintings, installations, photographs, and more, Mickalene Thomas has foregrounded strong Black women in states of searching and selfassuredness. This survey—opening at the Broad in Los Angeles before moving on to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Hayward Gallery in London— features 80 works made over the past 20 years, all assembled under an exhibition title borrowed from feminist writer bell hooks. May 25–Sept. 29

“In the House of the Trembling Eye: an exhibition staged by Allison Katz” at the Aspen Art Museum

At the 2022 Venice Biennale, Allison Katz exhibited a painting of two roosters dropping feed into a vessel; its style recalled that of mosaics found throughout Italy. Katz will return to ancient subject matter with this museum-filling show in Colorado rooted in her research into Pompeii, the Roman city famously buried in ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The rising Canadian painter has teased borrowing fresco fragments and other centuries-old objects for this exhibition, the details of which have been kept under wraps. May 29–Sept. 29

“Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early Works” at the Museum of Cycladic Art

Though not nearly as old as the works most commonly shown at this Athens institution, the formative offerings of photographer Cindy Sherman still mark the beginning of an era of sorts. More than 100 works from the 1970s and ’80s will feature in what’s being touted as Sherman’s first Athenian museum show, including photos from her epochal early series “Untitled Film Stills,” “Rear Screen Projections,” “Centerfolds,” and “Color Studies,” which helped expand the purview of self-portraiture in new narrative ways. May 30–Nov. 4

Arooj Aftab, Night Reign

On the rise as a singersongwriter of otherworldly talent, Arooj Aftab was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani expatriates who returned to their homeland in the ’90s. Since she moved to the United States to go to the Berklee College of Music, she has collaborated with musicians who have coursed in and around the art scene, including adventurous jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, poet/ singer Moor Mother, and DJ/composer Jace Clayton, among others. This gorgeous new album stands to expand her audience even further. On sale May 31

“Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks’” at the Art Institute of Chicago

With a wide-ranging array of themed shows—from a regrettable consideration of her sartorial style at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017 to a striking survey of her works on paper at MoMA last year—Georgia O’Keeffe has not lacked for attention of late. The most recent addition to her exhibition annals takes inspiration from the artist’s visions of New York City starting with her move into a Manhattan skyscraper in 1924. It will also include other paintings, drawings, and pastels from the ’20s and ’30s, all with a mind to expand conceptions of O’Keeffe, who is still most closely aligned with her flower paintings. June 2–Sept. 22

Zanele Muholi at Tate Modern

More than 260 photographs will feature in this comprehensive survey of the self-described “visual activist” who serves as a sharp-eyed chronicler of life in South Africa. Zanele Muholi often photographs LGBTQIA+ people, but the artist is most famous for self-portraits in which they project real power from their eyes, staring down their viewers and inviting them in at the same time. June 6–Jan. 26

Parade by Rachel Cusk

Writer Rachel Cusk is an art world favorite for her lucid meditations on artists and their work: her 2019 essay on painter Celia Paul’s tumultuous relationship with Lucian Freud, for example, tackled gendered power imbalances with her usual directness. In this new novel, she delves into the lives of artists in a much more abstract manner. Her focus is G, a male artist whose prismatic life involves instances of violence, both metaphorical and not. On sale June 18

“Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku” at Kunsthalle Basel

The striking figurative works of Nigerian-born Toyin Ojih Odutola have become extraordinarily familiar without losing any of their power and poise. For her first solo institutional show in Switzerland, the artist—who favors materials including charcoal, pastel, and pencil—is showing all new works under a title that translates as “House of Abundance.” June 7–Sept. 1

“David Medalla: In Conversation with the Cosmos” at the Hammer Museum

How does one curate an institutional survey for an artist whose work resists being shown in museums? That is a question that guides this Los Angeles show for David Medalla, a Filipino artist whose most memorable work, A Stitch in Time ( 1968), began with his offering romantic partners handkerchiefs on which they could sew whatever they liked. Several decades before the rise of relational aesthetics in the ’90s, Medalla produced art whose essence was conversation and interpersonal exchange. The challenge for the Hammer will be whether those artworks still come alive, even when exhibited as mere objects. June 9–Sept. 15

Shara Hughes at Galerie Eva Presenhuber

One of the highlights of Zurich Art Weekend—just a one-hour train ride from the buzz of Art Basel, which opens a few days later—will be the next gallery show for the ascendant New York–based painter Shara Hughes, whose abstracted landscapes blaze with color. For her fifth solo show with Eva Presenhuber, the artist will fill the gallery’s Waldmannstrasse location with new large-scale paintings of trees, with a mind toward creating a forest of sorts. June 7–July 20

The fairest of all the art fairs will host 287 galleries from 40 countries this year, with 22 new enterprises joining the ranks. It will also be the first edition fully under the direction of Maike Cruse, whom former Art Basel Miami Beach director Noah Horowitz hired after assuming his role as the fair’s chief executive in 2022. Also of note: this year’s Parcours section, which adopts Basel itself as a canvas and exhibition space, will be organized by Stefanie Hessler, director of New York’s Swiss Institute. June 13–16

“The Deep West Assembly: Cauleen Smith” at the Astrup Fearnley Museum

“The Wanda Coleman Songbook,” Cauleen Smith’s recent show at 52 Walker gallery in New York, was a tender tribute to the Los Angeles poet that contained very few of her words spoken aloud. Instead, Smith alluded to Coleman’s writings through commissioned music and an expansive video installation filled with images of LA freeways. That work, like many other films by Smith, reflected on the multitude of ways that Black history is all around us. This show in Oslo will include a new film installation commissioned for the occasion, plus screenings of other films in her oeuvre. June 14–Sept. 15

“Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture” at the Seattle Art Museum

While the New York avant-garde was a spirited community in the 1960s and ’70s, the scene on the West Coast was at least as restless—and often in wilder and weirder ways. The description of this show refers to “senselessness, absurdity, and fun,” as cited from writing around the antiestablishment Funk art movement in the Bay Area, and it promises works drawn from up and down the coast. June 21–Sept. 2

“Ho Tzu Nyen: Time and the Tiger” at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art

Between 2012 and 2017, Ho Tzu Nyen created five videos about tigers that take up aspects of Southeast Asian history, mulling the painful legacy of colonialism in the region through a mix of fact and fiction. The powerful stories about loss told through these videos—British colonizers nearly hunted Malayan tigers out of existence—have made Ho one of Singapore’s most celebrated artists. Now, this midcareer survey at Bard College in Upstate New York allows US audiences to see why. June 22–Dec. 1

Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity, and Joy by Simon Wu

Taking his title from an anthem of steely defiance by the Swedish pop star Robyn, Simon Wu offers writings on art (from the mind of a critic, curator, and Art in America contributor) and such other topics as “the complicated sensation of the Telfar bag” and “clutter in his mother’s suburban garage and its meaning for himself and his family.” On sale June 25

“Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao” at the National Gallery of Australia

As Paul Gauguin’s legacy continues to be reevaluated and revised, this show in the Australian capital of Canberra draws on some 140 of the artist’s best-known works, and promises new readings of them by way of contemporary perspectives. Noting that “in today’s context, Gauguin’s interactions in Polynesia in the later part of the 19th Century would not be accepted,” the show—curated by former Louvre Museum and Musée d’Orsay director Henri Loyrette—will delve beneath the surface of his paintings, viewing his art against the backdrop of colonialism. (The show travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, later in 2024.) June 29–Oct. 7

“I.M. Pei: Life Is Architecture” at M+

Billed as the first major retrospective for one of the 20th century’s most famous architects, this show in Hong Kong will feature drawings, sketches, videos, models, photographs, and documentation related to I.M. Pei’s many high-profile projects around the world. It will also include newly commissioned photographs of his buildings by seven “new generation” photographers, and models of built and unbuilt projects made in collaboration with local architecture schools. Opens June 29

“Samia Halaby: Eye Witness” at the MSU Broad Art Museum

This exhibition became an unexpected cause célèbre earlier this year when Indiana University, whose museum was meant to debut it, abruptly canceled the show, fueling speculation about what role Samia Halaby’s Palestinian nationality played in the decision. Now, the show at least has the benefit of opening at the artist’s alma mater, Michigan State University, during the Venice Biennale, where her lush abstractions are also currently on display. Expect the surge in interest in the 87-year-old painter, whose art has explicitly addressed forms of Palestinian resistance, to garner attention for this modest survey. June 29–Dec. 15

Rencontres d’Arles

Those making a summertime pilgrimage to Arles, the French city most closely associated with Vincent van Gogh, to toast Impressionism’s 150th anniversary will want to extend their stay for this photography festival, widely regarded as one of the best of its kind worldwide. The show offers many notable photography surveys, both well-known and not. See them all here, in one place, before they travel the globe. July 1–Sept. 29

Tokyo Gendai

During the inaugural edition of this fair last year, cofounder Magnus Renfrew called it “the beginning of a new chapter for the art scene in Japan.” The fair will now have a chance to bear that out in its second go-round, with sales generated by its mix of international blue-chip galleries and Tokyo-based enterprises likely acting as a litmus test for the Japanese art world’s strength. July 5–7

“Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson” at SITE Santa Fe

This artist-driven exhibition curated by Teresita Fernández and Holt/Smithson Foundation director Lisa Le Feuvre will focus on two intergenerational artists’ “shared desire to recontextualize the complexities of art addressing the land.” Fernández and the late Robert Smithson—who helped define Land art in the 1960s and ’70s—will each be represented by some 30 works, and there’s good reason to think those works will take on new resonance in relation to each other. July 5–Oct. 28

“Martha Diamond: Deep Time” at the Colby College Museum of Art

Opening in Maine before making its way to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut this fall, this Martha Diamond survey covers five decades of a career devoted to painting pitched in the fertile middle of a lot of different movements. Diamond rendered her native New York City in forms that are both concrete and abstract, and enough of both to make the notion of choosing one or the other a fool’s errand. Diamond died this past December at the age of 79, and her first major monograph accompanies the show. July 13–Oct. 13

“Walter Price: Pearl Lines” at the Walker Art Center

American painter Walter Price creates large canvases that verge on inscrutability. They feature Black figures that fade in and out of focus, traversing vague landscapes that melt into abstraction. The sense of mystery these works convey extends even to Price’s shows themselves—he has titled nearly all his solo outings “Pearl Lines,” suggesting they are all related in ways that are not immediately obvious. This biggest of the artist’s surveys to date—in Minneapolis, and also called “Pearl Lines”—may enable viewers to crack Price’s code. Aug. 8–Dec. 8

A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda by Carrie Rickey

Five years on from her death, photographer and filmmaker Agnès Varda is inscribed in both film and art history, with the Criterion Collection releasing her entire filmography, and museums in France and Spain staging shows of her installations. Varda mania has fully arrived—and stands to continue with this new biography from Carrie Rickey, a former film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who shows how the French New Wave filmmaker’s life inspired her deceptively light meditations on the passage of time, women’s rights, and more. On sale Aug. 13

“Leonilson: Now and Opportunity” at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo

Leonilson had a habit of associating Portuguese words with the wrong gender, a small act of rule-breaking that was mirrored by purposeful infractions in his art, which explicitly addressed his HIV diagnosis at a time when doing so was still taboo. Although he died at 36, the Brazilian artist left behind a formidable store of paintings, embroidered works, and installations that addressed fragile bodies and marginalization. His final years form the basis of this 150-work show, which is being staged amid a yearlong series of exhibitions about queerness at MASP. Aug. 23–Nov. 17

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History of life
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and fossil organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the process of ...
The origin of life on Earth, explained
The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. Several seminal experiments in this topic have been conducted at the University of Chicago, including the Miller-Urey experiment that suggested how the building blocks of life could ...
Life
Life - Evolution, History, Earth: The evidence is overwhelming that all life on Earth has evolved from common ancestors in an unbroken chain since its origin. Darwin's principle of evolution is summarized by the following facts. All life tends to increase: more organisms are conceived, born, hatched, germinated from seed, sprouted from spores, or produced by cell division (or other means ...
The origin of life: what we know, what we can know and what we will
The origin of life (OOL) problem remains one of the more challenging scientific questions of all time. In this essay, we propose that following recent experimental and theoretical advances in systems chemistry, the underlying principle governing the emergence of life on the Earth can in its broadest sense be specified, and may be stated as follows: all stable (persistent) replicating systems ...
Life
Life - Origin, Evolution, Abiogenesis: Perhaps the most fundamental and at the same time the least understood biological problem is the origin of life. It is central to many scientific and philosophical problems and to any consideration of extraterrestrial life. Most of the hypotheses of the origin of life will fall into one of four categories: Hypothesis 1, the traditional contention of ...
Life
Much is known about life from points of view reflected in the various biological, or "life," sciences. These include anatomy (the study of form at the visible level), ultrastructure (the study of form at the microscopic level), physiology (the study of function), molecular biology and biochemistry (the study of form and function at chemical levels), ecology (the study of the relations of ...
Hypotheses about the origins of life (article)
In this article, we'll examine scientific ideas about the origin of life on Earth. The when of life's origins (3.5 ‍ billion years ago or more) is well-supported by fossils and radiometric dating. But the how is much less understood. In comparison to the central dogma or the theory of evolution, hypotheses about life's origins are much more...hypothetical.
Origins of life: Uncovering the mystery of how life began on Earth
HOW did life on Earth begin? Until 70 years ago, generations of scientists had failed to throw much light on biology's murky beginnings. But then came three crucial findings in quick succession.
The origin of life: what we know, what we can know and what we will
The origin of life (OOL) problem remains one of the more challenging scientific questions of all time. In this essay, we propose that following recent experimental and theoretical advances in systems chemistry, the underlying principle governing the emergence of life on the Earth can in its broadest sense be specified, and may be stated as follows: all stable (persistent) replicating systems ...
History of life on Earth
The diversification of life. Life began on Earth at least 3.5 billion years ago. Since then, it's diversified in an amazing way! Learn about important events in the history of living organism on Earth, up to and including the appearance of humans.
The Meaning of Life
The Meaning of Life. Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997).
History of Life on Earth
Life Science Resources. Early Life on Earth - Animal Origins. Depiction of one of Earth's ocean communities, including the top predator Anomalocaris, during the Cambrian Period 510 million years ago. By the end of the Cambrian, nearly all the major groups of animals we know today (the phyla) had evolved. Depiction by Karen Carr, Smithsonian.
Defining life and evolution: Essay on the origin, expansion, and
Life as a Phenomenon is omnifarious and thus omnipresent. 14. The second statement of the Paradigm of Life. Life is an informationally closed system. Life as programme-wise formalized information on "Self …" in its pure form, as such, does not interact with the entire material world, and, as information, does not exist for the latter.
How did life begin?
All life that we know of shares the use of DNA or RNA to carry genetic information, which suggests a shared origin; viruses are somehow connected to the evolutionary tree of life—which brings us to a second line between life and no life. If we think about the history of the Earth, at some point in the past there was no life and now the place ...
The origin of life on land
Abstract. 'The origin of life on land' shows that life on land is significant for two reasons: firstly, life on land represents most of modern biodiversity and secondly, life has changed the face of the Earth; before life on land, there were no soils. Earliest fungi have been dated to the Precambrian, but the first green plants on land are ...
Why It Matters: History of Life
Evolutionary biologists could list many reasons why understanding phylogeny is important to everyday life in human society. For botanists, phylogeny acts as a guide to discovering new plants that can be used to benefit people. Think of all the ways humans use plants—food, medicine, and clothing are a few examples. If a plant contains a ...
What Is The Meaning Of Life?
The meaning of life may never be definitively known. The meaning of life may be different for each individual and/or each species. The truth of the meaning of life is likely in the eye of the beholder. There were three choices given at the beginning of this essay, and for me, the answer is all of the above. Jason Hucsek, San Antonio, TX
Philosophy
Demonised by the political establishment for his radical, dissenting views, this 18th-century Welsh polymath deserves better. Huw Williams. Philosophy Essays from Aeon. World-leading thinkers explore life's big questions and the history of ideas from Socrates to Simone de Beauvoir, political philosophy to philosophy of mind, the Western canon ...
How to Write a Life Story Essay (with Pictures)
1. Determine the goal of your essay. An autobiographical essay, also called a personal narrative essay, should tell the reader about your life, personality, values and goals. The essay should tell the reader what is important to you, what your values are, and any life experiences that influenced the way you experience the world. [1]
Essays About History: Top 5 Examples And 7 Prompts
History is the study of past events and is essential to an understanding of life and the future; discover essays about history in our guide. In the thousands of years, humans have been on earth, our ancestors have left different marks on the world, reminders of the times they lived in. Curiosity is in our nature, and we study our history on this planet by analyzing these marks, whether they be ...
Philosophy
Philosophy Essays from Aeon. World-leading thinkers explore life's big questions and the history of ideas from Socrates to Simone de Beauvoir, political philosophy to philosophy of mind, the Western canon and the non-Western world.
Abraham Lincoln: Life in Brief
Abraham Lincoln: Life in Brief. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, seven slave states left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, and four more joined when hostilities began between the North and South. A bloody civil war then engulfed the nation as Lincoln vowed to preserve the Union, enforce the laws of the ...
Essay on Life for Students and Children
500+ Words Essay on Life. First of all, Life refers to an aspect of existence. This aspect processes acts, evaluates, and evolves through growth. Life is what distinguishes humans from inorganic matter. Some individuals certainly enjoy free will in Life.
Ruby Bridges: a Pioneering Journey through the Tides of History
Essay Example: In the rich tapestry of American history, one thread stands out boldly: the story of Ruby Bridges. Born amidst the cotton fields and magnolia blossoms of rural Mississippi on a September day in 1954, Ruby's early life was woven with the fibers of struggle and perseverance that
Who Is Podcast Guest Turned Star Andrew Huberman, Really?
Today, Andrew Huberman is a stiff, jacked 48-year-old associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is given to delivering three-hour ...
Why THE BATMAN is so beautiful.
The film is being directed by Matt Reeves, who wrote the screenplay with Peter Craig, and stars Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne / Batman, alongside Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, John ...
Figures at a glance
How many refugees are there around the world? At least 108.4 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 35.3 million refugees, around 41 per cent of whom are under the age of 18.. There are also millions of stateless people, who have been denied a nationality and lack access to basic rights such as education, health care, employment and freedom ...
Opinion
A federal magistrate judge issued a similar ruling last November on Idaho's abortion law, one of the most extreme in the country, which makes it a crime to assist a minor in obtaining an ...
A Discerning List of Things to Experience This Summer
Image Credit: Courtesy Abrams Books, New York; Few who read Peter Schjeldahl's essay "The Art of Dying" when it was published in the New Yorker in late 2019 will ever forget its gimlet-eyed ...

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