Intrinsic Desire, Utility, and Reason, or The Meaning of Life Simply Explained

For someone to say they are going to explain the meaning of life is like trying to answer the prosecutor’s question, “Why did you commit the theft?” when there has been no theft. “What is the meaning of life?” presumes that life has a meaning. But it doesn’t. It would be more precise, then, to speak of explaining the apparent meaningfulness of life, that is, why life seems to have a meaning. Yet a third option is to offer an alternative meaning of “meaning” as something subjective. In that case I can indeed offer an explanation, that is, of why life has, or can have, subjective meaning. And that is what I intend to do, and simply, in this essay.

We are all filled with desires. These desires provide whatever meaning life has for us. If we desired nothing, life would indeed have no meaning, neither objective nor subjective. But if I am set upon having something, or keeping something I have, or getting rid of something, then meaning appears. And if there is some overarching desire (or desires) in one’s life, then it, or they, set the meaning of life for that person. Indeed, the very notion of something’s being objectively meaningful derives from this “move” by evolution, since this lends even greater force and hence efficacy to the desire.[1]

In my case I would say my life’s meaning derives from identifying as a philosopher, a writer, and a hiker, and as a lover, a father, and friend. In other words I desire to be fully accepted in the social sphere, and to be pursuing a few central vocations. Moreover, I think each is necessary but only jointly sufficient. Thus, without the human connections, the pursuits would be, well, meaningless to me, as also (perhaps) would be the human connections without the pursuits. 

But someone else could have an entirely different set or arrangement of desires, and that would constitute the meaning of their life. To what extent all human beings share certain key desires is an empirical question, which I won’t attempt to answer. 

In this essay (having established that that there was no theft, i.e., that life has only subjective meaning, which is based on one’s desires) I want to make two further points: 

1) All of the desires that give life its meaning are intrinsic. 

2) Intrinsic desires derive from their utility.[2] 

Furthermore I will draw the implication that reason (in a broad sense) has a crucially instrumental role to play in human life. 

As I say, it’s all very simple. So to proceed: The meaningfulness of one’s existence has to do with how much one cares about something. That is just another way of saying that it depends on desire. But caring must have its foundation in something one cares about for its own sake. If we only cared about things because of something else we cared about, there simply would not be any basis for caring about anything at all, or at least not in the deep sense in which we speak of life’s having a meaning. 

Thus, if I cared about writing only because I cared about having money, and I cared about having money only because I wanted to buy food, and I cared about food only because I cared about continuing to live, and so on but with no end point, then it becomes ultimately mysterious why I care about anything. We might suppose that the buck stops with caring about continuing to live. We (or some of us) want to do that “for its own sake,” “just because,” intrinsically. Sure, we could push that further: Maybe we want to live only because we want to enjoy certain pleasures. The point is just that there has to be something we desire for its own sake. And once we know what that is, then we know what has life-enhancing meaning for someone. That is my first point.

My second point seems at first contrary to the first. I surmise that the only[3] reason we desire something intrinsically is that it served some useful purpose. So for example it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the reason someone wants to experience certain pleasures for their own sake, i.e., desires them intrinsically, is that beings who experienced pleasure from doing certain things were thereby given some advantage in the contest for survival. For example, eating is useful for surviving, and hence those beings who enjoyed eating for its own sake were more likely to survive, more likely even than those who understood that eating was “good for them” but were otherwise indifferent to food. We need not speculate about prehistory to discover the truth of this general idea: Simply consider how difficult it is for you yourself to maintain a healthy lifestyle if you don’t actually enjoy and prefer nonfatty foods and exercise and so forth. 

And now to my intended upshot, which is about reason in a broad sense. I think of reason, or reasoning, as encompassing not only making logical inferences but also acquiring a great deal of experience and knowledge of the world and how it works, and also reflecting on and discussing what one has learned and inferred. Reason in this sense is relevant to the meaning of life because however useful certain desires may have been to our ancestors, such that they became intrinsic, that utility was relative to the circumstances at the time. But the world is forever changing, sometimes even due to the success of our intrinsic desires (consider “overpopulation”). So it may come to pass that some desires that were useful before are no longer so, and may even be harmful, in the sense of working against the original utility of those very desires, even unto putting our survival at risk, under present circumstances. This is exactly where reason shows its own utility, namely as a means to uncover the mismatch and then to figure out how to overcome (or manage) it. 

Curiously, however, the desire to be rational does not seem to be as strong or entrenched as the desires it is often pitted against. It would be interesting to ponder why that is so. But however that may be, it does seem to me that it is reason we require to save us. 

On the third paw, I have no doubt that reason too can become deadly under certain circumstances. After all, it has no objective value, since nothing does; and its presence and strength in us and its utility for our survival and thriving are ultimately governed by the same contingent forces as everything else. So while I myself am strongly inclined to being rational (which is a large part of what I mean by saying I identify with being a philosopher), and believe that this trait has utility for personal and species survival and thriving, the value of my or our species’ continued survival and thriving is itself dependent on my desires and would not outlive them if no one else had them or desired something else for which they were instrumental.

[1] So not every desire will “generate” meaning, but only desires that have special significance and therefore benefit from this faux enhancement. This is precisely what I characterize as the moral move in my critique of moralism as illusory and a case of double counting (to use Ronnie de Sousa’s term). See e.g. pp. 1-4 of my Ethical Health (Routledge, 2025). Thus I am humbled that chatGPT had to prompt me to make the point explicit in this essay.

[2] I made this point more colorfully in “Intrinsic Desire and Morality: Entomological Revelations.”

[3] This is too extreme since sometimes traits come along “for the ride” and have neither positive nor negative utility for an organism. So take my surmise as a rule of thumb.

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