Is It Worth It?
Jul 2nd, 2009 by Micah Tillman | 8 Comments |
If you’re like me, having “suffered from depression,” you’ve found yourself asking the question, “Is it worth it?” about many things — especially about life in general.
(I put “suffered from depression” in quotation marks because depression isn’t the kind of thing you suffer from. It is suffering.)
I was reminded of the “Is it worth it?” question on our recent trip out to the wedding in Middle America.
The pastor at the wedding talked about how difficult relationships are, you see, and I really hate driving on long trips.
____
Unfortunately for depressed people, it’s not just a sermon or a car ride that leads them to ask, “Is it worth it?” It’s life in general.
The issue is not so much, “Is this or that relationship worth all the work that has to be put into it?” or “Is this wedding worth the car trip I have to take to get to it?”
Rather, the issue is, “Is life worth all the struggle and pain I have to go through in it?”
____
Now, if you’re like me, there’s enough of the deontologist in you to make the question of whether life is worth it or not to be essentially — and annoyingly — moot.
It doesn’t ultimately matter whether life is “worth it,” since you have certain duties that you can only fulfill if you continue to live. It’s your duty to live, whether or not you think it’s worth it; so you have to get on with living.
Nevertheless, it’s still annoying (to put it mildly) to think that maybe life isn’t worth it. It would, at least, be really nice if life were worth it.
____
But on that trip out to Middle America and back, I finally got clear on a thought I’d been trying to work out for a while now.
I think, you see, that very often I couldn’t answer the “Is it worth it?” question affirmatively, not because I answered it negatively, but because I couldn’t answer it at all. And the inability to answer a question looks and feels like a negative answer.
The reason, however, that I so often could not answer the “Is it worth it?” question is, I realized, that very often the question itself is senseless. Very often it’s not actually a question.
It’s more like, “What’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything?” than an actual question.
Allow me to explain.
____
Imagine that I walk up to the icecream truck that drives through our neighborhood (playing Christmas carols in the middle of summer) and offer the driver three dollars for an icecream cone.
He accepts, and we make the exchange.
In doing so, I show that an icecream cone is worth three dollars to me, and the driver shows that three dollars is worth one icecream cone to him.
(Actually, I show that an icecream cone is worth a little more than three dollars to me, and he shows that three dollars are worth a little more than one icecream cone to him. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want his icecream cone more than my three dollars, and he wouldn’t want my three dollars more than his icecream cone.)
____
When we talk about how much something is worth, in other words, we are talking about two good things. An icecream cone is a good thing, and three dollars are a good thing. And an icecream cone is worth three dollars.
However, when we ask whether something is “worth it” or not, the “it” in question is usually something bad. Is life worth the pain? Is getting fit worth the struggle? Is learning worth the frustration? Etc.
What this implies is that you can measure the value or worth of a good thing in terms of bad things. “That (good) wedding was worth a (bad) car trip. Maybe even a (bad) car trip and a half.” “This (good) relationship is worth three (bad) arguments per week; maybe even four. Definitely not five.”
____
But since when does anyone actually think that good things are worth bad things?
Since when do we measure the value of something in terms of badness?
It doesn’t make any sense! (He said, slapping himself in the face.)
“Is it worth it?” so often means, “Is that good thing worth these bad things?” which means: “This good thing is equal to how many bad things?”
It’s comparing apples and oranges. There is no exchange rate between good and bad things, like there is between icecream cones and money.
____
Thus, when Alexei responds “I wouldn’t consent” to Ivan’s discussion of “the case of children” (in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov), it’s not because he thinks a good world isn’t worth the suffering of children, but that it makes no sense to ask whether a good world is worth the suffering of children.
Badness is not the measure of goodness. You can’t measure worth in terms of badness any more than you can measure time in terms of parsecs.
Finding himself able to offer no answer to Ivan’s question, Alexei mistakenly believes his answer is “no.”
What he should have said was, “I can’t answer that question, because it’s senseless. It’s asking me to measure goodness in terms of badness, and that is meaningless. Your question isn’t actually a question, any more than ‘life, the universe, and everything’ is a question, or ‘Why is democracy more three than green?’ is a question.”
____
Pain and evil and suffering are problems, but you can’t express those problems through the question, “Is it worth it?” since the question only seems to make sense. It’s not actually a question; rather, it’s a vague gesturing at the problem. (The same thing goes for the Problem of Evil.)
Thus, you’ll never find an answer to the question, “Is it worth it?” in many cases. And thus those of us who “suffer from depression” shouldn’t be surprised when we can’t.
When “Is it worth it?” isn’t actually a question, it can’t actually have an answer (any more than the ironing board over there, or your hat, “has an answer”). Only questions can have answers, and very often, “Is it worth it?” isn’t a question. Just because it has a question mark at the end doesn’t make it a question.
____
All that to say this:
If you’re depressed, please don’t mistake your inability to answer the question, “Is it worth it?” for a negative answer.
If you’re like me, you sometimes think your answer to the question, “Is it worth it?,” is “No,” when actually you just cannot answer the question at all.
Your inability to offer an answer seems like a “No” answer. However, please remember that being able to give no answer to a non-question is not the same as giving a “No!” answer to a real question.
Please don’t assume that “No!” is the answer to something that isn’t actually a question.
____
It’s not that your pain and suffering aren’t real. It’s that we shouldn’t measure the good and happy things in life in terms of badness and sadness.
There’s too much badness and sadness in the world already, without our turning badness and sadness into the measure of all things!
Badness and sadness don’t deserve to be the measure of good things.
Good things deserve to be measured in terms of other good things.
As I have told you in the past, I too have depression. The way that I circumvent that question is that I shape tasks into matters of duty and responsibility. Instead of asking “is it worth it to do this” I tell myself “I have to do this because people are depending on me.”
For you, for example, instead of wondering the worth of driving for your wedding, you could have told yourself “I promised myself to my soon-to-be-wife, so it is my duty to drive here.”
An excellent point. It’s interesting how powerful switching modes of discourse (switching mode of intentionality, as a phenomenologist would say) can be.
The way you look at (the way you “intend”) things has significant practical consequences.
And fortunately for us, there are methods (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy) and medicines (e.g., SSRI’s) that can help us improve our abilities to intend things in the right way. (The mind can need practice and exercise and medicine, just like the body can.)
A)
RE: exchanging negatives for positives:
Wouldn’t it make sense to look at worth’ as it relates to ‘cost’ in this context? For example, your $3 ice cream cone isn’t just a representation of two positives–it also represents the work, or sweat equity, that went into obtaining the three dollars in the first place. So the ‘cost’ of the ice cream cone is 11 minutes at work, or however long it took to earn the three dollars. Likewise, one cost of attending the wedding was the long trip.
My understanding of the value of life is such that whatever the cost in pain, suffering, and depression, the life in question carries greater value–if not in an obvious way to the individual, then to the people around him/her, the community, and ultimately to God.
B)
I’m grateful for you–the cost of knowing you (making my brain hurt, differences in world view) is exceeded by the benefits (brain stronger for exercise, better articulation of world view). And thus far I’ve found that the other benefits of your friendship do not carry any appreciable attendant costs, so the net benefit of your existence for me is considerable!
Those are two points that needed to be made. Thanks!
One could analyze things in terms of cost, but I think some clarifications would have to attend such an analysis.
First, my time and effort are good things too. So if I see my money as representing time and effort, then I’m still exchanging good things for good things. (My time/effort for icecream.)
In this sense, “cost” means something like, “what good things I have to give (up or away) to get another good thing” or “how many good things I am willing to exchange for another good thing.”
Second, to speak of cost in terms of pain/suffering is something else. To say that something cost a certain amount of pain and suffering is to use cost in a different sense than to say it cost money, time, effort, energy, etc.
In this sense, “cost” means something like, “what bad things I had to go through/endure to get to a good place.”
In the second sense (cost as having to do with negatives), there is no trade or exchange. It’s not like you give someone something bad, and she in turn gives you something good (which is what happens when speaking of cost as having to do with positives).
***
Now, it does seem natural and helpful to analyze life and worth in the way you do in (B). (Thanks! by the way :-)
Every bad thing (every “cost” in the second sense) is like a negative number, and every good thing is like a positive number. A good thing is “worth it” if when I add it to its costs, my net result is greater than or equal to zero.
My claim in this post, however, essentially amounts to the idea that good things and bad things are incommensurate. They do not have a common measure. They cannot be placed on the same scale, the same number line.
(E.g., beauty, sexiness, and cuteness do not belong on the same scale. A person doesn’t suddenly become beautiful by reaching a certain point on the sexiness scale, nor does a person become sexy by reaching a certain point on the cuteness scale. Britney Spears, for instance, got sexy by ceasing to be cute [observe the difference between the covers of her first two albums] not by becoming cuter. And Ms. Spears hasn’t become beautiful by becoming more sexy [observe the difference between her second and later album covers]. She’d have to become more like Olivia De Havilland or Ingrid Bergman to be beautiful.)
In other words, I don’t think that good things and bad things can be added and subtracted, can “balance out.”
Nevertheless, we do speak of things being “more trouble than they’re worth,” and I’m not sure what to do with that.
More to think about :-)
A) For the record, Britney has never been either sexy or cute.
B) You’re absolutely right about the impracticality of balancing good versus bad as if on a scale–(who was the philosopher that talked about utils?) but it seems to be our default, base level way of making decisions, doesn’t it? We constantly weigh options, possible outcomes, value, worth, etc., as we chart various courses. In almost every case, a simple binary scale is inadequate. For example, in deciding whether or not to buy ice cream, we weigh health issues, the time it takes to go downstairs to run to the truck, and the weather. We also consider the impact on other people–the benefit of the driver having a job; a spouse’s potential jealousy if she doesn’t get a cone. All this in addition to the opportunity cost of the $3.
(I guess I’m not necessarily arguing that this is a positive way of looking at the world so much as descriptive of how people operate.)
Of course, when it comes to things like life and love, you run into commodities of theoretically infinite value (like “importance” in a past post).
Don Miller had some really interesting things to say about what he sees as Jesus’ teachings on two different aspects of these topics. I think he had slightly different language for expressing some of these same ideas.
A) He argues quite persuasively against a Christianity which operates by 3 step formulas. He says that we (hopefully) couldn’t give an argument with 3 premises and a neat conclusion that explain why we love our kids or spouses. Similarly, our faith ought to be deeper than what we can express with words.
I don’t think I’m doing his argument justice here, but what he helped me to notice is that we can use words to describe a problem (paradox, dilemna, whatever) that can’t be untangled with words. The solution to the logical argument isn’t a counter-argument: it’s actions, feelings, something wider than mere words.
B) Jesus calls us out to a wider existence than the life boat mentality where we weigh all our transactions in a strict cost-benefit analysis.
Adam–
RE Ms. Spears: I guess I’ll just have to say, “De gustibus non disputandum est.” :-)
____
I believe the philosopher you have in mind is (the great classical-liberal and feminist hero) J.S. Mill (or his predecessor, Jeremy Bentham); i.e., the Utilitarians.
While I am impressed by Mr. Mill’s political/social philosophy, I find utilitarianism to be a deeply problematic grounding for ethics.
____
You are right to point out that “weighing options” and “writing up pro/con lists” is how people very often approach their decisions in life. This means that there is something about this way of looking at positive and negative things that is, or can be, helpful to people (at least in many situations). If it wasn’t at least a little helpful, much of the time, people wouldn’t do it so often. People are stupid, but not that stupid.
However, from within the depressive state, I have found such an approach (weighing goods and bads, adding up positives and negatives) to be decidedly unhelpful. And I think one of the reasons it’s unhelpful is that it is somehow nonsensical, at its root, when expressed in the question “Is life worth it?”
____
I have these two phenomena in front of me:
(1) We, each and every one of us, have certain duties that we can only fulfill if we continue to live. Thus we, each and every one of us, have a duty to live.
(2) When a depressed person “does the math,” and she or he will often conclude that the negatives in life outweigh the positives, and thus that life is not worth it.
Thus, a depressed person will often find herself with the duty to live a life that seems to be not worth living. This is a deeply frustrating and paradoxical situation.
____
Some people might attempt to alleviate the paradox by claiming that the depressed person miscalculated the weight of the bad things in her life. They might try to convince the depressed person that things “really aren’t that bad,” or “aren’t as bad as they seem.”
I, on the other hand — and speaking from personal experience — would argue that things are as bad as they seem. In other words, I would argue that the mistake is not in assigning too much weight to the negative things in life — and thus coming to a negative result when everything is added up — but in thinking negative and positive things can be added up at all.
____
Rather than thinking of the relationship between the good and bad things in life in terms of a number line (with bad things being negative numbers, and good things being positive numbers) or in terms of a scale (with bad things on one side and good things on the other), I suggest that bad things and good things are apples and oranges.
Or, if they can be combined at all, perhaps they are like blue and yellow, which when added together do not cancel each other out (as a negative number does to a positive number), but produce a third color: green.
In other words, I wish to solve the paradox of having the duty to live a life that isn’t worth it by claiming that the the phrase, “life isn’t worth it,” is actually the product of a misinterpretation of our inability to give a positive answer to a senseless question.
____
I’m not sure that my comments here have really answered your comment. But they have helped me get a little clearer on exactly what it is that I’m up to. Thanks!
______________
Jeff–
I’ve only ever read Mr. Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, and found it to be a deeply confused book. However, the idea/argument of his which you present above is deeply insightful; I really like it. Kind of Aristotelian, in a way (Aristotle believed, evidently, that the conclusion of some arguments are actions, rather than propositions).
RE cost-benefit analysis. There does seem to be something suspicious about the idea that life is subject to mathematization/calculation, no matter how modern science sees the world.
Love the further discussion on this. And I find myself sticking onto your color simile–we combine the colors of our lives not to allow one color to predominate, but to find out what color will come out.