Most of us don’t spend our days asking, “What is the meaning of life?” Some days, maybe. But most days it’s coffee. Emails. Then to-do list. Or that mistake from yesterday we wish we could undo that consumes our thoughts.
And yet—quietly, underneath all of that—many of us are carrying a deeper question we don’t always name aloud, a question that tends to surface at moments of transition, like at the start of a new year, after a loss, or in the middle of a long night when sleep won’t come.
It’s the question behind so many of our decisions, even when we don’t realize it: What am I doing with my life? And is it actually the life I want to be living?
A little over a decade ago, three professors at Yale University decided to take such questions seriously. They created a course—not about career success or technical mastery—but about some of the biggest questions human beings have ever asked:
- What matters most?
- What is a good life?
- What is the shape of a flourishing life?
- What kind of life is worthy of our humanity? (Volf, et al, xv).
When you hear those questions, how do they land for you?
Do they feel energizing? Unsettling? Can you feel a shift inside yourself?
This wasn’t a class about how to succeed by the world’s usual measures—it was about what it means to succeed at being human. They called the course Life Worth Living. And students flocked to it. So many, in fact, that getting into the class became highly competitive, with about four students applying for every available seat. Not because it promised easy answers, but because it dared to take the deepest questions of human life seriously (Christian Century).
Here’s some of the “word on the street” from students who experienced the course firsthand:
- “It seems everybody has bought into the existing paradigm of success: go into consulting, make a lot of money. It’s different to read great texts with a sincere desire to answer the great questions of life rather than hunting the pages for an argument to prove your intellectual prowess. Instead of trying to say something smart, students were interested in saying something that got the class closer to the truth, which often involved asking a question or admitting they were not sure of something.”
- “It seems a little dramatic to say that the class altered my life, but some days that’s how it feels. It opened me to the idea of a life lived with intention” (ibid).
And that’s the same invitation many of us feel at the start of a new year: to pause, reflect, and ask what kind of life we actually want to live. Because whether we realize it or not, many of us arrive at January already exhausted—carrying habits, expectations, and assumptions we’ve rarely had the time and space to fully examine.
So when I learned that the professors had published a book based on the course—making its insights widely available beyond Yale’s campus—I knew it would be a good inspiration for a sermon on the first Sunday of a new year. The book is titled Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters.
And before that sounds too appealing, I should add the warning the professors offer on day one: “This course might wreck your life” (xi). We could say the same about the book—or even this sermon. Because history suggests that people who take questions of meaning seriously rarely stay the same.
This tension between comfort and meaning isn’t new; it’s one of the oldest spiritual stories we have. Consider a classic example: Before he started his quest to become the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama was already a prince—heir to a kingdom, born into comfort, privilege, and every form of security the world could offer.
But one day, while venturing beyond the palace walls, he unexpectedly stumbled upon four sights that he had been carefully shielded from: an old man, a sick person, a corpse, and a wandering holy ascetic. In those encounters, he came face-to-face with the fragility of human life and the inescapability of suffering. And they stirred in him those same perennial questions we heard earlier: What really matters? What kind of life am I truly called to live? Taking those questions seriously shattered his contentment with the comfortable world he had always known.
There are countless stories like this throughout history, of people whose lives were transformed when they committed themselves to a spiritual path, to the work of justice, or to something larger than their own comfort and ego. Some people might say their lives were “wrecked.” But from another angle, those same lives might be understood as having been reoriented—aligned with a deeper set of values, a truer sense of purpose, and a fuller understanding of what it means to live well (xvi).
That kind of reorientation represents a real paradigm shift. As one student admitted a few weeks into the “Life Worth Living” course, “I thought there would have been a lot more in this class about yachts” (63). Which is funny—but also revealing. Because it names, with surprising candor, the story many of us have absorbed—at both conscious and unconscious levels—about what success is supposed to look like.
A yacht symbolizes a familiar story our culture often tells us: that the good life is about accumulation, comfort, status, and success — measured in visible, material terms. Bigger. Better. More. It’s the idea that if we just acquire enough—money, recognition, security—then we’ll finally arrive at happiness. But the story of the Buddha reminds us that even when all of those boxes are checked, the deepest questions of meaning may still insist on being asked.
There’s a common confusion in our culture that the “good life,” the life worth living, should always feel good—that it’s about maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain, and arranging our lives for comfort and ease. But a truly good life—a flourishing life, a deep life—asks much more of us than comfort and ease alone (49). The good life isn’t a life that feels good all the time. It’s a life that is good for us—and good for the world—over the long arc of our lives.
To say more about the questions that can help shape such a life, the professors behind the Life Worth Living course offer a framework that is surprisingly simple—and profoundly illuminating. Here’s one of the charts from the course that’s worth spending some time with.
Let’s start with the column on the left-hand side. At the top, the focus is on action. But as you move downward, the emphasis shifts toward deeper levels of reflection. And that movement—slowing down, going beneath the surface, taking time to reflect on what truly matters—is at the heart of what the Life Worth Living course is trying to cultivate (5).
Let’s start at the top of the chart and work our way down. Life can be so busy—and can throw so much at us—that it’s easy to move through our days on autopilot, guided largely by habit. When we’re living at this level, there’s a lot of action and very little reflection. Or, as the authors put it, when we’re in this mode, “We do what we do because that’s what we do” (12).
Moving deeper to the second line of our chart, there’s an old saying that, I can guarantee you that one thing is true: “Your life is perfectly designed to get the results you are getting.” At some point, though—often for reasons we can’t fully explain—we begin to feel dissatisfied with the outcomes of life on autopilot. Something isn’t working anymore. And so we start to reflect, if only briefly and imperfectly, on how we might be more effective in reaching our goals. At this level, people often find themselves asking a very practical question, a question of strategy: “Is what I am doing getting me what I want?” (Ibid).
But the chart doesn’t stop there. As we move deeper still, we shift more fully from action into reflection. I’ll never forget the first day of my three-year spiritual direction training program, when the director said to us, “We’re going to start slowly, so that later we can slow down.”
For most of us, that feels counterintuitive—and countercultural—given how we’re conditioned to live. Aren’t we supposed to start slowly, so that later we can speed up? So much in our world urges us to do more, move faster, be better, produce more. But this deeper level of self-awareness invites something different. It asks us to slow down long enough to wrestle with a far more searching question: What do I really want? And how might that be different from simply becoming more effective at getting what others have told me I should want?
This is the level of vision—where we catch a glimpse of a different life that might be—and begin to examine our values, our longings, and the stories we’ve been told about what a good life looks like. And it’s here that the work becomes both harder and more honest, because it asks us not just how we’re living, but what we’re really living for—and why.
And then we are invited to dive one level deeper still. Many people live their whole lives without touching into this level of depth. That’s why this course at Yale has been so impactful for so many students. They have been spectacularly successful for so much of their early life at achieving according to standards created by others. That’s how they ended up at an Ivy League university.
But at the level of self-transcendence, we are challenged to ask a far deeper—and more subversive—question: “What is actually worth wanting?” When you hear that question, can you feel the bottom drop out, even a little? Notice what stirs in you. What wants to emerge?
At some point, reflection carries us beyond the small story of our own preferences and ambitions and into what we might dare to call truth. Not truth in the sense of having one right answer for all people at all times and places, but truth in the sense of aligning our lives with something larger than ourselves—values that endure, commitments that give shape to our days, loves that are worthy of our devotion.
Connecting to something larger than ourselves can take many forms. For some, it looks like a deep commitment to family, community, or service. For others, it’s devotion to justice, compassion, or the healing of the world. For some, it’s grounded in spiritual practice; for others, in love, creativity, art, or care for future generations.
Even after we reach the depths of self-transcendence, the chart doesn’t leave us there. The movement curves upward again—back into action, but now a different kind of action. Action no longer driven by default expectations, but shaped by clarity about what truly matters.
From connecting to a truth larger than ourselves emerges a clearer sense of vision—grounded not in what others expect of us or try to impose on us, but in what we are most deeply and most authentically called to do. From that vision, we can begin to discern an effective strategy. And from that strategy grows the daily habits that quietly, steadily shape how we actually live.
So let me move toward my conclusion by sharing how the professors themselves bring the course to an end—by inviting students to keep returning, again and again, to the deepest questions:
“Is what I am doing getting me what I want?”
Deeper still: “What do I really want?
And deepest of all: “What is actually worth wanting?”
And in the end, they offer this simple, powerful charge—one that feels especially fitting as we begin a new year: “Live for what matters most. Your life is worth it” (284). And that choice—what we give our lives to—begins again today in this new year.
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