By "livable" I mean a suite of beliefs and convictions that provide the human heart with the support, conviction, stamina, and hope it needs to live a rich and full human life—a life full of joy, peace, wonder, moral seriousness, and love.
As I pondered this question, I came up with the following.
First, every human person—yourself included—is of inestimable value and worth, worthy of recognition and care. This conviction is twofold. From a moral perspective, it grounds and secures our moral and political obligations toward each other. From a mental health perspective, our sense of cosmic mattering and existential significance grounds and secures our self-compassion, which could be framed as our ethical duty toward ourselves: to treat ourselves as worthy of love and care. Simply stated, this commitment to inherent human dignity, oneself included, is summarized in the biblical axiom to "love your neighbor as yourself."
Next, your life has purpose. Your existence is not happenstance or accident. There is a reason you exist, cosmically and existentially. Phrased differently, your life has a task. To be sure, this task can be opaque and can change depending upon circumstance or season. But at each moment of our lives, our existence poses us a question: "What is life asking of me, right here and now? What is my task, my purpose, my duty, my calling, my quest?" Put another way, your life is a story with a plot, and you are called to the task of authorship.
Finally, as I describe in The Book of Love, sacrificial goodness will be vindicated, somehow and in some way. Hope is the bread of life. We hold the conviction that what we do in this life matters, cosmically and existentially. Heroic acts of love, whether small and hidden or large and noteworthy, ripple outward and echo into eternity. We might not see visible or empirical evidence of this impact in our lifetimes, but we trust that the universe will vindicate every sacrifice we make today to bend the world toward the light.
Dignity. Purpose. Hope.
To my mind, these are the pillars of a livable worldview. They stabilize our moral obligations toward each other, ground our mental health, and sustain our existential well-being. Challenge or remove any of these pillars, and hell soon follows. Moral lassitude and erosion. Existential despair. Nihilistic indifference. Nausea toward life. Anomie and alienation.
Human life demands dignity, purpose, and hope. And, crucially, these are metaphysical commitments. There is no factual or scientific justification for any of them. In fact, on purely factual and scientific grounds, each of them can be—and often is—challenged and disputed. Which means that a wholly factual and scientific worldview is inherently anti-human. Only metaphysics makes life livable, fully and richly human.
