There's a classic paper by Thomas Nagel that addresses your question. It's called The Absurd . It appeared the Journal of Philosophy , v. 68 no. 20, 1971. A bit of googling just might find you the full text, though of course <*cough*> I could never actually suggest that you look for a copy produced without regard for copyright. Nagel thinks there's no getting around the absurdity of life. In fact he thinks there's no conceivable way that life could not be absurd. I can't say I'm completely convinced, but be that as it may; you might find something useful in this, from the end of Nagel's paper:         If sub species aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn't matter either... Nagel adds that once we see this, we can live our absurd lives with irony rather than heroism or despair. Your mileage may vary. Here's a slightly different take. In my more sanguine moments, I'm inclined to say that it doesn't matter if things don't matter...

There's difficulty that stand in the way of answering your question. In the actual world, it's not a law that physically beautiful people aren't virtuous. Some are, and some aren't. So your question is about a world with different laws than this one and you're asking what would be the explanation for a regularity in that world that doesn't hold up in this one. Now such questions aren't necessarily meaningless. One way to understand them: think about a world that's otherwise as much like this one as possible, except that beautiful people aren't virtuous. Do we have any hope of getting a grip on that question? Possibly. Though there certainly are people in the actual world who are both beautiful and virtuous, perhaps there's some statistical correlation between beauty and lack of virtue. (I'm skeptical, but let that pass.) If so, then the way to answer your question would be to investigate whatever it might be in this world that underlies the statistical pattern, and extrapolate from that to a...

On the one hand, most anything we can imagine has some sort of potential application. But the fact that we could use Michelangelo's Pieta to block a washed-out road doesn't have anything to do with why we think the Pieta is valuable. Now if we're prepared to use "usefulness" loosely enough, then the "value=usefulness" idea might get a better run for its money. A work of art has the potential "use" of eliciting aesthetic experiences from us. However, the obvious reply is that those experiences are valuable for their own sake and not because they're useful for some other purpose. The defended of the "value=usefulness" idea can still make a few moves. Aesthetic experiences, the story might go, are conducive to a good life. (We'll leave aside the large question of just what a good life amounts to.) But there are two obvious replies. One is that even if aesthetic experiences can be part of some larger value, they could still be valuable for their own sake. The even more obvious reply is...

Please don't take this the wrong way. Though I wouldn't use words like "stupid", I'm on your parents' side. A man who would take a 17-year-old whom he has never met and with whom he has no real-life acquaintance on the sort of journey you describe against the wishes of the people who know him well is a man whose judgment I would not trust. And the fact that you don't see the worry gives me reason to think you aren't yet ready to make a decision like this yourself. You write "Clearly, though, young as I am, am ready to embark on a journey that will change my life." I ask: why is this clear? And to whom? Here's where we actually get to a philosophical point: the fact that you feel convinced and that it seems clear to you doesn't provide anyone - you nor anyone else - with a real reason to believe that it's true. There are too many unknowns here for gut instinct to be worth much. Might everything turn out well? It might. Or it might not. Can you become a well-educated person without...

An interesting question. I'd start by suggesting that your "if and only if" is open to challenge. First the less important part for our purposes: the fact that somebody values something doesn't obviously mean it's actually valuable. Some people value terrible thing, after all. There's a chilling scene in James Clavell's novel Shogun in which a samurai takes deep, deliberate and despicable pleasure in the screams of a man being tortured to death by a torturer who specializes in optimal cruelty. The samurai clearly values the experience, but I'm not willing to say that it's therefore valuable . Still, it seems right that value has a deep connection with experiences and the beings who have them. That may seem to be all that your worry needs. In other words it might seem that something is valuable only if someone values it or, more broadly, only if it evokes the right sort of reaction in some sentient being. But this is too strong. Consider: something could be exquisitely beautiful (to take...

I'd like to start with the last bit. You say that you understand living an authentic life as "directed by evolutionary forces that propel me to seek out maximum stimulation in order to realize my potential." I'd suggest some skepticism about that. If you mean by "evolution" what biologists mean, then there are no such forces; evolution isn't goal directed. And in any case, it's not obvious that "maximum stimulation" is the best way for for anyone to realize their potential. On the contrary, it's at least as likely that most of us suffer from too much stimulation as from too little. Down in the foothills, let's start with an example. I don't get along with racist bigots who lard their conversation with vile remarks. I've had all the "stimulation" from such people that my potential calls for. Being authentic doesn't call for inviting them to my dinner parties. On the contrary, doing that would be downright inauthentic. I'd be pretending a friendship that doesn't exist. Tolerance doesn't call for...

I'm afraid that I don't know the answer, and whatever credentials I have as a philosopher won't help much. It's a question about human psychology/behavior and really good answers will have to come from the social and biological sciences. Philosophers might offer plausible speculations, but those speculations might be wrong. That said, you've certainly put your finger on something real. In fact, psychologists have a name for at least a part of it: the Fundamental Attribution Error. It amounts to this: when we see other people acting badly or foolishly or inappropriately, we tend to put it down to character traits. But when it comes to our own bad or foolish or inappropriate behavior, we tend to excuse it as the result of some passing circumstances. Put another way: my mistakes are simply a result of a passing state; yours are products of some unfortunate but more-or-less permanent trait. We make excuses for ourselves even in cases where we aren't inclined to do so for others. Why are we...

Sorry to hear of your distress. And I'm also sorry that I don't have a lot of insight to offer, except but of negative advice. When you wonder what causes meaning to erode, there are two rather different sorts of things you might be asking. One is what sorts of reasons and arguments might persuade us that things don't have the cosmic significance we thought they did. Some philosophers have had things to say about that, and you might find Thomas Nagel's classic article "The Absurd" (Journal of Philosophy, 1971 pp. 716-727) interesting as an example. But Nagel cautions that even if his diagnosis of the absurdity of things is correct, it doesn't give us a reason to worry about it. Put in a different way, perhaps, a philosophical account of how things mean less than they seem needn't get in the way of a rich and enjoyable existence. And that brings me to what I suspect is the real point. Many of us have gone through periods when things seem meaningless to us not just in some abstract philosophical...

Although I can imagine cases where comparing the value of lives might be the way to go, it's not obvious that this is one of them. Heading down a path where we value lives by discounting on the basis of the likely number of remaining years (which is all I see at work here) seems a very dubious idea, fraught with all sorts of moral peril. Although there is something particularly poignant about the death of a child, this doesn't simply translate into a case for saying that the best solution to the dilemma you pose is to give the child's life a weight greater than that of the five adults who would otherwise die. All this said, there are some hard issues in the general neighborhood. Deciding how to use resources in end-of-life situations, for example, is a serious problem where some sort of discounting doesn't simply seem out of place. But the issues here are tricky, and it's hard to see how any simple rule will work.

The best piece of advice I ever heard on this issue came in a talk I heard years ago about Darwin. Darwin wanted to convince us of something that wasn't at all obvious when he introduced it. But more to the point, he wanted to be taken seriously by the scientific community. How did he do it? By spending the early part of his career demonstrating that he could do what his fellow scientists did -- that he could do credible, solid research that his colleagues would recognize as such. That made it possible for him to be taken seriously when he introduced his novel ideas. If someone is going to invest the time and energy needed to explore and evaluate ideas that are far from the mainstream, they need good reason to think that the effort might pay off. For every brilliant maverick in any field, there are at least 10 cranks. We might put it this way: if you want to persuade your peers, you need to be accepted by them as an able worker in your field. And doing that has an advantage from your own...