Why does anything matter?
My answer: individual well-being. And what is well-being? It’s whether your preferences are in line with your experiences or not, whether you feel good or bad, happiness or suffering, fulfillment or despair.
If I start with anything, small or large, petty or profound, and ask “why does this matter?”, and then I repeat the question with my answers, eventually I always hit the same foundational answer: Something matters to me just because I prefer it to be one way or another, because it makes me feel good or bad in some way.
Things only matter to individuals, so when asking “why does this matter?” we must also ask “why does this matter to whom?”
If I walk outside and slap the first person I see, why does that matter? It only really matters because getting slapped hurts (in more ways than one), and most of us would prefer to not have that happen. (Although maybe some people do in certain situations, and that’s A-OK.)
It’s not the law that dictates why things matter, nor are rights of fundamental importance. Both the law and rights are ways of implementing the one root of it all—well-being.
Science, beauty, justice, art, technology, music, democracy, literacy, accomplishment—none of these things matter by themselves. It is only through recourse to well-being that they find their meaning.
If I ever doubt that, I can just go back to the original question: “Why does this matter?” Every single time, at the end of this inquiry I will discover an individual who has experiences and preferences, someone who can suffer and experience joy, someone who cares about how their life goes.
That’s what really matters, and it matters regardless of whether that someone is human or not.
Everything else is just implementation details.
This post is a chapter from my book, Thoughts, Volume 1, where I share reflections and ideas chapter by chapter. In the book, it’s titled “On Why Anything Matters”.
