I sit at my desk, by a window that looks out onto the backyard and the road beyond our fence. Every year at Christmas, for my entire college career, I have come home to celebrate with my family. And in the odd hours between watching my mom doing an unfair amount of cooking, I will come up to my room and stare out the window. When I close my eyes I can see the snow storms of the past, as they blow against the glass panes of this old house. As I write this, the snow has recently stopped, and perhaps when I read this again, maybe a year from now, the snow will begin anew.

This is an essay about value, which also happens to be the topic of my senior thesis. But I don’t want to write about dense philosophy here, as much as I love doing that. I want to write about how I think about value, not how I reason about it. We can reason through all sorts of philosophical thought experiments, but at the end of the day those only shape how we think, on a deep level, about something.

So, after years of reading about ponds and glass, and the wealth that might occur in the future, or the tragedy that has occupied our past, this is how I think about value.

It’s a Wonderful Life

When I was in 11th grade, late one Friday night, in the dead of winter, I went with my then girlfriend to the store. We purchased some snacks and brought a blanket to a hidden courtyard at our school. There were these big columns that held up the second floor of the building. Sometimes people would bounce tennis balls against the adjacent wall during lunch. Under the cover of stone and stars we huddled together with a blanket and watched Netflix. I don’t remember why we did this, but I remember the show we watched. And, if I close my eyes, I can pretend to recall the feeling of cold and the dark shapes of a nearby garden.

This moment was valuable. The universe is better for it having existed.

Trapped in time, forever and always, I am sitting against the wall of my old school with someone I used to love. This wasn’t some fleeting moment of salt on my tongue, cold wind on my face, and heat on my chest. No matter what happens in the future there will always be this instance of warmth that filled the universe during the dead of winter.

That is value.

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I feel as if I’ve become more jaded as I age. Even though I still love sitting on my floor and putting tiny pieces of plastic together, pretending these colored bricks are somehow a spaceship, there is a sort of magic to Christmas that has now been lost.

Before the different months had meaning, and when staying up past 11 pm was unthinkable, Christmas was a fundamentally exciting time. 

Now that I have a disposable income I can buy myself all sorts of stuff, which an eight year old cannot do. After twenty-one years I have gotten better at understanding the things I want or need. But on Christmas days past the people I loved would give me things I didn’t even realize I wished for.

Trying to fall asleep Christmas Eve, but failing. Waking up early, but having to wait so my parents could get some amount of sleep. Peeking out from the banister or listening to my dad making coffee downstairs.

That was magical. 

Even now, there is still a great joy to the holidays. We put up a tree and cover the mantel with tiny Scandinavian elves. I get to see my cousins and I get to be around the people I love.

Each Christmas I lived through has added value to the universe. The very scope of reality is superior because I got to wake up in a warm house, while cold wind blew outside, and eat sugary treats and get showered with love and unwrap presents. 

I refuse to believe these days weren’t of supreme and immense value.

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We can talk philosophy all we want, but a human life is made up of thousands of these valuable moments that sparkle like stars against the backdrop of non-existence. Our brains can barely fathom the beauty and value of our own lives, how can we conceive of everyone else’s? Of lives that might never exist.

To me, answering this question is of central importance. I believe the way we think about value, and doing good, should be colored by our answer. When we think about the future, and what it should hold, our thoughts must be determined, in part, by our answer here.

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So what is my answer?

As I’ve said before, my care should be uncoupled from time and space. And so I too think my sense of value must also be spatially amorphous; I should be capable of recognizing it in any year and in any place I may be.

I think the precious and beautiful moments of my past aren’t so simply because I happened to be around to live them. These perfect and messy moments of life should be viewed as the wondrous occurrences they are by anyone who happens to know of them. You, by virtue of having read this essay, are now aware of some of the value that filled the world on Christmas day, or a random winter night in 2018. 

When someone shares their past with me, the moments they loved most, I become aware of another piece of value.

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I feel like I still haven’t gotten at what value is. But it also feels as if it is a question that can’t be answered straightforwardly. Just look at what I’ve written, at these moments I’ve shared. Think about those moments of your own life. 

What I’m trying to say is that I can give you a definition of value, perhaps human welfare, but that won’t help you understand what value is. I’m not sure our brains were really built to perceive value so abstractly.

I don’t know what a dollar is really worth. I conceive of it in terms of a plane ticket, or how many hours I worked to get it, or the food I can buy with it. But what is the value of a dollar? I feel as if, in a meaningful sense, what I’ve just said answers this question.

 So what exactly is this more abstract sense of value? Moral value we might call it, though I’m unsure that is the right term. Supreme value? Highest order value? 

Whatever we call it, what is it?

I’ve already explained the answer. Read the opening paragraph. Read the second and third sections. Think of your first kiss or your favorite birthday. What is the throughline of all these examples?

Value.

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I said I wasn’t going to talk about philosophy, but I can’t help myself.

There’s this idea that we should be neutral about the future. An extra life isn’t good or bad, it’s just a thing that could be.

I think this is wrong. In fact I’m almost willing to say I know this is wrong.

Imagine telling someone ten thousand years ago about the life I’d live. Could they even imagine it? Could they ever really comprehend the thoughts I think, the things I’ve seen, and the almost bizarre mundanity of my day to day? Wouldn’t this all be more than alien to them?

Does that even matter?

Imagine if I never got the chance to put smiles on the faces of my loved ones. Imagine if they never even existed. No Christmas day. No Hanukkah. No presents or chocolate or hugs or dinner or movies. No stockings, no one in this old house to see the snow.

That would be a tragedy. It’d be a crime. The very thought of erasing it fills me with anger. The universe is better, brighter, and more beautiful because those people are in it.

Through cosmic luck I got to imprint these moments onto reality. No matter what the future holds you will never take away the twenty-one years of life I got. Forever and always that value gets to live. 

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Ha. 

Take that nihilism.

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Imagine everything you just read was recovered from a time capsule. But instead of from the past, it came from the future.

Imagine the life I just described hadn’t taken place yet, but will, one hundred years from now.

Could you deny the value of my experiences? Deny the beauty in the moments that haven’t yet been written?

No. I don’t think you can.

I can’t properly conceive of the past. But we have love letters that were preserved for hundreds of years. I’ll never know those people, and I’ll never be able to ever understand what it was like to be them. But I know what it’s like to be in love, or to have a crush, and so I know those moments hundreds of years ago were valuable. 

We can’t be neutral about the future, because we can’t be neutral about the past. 

History has its value locked in, but perhaps tomorrow is still malleable. I don’t think that matters. The value my life has been filled with isn’t valuable because it happened to exist. The fact that it happened isn’t why I care about Christmas past. As I’ve tried to get at, those moments were and are valuable. The very nature of the concept is defined relationally to those moments.

Those moments were valuable. The universe is better for them having existed. And so tomorrow will be better if more of those moments get to exist. 

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What if my children never meet their grandparents? 

Something will have been lost.

What if I never even get to have children? 

Something will have been lost. Lives that could have sparkled as brightly as mine will be snuffed out before their flame was even lit. That’s a tragedy. It’s bad. It’s horrible actually.

What if my children never get the opportunity to have children. Let’s assume, like me, they one day want to be parents. Perhaps I’ll even be dead and gone by the time my grandchildren are hypothetically born. Imagine these imaginary grandchildren suddenly are denied the opportunity to exist. 

Abstract as this is getting, I still think something monumental would be lost. Even after I’m dead I want people to be given gifts, kiss their partners, and stare out the window as snow falls from the sky. I value those moments, and I believe that they define what value is.

And so I wish for more of it, forever and always. Even if I won’t be there to see it.

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The planet has billions of people on it. I know of hundreds, maybe thousands, of instances of value. The stories my friends have shared with me. Photos from my parents’ past.

But there are billions of people alive today. I will never, no matter how hard I try, be able to understand all the beauty that our present moment is filled with. 

But just the knowledge of it is enough for me. And the moments I do get to savor are just as sweet, perhaps even more so, with the understanding that across the planet someone else just laughed with friends or hugged their mom.

In fact the only issue is that there are people who don’t get to experience these wonders.

Value is valuable because that’s just what it means to be valuable. We should, like ravens, desire innately this sparkly thing that we call ‘value’. We should want to fill the world with as much of it as we possibly can, not just be satisfied with what we have.

When it comes to Christmas mornings or hugs or love I think we’ve earned the right to be insatiably greedy. One more moment with the people I care about will always be valuable, and so I’m comfortable demanding time and space be filled with such moments.

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If a billion years from now people are tortured or marched to death camps, it will be just as disgusting, just as atrocious, as when it happened in our history. My existence was almost stopped by the hate of people who are now dead. That sort of hate will be just as evil a thousand years from now as it was in our recent past. I don’t think I could respect myself if I was indifferent, neutral, about horror that has yet to come. If people still come down on Christmas morning to unwrap presents and make sugar puffs, it will be just as exciting a million years from now as it is tomorrow, or last year. How cynical would I have to be to deny this?

The moral arc of the universe does not bend towards justice, it bends towards nothingness. My grandfather lived through the holocaust. Could have died in it. Reality only conforms to good insofar as we make it so. The universe is endless matter and space between that matter. We can take the universe in our hands and make it better.

We can fill it with value. 

Value like coming home for the holidays or a first love. Value like laughing drunkenly with friends, or solving a particularly difficult math problem.

We can excise the possibility of horror from the future. We can build a world filled with all that is valuable, and keep building more and more of  that value, until the stars go dark.

And that would be good.