[This post is part of a series called Choose Your Life Purposes. If the issues addressed in these posts interest you, please consider becoming an Existential Wellness Coach. To learn more about our Existential Wellness Coach Certificate Program, please visit here. To preorder Choose Your Life Purposes, please visit here.]

How we evaluate life matters. We experience life against the backdrop of our evaluation of life. If that evaluation is negative, nothing has much of a chance of feeling positive. Isn’t depression maybe just a persistent negative evaluation of life?

Why might you evaluate life that harshly? Maybe because you went unloved as a child. Maybe because you’ve spent a stupendous amount of your time just earning a living. Maybe because you see immorality rewarded. So many reasons!

Maybe you had dreams that never materialized and goals that you never reached. Maybe you had expected more out of life—more from it, more from others, and more from yourself. Maybe … this list is potentially extremely long, isn’t it?

It is easy and maybe even inevitable to evaluate life as a cheat, maybe easier and more reasonable than evaluating it as worth the candle. But how many unfortunate consequences flow from such a decision and from such a negative evaluation!

Such a negative evaluation is only a bit of bedrock reality upon which you get to build your intentional life. Maybe you’ve appraised life correctly. There will be pain, there will be death and maybe you’ll only get 3% or 6% of what you want. Maybe that’s true.

Now, adopting this philosophy of life, you face that truth, that you consider life a cheat, and move on. Now you can say, “Well, it looks like I’ve concluded that life has cheated me. Let me say that as clearly and as openly as I can and get on with the project of my life!”

Evaluate life harshly, if you must. But leap right to the next step. Shout, “So be it! Here I am and I refuse to throw in the towel. I intend to live my life in a principled way, doing one right thing after another, to the best of my ability. Boom!”

Even though you may have ample reasons to feel that life is a cheat, you must, for the sake of experiencing meaning, for the sake of your emotional well-being, and because of some core moral imperative, move past that negative evaluation.

You announce, “Life may be a cheat, for which I have ample evidence. But despite being burdened with this absurd hand to play, I see a way to play it. I see what I can do today and I see what I can do tomorrow and I see how to live.”

You counter your calculations about life with a dedication to your life as project. You make this leap even though you’ve been harmed, even though you’ve been badly disappointed, even though you find life taxing and unrewarding. You leap. Boom!

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