The other day I received an email from a student who attended a talk I gave at her school a few years ago.

I remember chatting with her after the presentation because she was passionate about a specific artistic movement, and had focused her studies on that period, the artists involved, and so on. I didn’t know much about the topic myself, but her enthusiasm for it was contagious, so I looked it up and did a little reading about it after the event.

In this message she sent me, though, she sounded far less enthused.

She’s nearing graduation, and in light of what’s happening around the world right now, she’s beginning to feel like everything she’s learned and accomplished is meaningless.

What’s the point, after all, of sitting around reading about art history when you and your loved ones might die?

Even in the best of times, it can be difficult to figure out what’s meaningful. That book you’re working on, the app you’re building, the habit you’re maintaining: it’s important to you, but is it important beyond that?

Meaning is a subjective thing.

We each define what is meaningful for ourselves, and though that determination is influenced by social norms and other such variables, we can ultimately find meaning in whatever we choose. And whether that means trying to cure cancer or knitting socks—or both—these activities give us pleasure, help us maintain psychological equanimity, and make our lives worth living.

There’s never been a moment in all of human history in which there hasn’t been some arguably more important thing to worry about, in the sense of baseline survival.

If we weren’t threatened by a pandemic, we’d be threatened by the possibility of war, the potentiality of a world-ending asteroid impact, the near-certainty of flooding and mass migrations caused by ocean level rise. A pandemic isn’t nothing, but it’s also not a new type of thing. Our lack of moment-to-moment awareness of these other threats doesn’t make them less potent or probable, it just means they’re slow-moving, tough to imagine or visualize, or not particularly panic-inducing, for whatever reason.

Important to remember, though, whatever threats we face, is that we’re not just protecting and preserving human lives when we try to prevent and cure disease, or solve these other issues as they arise: we’re also trying to maintain our humanity and culture.

It’s not enough to just be alive, we also need things to live for.

Although studying art history may seem quaint when compared to curing disease, it’s one of an infinite number of possible pursuits that can improve our collective understanding of ourselves, of the things we make, and how all the bits and pieces of what we loosely refer to as “civilization” fit together.

Working out helps us feel good and stay healthy, making music can perk us up and bring joy to others, writing in a journal can lend structure to our days and help us understand our internal processes, and playing video games can immerse us in alternative narratives, while also extracting us from our usual environments for a spell.

None of these activities is valuable in the same way that curing disease is valuable, but they are not lacking in value, on the personal or the societal level.

The difference between mere subsistence and truly living is that the latter requires we do more than just survive: we have to pursue fulfillment, we have to challenge ourselves, and we have pursue next steps that we’re only able to imagine because we’ve learned so much and as a species expanded our thinking far beyond what’s necessary to simply maintain consciousness.

This essay was originally published in my newsletter.