And there you have it, Dearest Reader.

The meaning of life—if there is one simple enough to survive contact with reality—is the pursuit of happiness.

The optimists are blessed. Happiness comes easily to them, as if installed at birth.

The pessimists must work at it—grinding away, adjusting their gait, learning to walk with the discomfort of a pebble in their shoe.

Both are playing the same game.

They just experience the terrain differently.

To understand why this framing holds up, we need to detour briefly through one of the most dangerous thinkers in Western philosophy.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent. He lived modestly, grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes, and thinking far ahead of his time.

So far ahead, in fact, that he was:

Excommunicated by his religious community

Condemned by political authorities

Read quietly by nearly every serious philosopher who came after

Einstein called him the only philosopher he truly admired.

Hegel said that to be a philosopher, one must first be a Spinozist.

Why?

Because Spinoza did something radical.

He rejected the idea that humans sit outside nature, governed by divine whims or moral exceptions.

Instead, he argued that humans are fully embedded within nature, governed by the same causal laws as everything else.

No miracles. No free-floating moral absolutes. No special exemptions. Just systems.

Spinoza’s Ethics isn’t a rulebook. It’s an operating manual.

Rather than asking what is good or evil in some abstract sense, Spinoza asked:

What increases a person’s capacity to act?

What diminishes it?

For Spinoza, good and bad are not moral categories — they are functional ones.

Good = that which increases our power, coherence, and understanding.

Bad = that which diminishes them.

This reframing collapses centuries of moral confusion.

Virtue is no longer obedience. Sin is no longer taboo.

Ethics becomes intelligence applied to living.

Will and Ariel Durant, in The Story of Philosophy, recognized how explosive this idea was.

They showed how Spinoza quietly reconciled three historically opposed ethical systems:

The compassion-first ethics of Buddha and Jesus

The power-first ethics of Machiavelli and Nietzsche

The reason-first ethics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

Spinoza didn’t choose between them. He absorbed them.

By identifying virtue with intelligence, and happiness with increased capacity, he built a system of ethics that didn’t require denying biology, power, or desire — only understanding them.

Durant called this synthesis “the supreme achievement of modern thought.”

That is not casual praise.

Spinoza begins with a definition that sounds obvious until you follow it all the way down.

Pleasure and pain are not fixed states. They are transitions.

“Pleasure is man’s transition from a lesser state of perfection to a greater.”

“Pain is man’s transition from a greater state of perfection to a lesser.”

Emotion is motion.

All passions are movements toward or away from capacity, coherence, power.

Happiness is not arrival. It is momentum in the right direction.

Here Spinoza quietly meets modern neuroscience.

As Robert Sapolsky explains in Behave, dopamine spikes most strongly not when we achieve a goal, but when we nearly achieve it.

Progress excites us more than completion.

Learning reinforces itself.

Stagnation feels like decay.

Once a goal is fulfilled, dopamine drops. A new pursuit is required.

Spinoza anticipated this centuries ago.

Emotion is motion.

Virtue, then, is not sacrifice.

It is the ability to direct oneself intelligently through a world governed by incentives, hierarchies, and constraints.

Spinoza does not ask people to abandon self-interest. He recognizes it as inevitable.

What matters is whether self-interest is blind or informed.

The freer a mind is from confusion, the less it is enslaved by useless desires.

In The Improvement of the Intellect, Spinoza explains why he abandoned wealth, honor, and reputation.

Not because they are evil — but because they multiply desire without resolving it.

The more one has, the more one must chase.

Frustrated hope turns to pain.

Fame requires living according to others’ fantasies.

Knowledge behaves differently.

“The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature.”

Understanding does not exhaust itself. It stabilizes.

This is not transcendence out of the system. It is transcendence within it.

We collect points because that is how systems work.

But when the points we collect are knowledge — patterns, causes, structures — something changes.

We gain agency.

Not freedom from biology. Not escape from networks.

But the ability to move through them with eyes open.

And that, Dearest Reader, is about as close to meaning as the universe seems willing to offer.

Fin.