DESIGNING A LIFE WORTH LIVING

Derek Hagen
1 hour ago
4 min read

Hand-drawn illustration of two LWL labels — Life Worth Living and Life Well Lived — connected by the word LIFE as a bridge between them.

❝All good things must come to an end some time, don't burn the day away.❞ -DMB, "Pig"

Life worth living makes life well-lived possible. But you have to do something with the time in between.

TWO VERSIONS OF LWL

I've spent a good chunk of my career writing about meaningful living — helping people figure out what they actually want their lives to look like, and then building their finances around that rather than the other way around.

Over the years, two phrases kept showing up in my work: life well lived and life worth living. I used them interchangeably for a long time. They felt like synonyms... two ways of saying the same thing.

Then I noticed they share the same initials. LWL. Both of them.

I thought that was a cute coincidence. Then I realized they're not synonyms at all. They're actually quite different, and the difference matters.

LWL: LIFE WORTH LIVING

Oliver Burkeman points out in Four Thousand Weeks that the average human life runs about 4,000 weeks. That's not a lot. It's even less when you consider how many of those weeks are already behind you.

Think of it like a meter — a bar running from birth to death, shaded in as you go.

Hand-drawn progress bar from birth to death, shaded halfway, representing a life at middle age.

Some people have more of the bar shaded than others.

Hand-drawn progress bar from birth to death, shaded most of the way, representing a life in old age.

Some have most of it still ahead.

Hand-drawn progress bar from birth to death, shaded only a small amount, representing a life in youth.

Whatever your meter looks like, it's an estimate. Nobody knows exactly how much is left. But there is time left, and the first LWL is about what you do with it.

Life worth living is the forward-looking question. It's motivational. It's looking out at the unshaded part of the bar and deciding what you want that time to actually contain: what would bring you meaning, what would bring you joy, what's worth doing. It's answering, for yourself, the question: what makes life worth living?

Hand-drawn life bar halfway shaded, with a stick figure standing on top looking forward, thought bubble reading LWL — illustrating a life worth living.

LWL: LIFE WELL-LIVED

The second LWL faces the other direction.

Life well lived is retrospective. It's the satisfaction you feel — or don't feel — when you look back on the life you've actually lived. It's not about plans or intentions. It's about what happened, what you built, who you loved, and how you spent your time. It's the story you tell yourself at the end.

Hand-drawn life bar mostly shaded, with a stick figure standing at the edge looking back, thought bubble reading LWL — illustrating a life well lived.

The Three-Dimensional Meaning in Life Scale assesses three dimensions of meaning in life: coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is the feeling that your life makes sense. Purpose is having direction in life. Significance is the belief that your life has value.

THE DASH IS WHERE LIFE LIVES

Poet Linda Ellis wrote a poem called "The Dash." The observation at its center is simple: a tombstone has two dates on it: the day you were born and the day you died, with a dash in between. That dash is where everything actually happened. The joy, the hard parts, the relationships, the ordinary Thursdays. All of it fits inside that small mark.

Hand-drawn tombstone with birth and death dates, the dash zoomed in to reveal a life progress bar labeled Life and Age.

Our two LWLs work the same way. They're bookends. Life worth living on the left, life well lived on the right, and everything that matters happening in the middle.

But wanting a life worth living isn't enough on its own. Wanting is not the same as doing. The dash gets filled in whether you're intentional about it or not.

The question is whether you're the one deciding how.

Hand-drawn text showing LWL → ACTION → LWL, illustrating how a life worth living leads through intentional action to a life well lived.

ONE LWL MAKES THE OTHER POSSIBLE

Most people treat these as synonyms. Most people don't design either one deliberately.

The first LWL, life worth living, is the question that motivates the action.

The second LWL, life well lived, is the answer you get to give at the end.

One makes the other possible.

But only if you do something with the time in between.

You get one life; live intentionally.

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