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A meaningful life, she claims, is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one. In her view, “meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile.  The person living the life must be engaged by it.  A life of commitment to causes that are generally defined as worthy — like feeding and clothing the poor or ministering to the ill — but that do not move the person participating in them will lack meaningfulness in this sense. However, for a life to be meaningful, it must also be worthwhile
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the first step we might take beyond what Wolf tells us is to recognize that lives unfold over time.  A life is not an unrelated series of actions or projects or states of being.  A life has, we might say, a trajectory.
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If a life has a trajectory, then it can be conceived narratively.  A human life can be seen as a story, or as a series of stories that are more or less related. 
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we must ask what lends objective worthiness to a life outside the moral realm.  Here is where the narrative character of a life comes into play.
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There are values we associate with a good narrative and its characters that are distinct from those we associate with good morals.  A fictional character can be intense, adventurous, steadfast or subtle. 
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When a life embodies one or more of these values (or others), and feels engaging to the one who lives it, it is to that extent meaningful.  There are narrative values expressed by human lives that are not reducible to moral values.  Nor are they reducible to happiness; they are not simply matters of subjective feeling.  Narrative values are not felt, they are lived
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An intense life, for instance, can be lived with abandon.
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We should not take this to imply that there is no relationship between meaningfulness and morality.  They meet at certain moral limits.  An evil life, no matter how intense or steadfast, is not one we would want to call meaningful.
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But within the parameters of those moral limits, the relationship between a meaningful life and a moral one is complicated.  They do not map directly onto each other.
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If we want to live meaningful lives, we might want to know something about what makes a life so.  Otherwise, we’re just taking stabs in the dark.
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we are currently encouraged to think of ourselves either as consumers or as entrepreneurs.  We are told to be shoppers for goods or investors for return.  Neither of these types of lives, if they are the dominant character of those lives, strike me as particularly meaningful.
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their narrative themes — buying, investing — are rarely the stuff of which a compelling life narrative is made.
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In what I have called an age of economics, it is even more urgent to ask the question of a meaningful life:  what it consists in, how we might live one.  Philosophy cannot prescribe the particular character of meaning that each of us should embrace.  It cannot tell each of us individually how we might trace the trajectory that is allotted to us.  But it can, and ought to, reflect upon the framework within which we consider these questions, and in doing so perhaps offer a lucidity we might otherwise lack
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Who among us has not asked whether his or her life is a meaningful one? 
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