3Chapter 3: Love, Growth, and Meaning

Working notes, not prose. This page is a research packet for drafting the chapter: the brief, source material, questions, examples, reader perspectives, and the earlier draft.

Brief

• Must: Show wanting that includes others: love, growth and meaning as what wanting becomes when another’s good enters it, lived mostly through ordinary care and maintenance.
• Serves: It is the agreement half: players whose wants take each other in. That grounds the book’s later ethics in care rather than achievement.

Quote options

1. “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” — Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good,” Chicago Review 13.3 (Autumn 1959), p. 51. [verified: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Iris_Murdoch] Why: Defines love as another’s reality entering your wanting. That is the chapter’s hinge from conflict to agreement.

2. “If a woman told us that she loved flowers, and we saw that she forgot to water them, we would not believe in her ‘love’ for flowers. Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956), ch. II “The Theory of Love”, pp. 26–27. [verified: https://archive.org/stream/TheArtOfLoving/43799393-The-Art-of-Loving-Erich-Fromm_djvu.txt] Why: Ties love, growth and ordinary maintenance together in one homely image.

3. “I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter.” — Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923), trans. Walter Kaufmann (1970), Part One. (Smith’s 1937 translation renders the second sentence “All real living is meeting.”) [verified: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/mirror/m/mb/martin-buber-i-and-thou.pdf] Why: The self grows through the other, so wanting that includes others is how an I is made in the first place.

4. “It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.” — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946/1959), Part Two, “Logotherapy in a Nutshell” (on “the self-transcendence of human existence”). [verified: https://archive.org/details/mans-search-for-meaning-viktor-e.-frankl-dr-furqan-library] Why: Meaning comes from wanting that points beyond the self, and growth is a side effect of that.

5. “The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” — Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! (1969). [verified: https://kortina.nyc/notes/manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969/] Why: Grounds the chapter’s ethics in care and maintenance rather than achievement, the outline’s explicit aim.

Research

Core argument

1. Pick up where Chapter 2 left off. Chapter 2 filled the world with wanting creatures and showed wants colliding. That is only half the story. Wants can also fold in another’s wants, so that the other’s good becomes part of what I want, not something I trade against.
2. This is old and biological before it is romantic. Folding in shows up at every scale: organelles that were once separate bacteria, vampire bats sharing blood meals, parents who fast so their young can live, Neanderthals keeping a badly injured man alive for years. Agreement between players is as basic as conflict.
3. Define the three words by what enters the want.
   • Love: another’s good enters my wanting and stays there even when it costs me. Murdoch’s version: another person becomes real to me, not a prop in my story.
   • Growth: the capacity that the wanting builds, in me and in the one I care for. That covers what I can notice, bear and do for them. Fromm’s flowers: love that does not water is not love.
   • Meaning: how a pattern of care holds a life together over time. Wolf: subjective attraction meeting something worth being attracted to, plus the ability to act on it.
4. Attention comes first. Before love can do anything useful it has to see accurately. Murdoch’s mother-in-law revises her view of D without any outward action, and Weil calls attention a form of generosity. Loving well is partly an epistemic achievement, which foreshadows Chapter 4.
5. Care is mostly maintenance. Fisher and Tronto define care as maintaining, continuing and repairing our “world.” Most love is lived as bins, towels, watering, showing up, answering the text, and patching the code. Ukeles shook hands with 8,500 sanitation workers to make that visible.
6. Care shows up in measurable ways too. Contact comfort mattered more than milk to Harlow’s infant monkeys. The Harvard adult development study found relationships predicting health and happiness in later life. In a 148-study meta-analysis, stronger social ties went with about 50% higher odds of survival. Deprivation of care at the start of life leaves lasting marks. Present these as evidence that care is load-bearing, not as proof of any metaphysics.
7. Growth and meaning are by-products, not targets. Frankl says self-actualization comes from forgetting the self in a cause or a person. Meaning taken as a project to optimize tends to slide back into self-regard. This is the hinge to the book’s later ethics of care rather than achievement.
8. Name the hazards honestly. Love can be possessive, partial and tribal. Care is unequally distributed and often coerced, most of all from women and poorly paid workers. Growth can be growth in harm. Meaning can be missing because of illness, poverty or exhaustion, and that is no failure of character. Check maintenance conditions (sleep, food, company, room to choose) before diagnosing a lack of purpose.
9. Close the pair with Chapter 2. Wants collide (Ch. 2) and wants embrace (Ch. 3), and both are real. Understanding someone requires seeing them from inside, which we can’t fully do. That sets up Chapter 4’s problem of subjectivity: love asks us to see another accurately, and we have only our own filters to see with.

Key questions

Curious child

1. If I love my dog, does my dog know? How could I tell if the dog loved me back?
2. Why do grown-ups say “I love pizza” and “I love you” with the same word?
3. Does a plant feel it when you water it? Is watering a plant love?
4. Why does Mom still clean up even when nobody says thank you?
5. Can you love someone you’ve never met?

Cynical adult 6. Isn’t “love” just genes looking after copies of themselves (kin selection), plus a favor bank (reciprocity)? What is left once you subtract those? 7. Who actually does the “ordinary care and maintenance” this chapter praises? Isn’t praising it a cheap way to keep it unpaid? 8. If meaning is whatever I feel is meaningful, then a devoted cult member has a very meaningful life. Doesn’t that make meaning worthless as a guide? 9. Isn’t “growth” just the self-help industry’s word for productivity?

Philosophical 10. What exactly changes in a want when another’s good “enters” it? Is it a new want, or the same want with a wider boundary of self? 11. Can you love without attending, or attend without loving? Murdoch treats them as nearly one act. 12. Wolf says meaning needs something “worthy of love.” Who decides what is worthy, and does the book owe the reader an answer? 13. Frankfurt says caring makes something important to us. Does that make the importance any less real? 14. Is love a feeling, a choice (hooks: “an act of will”), a practice (Fromm), or a way of seeing (Murdoch)? Must we pick one? 15. Can care be bad for the one cared for? Where is the line between care and control? 16. Does loving one person make me worse at being fair to everyone else? (Partiality versus impartial ethics.) 17. Is maintenance meaningful in itself, or only because of what it keeps going? 18. Would a being with no needs, one that never breaks, rots or gets lonely, be capable of love? 19. When a relationship ends, where does the growth it produced go? 20. Why does being cared for so early in life shape so much of what comes after?

Examples

1. Mitochondria as the oldest agreement (cells, around 2 billion years ago). Eukaryotic cells arose when one microbe took in another and both kept going. Lynn Margulis (then Sagan) argued this in “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells,” Journal of Theoretical Biology (1967). Molecular clock estimates put the mitochondrial merger at roughly 1.8 to 2.3 billion years ago. This is not love, but it shows how old it is for one player to fold in another’s continuation. Use it with care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis
2. Vampire bats sharing blood (animals). A vampire bat can survive only about two days without feeding. Bats that fail to feed beg from roost-mates, who regurgitate blood. Carter & Wilkinson (2013, Proc. R. Soc. B) found that past help received predicted donations better than relatedness did. The example sits exactly on the cynic’s line between reciprocity and care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_bat
3. Harlow’s cloth mother (1958). Infant rhesus monkeys clung to a soft cloth surrogate that gave no milk and went to the wire one only to feed. Harlow concluded that “contact comfort” was of “overwhelming importance” and lactation of “negligible importance” for affection. The ethical cost of the experiments is itself a lesson for the chapter: the people who studied love were willing to deprive infants of it. https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/love.htm
4. Shanidar 1 (Neanderthal, Iraq; excavated 1957–61). An older male with a crushed eye orbit, a withered right arm, a limp and severe hearing loss. His injuries healed, so he lived with them for a long time, and Erik Trinkaus argued he must have been helped by others to survive. Care for the disabled goes back before our species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanidar_Cave
5. The “Margaret Mead femur” story, as a warning. A widely shared anecdote has Mead naming a healed femur as the first sign of civilization. No primary source from Mead has been found, and it seems to trace to a secondhand retelling (often credited to surgeon Paul Brand’s writing). Shanidar 1 makes the same point with real evidence. The chapter can use the pair to model Chapter 4’s discipline of separating story from event. [check provenance before printing]
6. Murdoch’s M and D (thought experiment, “The Idea of Perfection,” 1964). A mother-in-law privately judges her son’s wife vulgar and juvenile. Over time, with nothing outward changing, she makes herself look again and comes to see D as refreshingly simple and spontaneous. Murdoch argues the moral work happened in the looking. It is the chapter’s clearest case of love as accurate attention. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/iris-murdoch-and-the-meaning-of-attention/11301690
7. Fromm’s forgotten flowers. Already among the Quote options; use it as the homely anchor for “love is active concern for growth.”
8. Ukeles, Touch Sanitation (24 July 1979 – 26 June 1980). Mierle Laderman Ukeles shook hands with about 8,500 New York sanitation workers across all 59 districts, telling each one “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” She also walked their routes. This is the chapter’s emblem for maintenance as the substance of care. https://www.wikiart.org/en/mierle-laderman-ukeles/touch-sanitation-1980
9. Heartbleed and the invisible maintainers (2014, civilization scale). When the Heartbleed bug surfaced, OpenSSL secured much of the internet and was kept by a handful of volunteers, only one of them full-time, on donations of about US$2,000 a year. Dan Kaminsky: “We are building the most important technologies for the global economy on shockingly underfunded infrastructure.” The Linux Foundation then launched the Core Infrastructure Initiative (24 April 2014). Maintenance is care at scale, and its neglect is a failure of love at scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed
10. The Harvard Study of Adult Development (1938 to now). It began with 724 men, 268 Harvard students and 456 boys from poor Boston neighborhoods. Director Robert Waldinger’s 2015 TED talk summary: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” https://www.robertwaldinger.com/post/what-harvard-s-study-of-adult-development-reveals-about-happiness/
11. Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton (2010), PLoS Medicine 7(7): e1000316. A meta-analysis of 148 studies and 308,849 participants found about 50% greater odds of survival with stronger social relationships. The effect is comparable to well-known risks such as smoking. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000316
12. Romanian orphanages and the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (from 2000). Children from severely under-staffed institutions were randomly assigned either to stay or to go to foster families. Those placed earlier, roughly before age two, showed better cognitive and attachment outcomes. Care is not optional input for a developing mind. [numbers from memory: about 136 children; verify against Nelson, Fox & Zeanah, Romania’s Abandoned Children, Harvard UP 2014]
13. Prairie voles and oxytocin, a complication. Prairie voles were long the textbook case of monogamy being run by oxytocin. Berendzen et al. (Neuron, 2023) reported that voles bred without oxytocin receptors still formed pair bonds and cared for pups. The biology of attachment is more redundant, and less “one molecule,” than pop science claims. [verify citation]
14. The deep-sea octopus that brooded for 53 months. Robison et al. (PLOS ONE, 2014) watched a Graneledone boreopacifica mother guard her eggs off California for about four and a half years, apparently without eating, and then die. Care as pure maintenance, pushed to its limit. [verify]
15. Toddlers who help (Warneken & Tomasello, Science, 2006). Eighteen-month-olds spontaneously picked up an adult’s dropped clothespins, or opened a cabinet for an adult whose arms were full, without being asked or rewarded. Folding in another’s goal seems to come early. [verify details]
16. Kitchen-scale scenes for the prose. Remembering which friend takes their tea without milk. Checking on an elderly neighbor after a heatwave. Re-reading a child’s homework to find what they actually got stuck on, as distinct from what you expected. Keeping a sourdough starter alive. Holding the ladder.

Source material

1. “For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods” — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, ch. 1 (1155a), trans. W. D. Ross. [verified: https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.8.viii.html] Use: The oldest plain statement that goods don’t add up to a life without others. It opens the “agreement half.”

2. “those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends” — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, ch. 3 (1156b), trans. W. D. Ross. [verified: https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.8.viii.html] Use: A near-exact ancient formula for the chapter’s definition, another’s good wanted for their sake. It contrasts with Chapter 2’s friendships of use.

3. “meaning in life arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness, and one is able to do something about it or with it.” — Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton UP, 2010), Lecture 1, p. 26. [verified: https://personal.lse.ac.uk/ROBERT49/teaching/ph103/pdf/WolfSusanne_2010_Meaning-in-Life-and-Why-It-Matters.pdf] Use: The chapter’s working definition of meaning. It carries the “able to do something,” the active and maintaining part.

4. “a life devoted to the care of a single other individual—a disabled partner, for example, or a frail, aging parent, or a child with special needs—could be a meaningful life” — Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010), Lecture 1, p. 18. (In context she is rejecting a “larger than oneself” view that would rule such a life out.) [verified: same URL as above] Use: A philosopher explicitly defending caregiving as a meaningful life. It supports “care rather than achievement.”

5. “I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” — Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection” (1964), in The Sovereignty of Good (1970), p. 34 in the Routledge edition (page to confirm against the author’s copy). [verified: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/iris-murdoch-and-the-meaning-of-attention/11301690] Use: Anchors “attention first”: love as seeing accurately, and the bridge to Chapter 4.

6. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” — Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet, 13 April 1942, in Correspondance (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1982), p. 18. French original: “L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité.” [verified: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Simone_Weil] Use: A short epigraph-grade line for the attention section. The context (Bousquet, paralyzed since 1918, had read her closely) is itself a small scene of care.

7. “the capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle.” — Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God (1951; trans. Emma Craufurd). [verified: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Simone_Weil] Use: A reminder that attention to another is hard work, not sentiment.

8. “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action.” — bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000), ch. 1 “Clarity” (glossing M. Scott Peck). [verified: https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/all-about-love/excerpt] Use: Moves love from feeling to practice, which prepares the maintenance section.

9. “A species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’, so that we can live in it as well as possible.” — Berenice Fisher & Joan Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring,” in E. Abel & M. Nelson (eds.), Circles of Care (SUNY Press, 1990), p. 40; restated in Tronto, Moral Boundaries (1993), p. 103. [verified via quotation in secondary source: https://publications.aston.ac.uk/id/document/3240] Use: The best one-sentence bridge from love to maintenance. The continuation, “our bodies, ourselves, and our environment,” gives care the chapter’s full range of scales.

10. “Certainly, man cannot live by milk alone. Love is an emotion that does not need to be bottle- or spoon-fed” — Harry F. Harlow, “The Nature of Love,” American Psychologist 13 (1958), pp. 673–685 (APA presidential address, 31 Aug 1958). [verified: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/love.htm] Use: Evidence that care is more than provisioning. Pair it with the ethical irony of the experiments.

11. “We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847), opening deliberation (translation not specified on source; confirm against the Hong translation, 1995). [verified: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard] Use: An answer to the cynic. Refusing to believe in love out of fear of being fooled is its own deception, and it links to the book’s anti-cheating theme.

Not verified this round, but worth checking (no wording given here): Frankfurt on caring making us “vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits” in “The Importance of What We Care About” (1982 essay, in the 1988 collection, p. 83 region). Deci & Ryan’s “relatedness” as a basic psychological need (Self-Determination Theory).

Counterarguments and limits

• Reductionism (the cynic’s strongest card). Kin selection (Hamilton, 1964) and reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971) explain much apparent care. The chapter should grant this openly. The explanation of where a capacity came from doesn’t settle what it is now: a want that evolved for gene copies can still, in fact, be aimed at the child’s own good. The chapter shouldn’t claim that biology proves selfless love either.
• Romanticizing care. Praising maintenance can become a way of keeping it unpaid and gendered. Ukeles’s manifesto was itself a protest about this. The chapter needs a sentence on who is expected to care, and at what cost to them.
• Partiality and tribalism. Care for “my people” powers nepotism, in-group violence and nationalism. Wanting that includes some others can exclude the rest. Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love and the long-spoons parable (Ch. 20) are the corrective, but the chapter shouldn’t pretend love naturally scales.
• Care as control. Paternalism, smothering and abusive “love.” Murdoch’s accurate attention, and Fromm’s “respect” component, which means letting the other grow in their own way, are the tests.
• Meaning is contested. Wolf’s “objective attractiveness” draws charges of elitism. Pure subjectivism makes meaning trivial. The chapter shouldn’t pretend to resolve this, and it can hand it forward to Ch. 4 and 7.
• Evidence overreach. Harlow’s monkeys aren’t humans. The Grant Study began as white men only. The Holt-Lunstad results are correlational. Oxytocin stories are oversimplified (see the 2023 vole study). Use the data to say care is load-bearing, and stop there.
• The definitional risk. If “love” stretches to cover mitochondria and bats, it means nothing. Keep a clear line: symbiosis and reciprocity are precursors and analogues, and love proper involves another’s good being represented and wanted. That also links to Act I’s volition.
• Maintenance without love. Much maintenance is done grudgingly or for pay, and it still keeps the world going. Is it care? The chapter should say whether it defines care by the act or by the orientation behind it.

Connections

• Ch. 1 (Before Thought, There Is Want): Love is wanting whose object includes another’s wanting, so the volo expands.
• Ch. 2 (Will Creates Difference): The explicit pair: conflict half and agreement half. Reuse the same creatures (bats, primates, people) to show both.
• Ch. 4 (From Subjectivity…): Love demands accurate seeing of a mind we can’t enter. Murdoch’s M and D is a bridge case, and the Mead-femur myth is a story/event exercise.
• Ch. 5 (The First Blade): Caring blurs the me/world cut, since a loved one’s harm registers as my harm. Autopoiesis is self-maintenance, and care is maintenance extended to another.
• Ch. 7 (The Third Blade): Good and bad begin as survival. Care is one of the strategies that survives, and one of the values we judge others by.
• Ch. 9 (The Cost of the Blade): Measures replacing purposes: “growth” as a metric can eat love.
• Ch. 16 (Becoming): Receptive attention (Weil, Murdoch, Buber) returns there, not justified by productivity.
• Ch. 17 (Maintenance, Meaning, and Magic): Direct continuation. This chapter introduces maintenance as care, and Ch. 17 argues that it doesn’t fit the MMM loops. Coordinate so the two don’t duplicate each other.
• Ch. 19 (What Knowledge Needs to Stay Alive): Knowledge also needs maintainers (the Heartbleed case could live there or here).
• Ch. 20 (Raising the Floor): Long spoons. Care scaled to institutions, and the answer to the partiality objection.
• Ch. 22 (A Better Tuesday): The exercises here can seed its concrete practices.

Exercise ideas

1. The maintenance audit (one day, 10 minutes of writing). Instruction: Tonight, list every act of maintenance that touched your day: things you did (washed a cup, replied to a message, fed someone) and things done for you by others, including strangers (the water ran, the bins were emptied, someone fixed the software you used). Beside each, mark whose good it served and whether anyone noticed it. Notice: How much of your day rested on care you never saw. Which of your own acts were for someone else’s good, and which felt meaningful even though they were dull. Why: It makes the chapter’s central claim, that love is lived mostly as maintenance, visible in the reader’s own life rather than asserted.

2. Murdoch’s second look (one person, one week). Instruction: Choose someone you’ve quietly filed under a label (“difficult,” “boring,” “needy”). Once a day, write one sentence describing something they did, in words they would accept as fair. No action is required. Notice: Whether the label loosens, what you’d been failing to see, and how much effort it takes to see someone accurately without your own wishes in the way. Why: It tests the claim that love starts as just attention, and that seeing another as real is work. It is also a rehearsal for Chapter 4’s limits of subjectivity.

3. Whose good is in this want? (five minutes, any time). Instruction: Take three things you want this week. For each, ask: whose good is included in it? Only mine? Mine plus a specific person’s? Does it conflict with someone’s? Rewrite one want so that it deliberately includes one other person’s good, then do it. Notice: How the want changes in feel and in difficulty once another’s good enters it, and whether it became more or less meaningful. Why: It enacts the chapter’s definition (love as what wanting becomes when another’s good enters it) and joins it back to Chapter 2’s wants in conflict.

Open questions for the author

• How far down the tree does “love” go? Do you use bats and mitochondria as analogues (“precursors of agreement”) or as early love? That choice sets the book’s line on volition.
• Which definition leads: feeling, will (hooks), practice (Fromm), or attention (Murdoch)? The brief implies practice and maintenance. Is attention the hinge or a sub-point?
• How much of the care-work politics do you include? One paragraph, or saved for Ch. 20?
• Does Wolf’s “objective worth” fit a book that puts humility about objectivity first? You may want to defer the “worthy of what?” question explicitly to Ch. 4 and 7.
• Split maintenance between Ch. 3 and Ch. 17. Suggestion: Ch. 3 says maintenance is how love is lived, and Ch. 17 says maintenance is what the loops leave out.
• Keep or cut Harlow, given the ethical weight? If kept, say how you frame the cruelty.
• Is Buber’s I–Thou the frame for the whole chapter, or one voice among several? It is already in the Quote options and in Ch. 16’s references.
• The earlier draft’s tone (Victorian-orphan plant, food with a “second career”). Is the wry domestic voice staying? It suits the maintenance theme well.
• Verify before use: BEIP numbers, the 2023 vole study, the octopus figure, the Warneken & Tomasello details, the Mead-femur provenance, and page numbers for Murdoch, Kierkegaard and hooks.

Reader perspectives

Curious young child

First reactions:

• The plant with “the expression of a Victorian orphan” goes over their head, but a droopy plant that needs water doesn’t.
• “Love is taking out the bin?” feels wrong to them at first. Love is hugs and hearts. Then they remember who packs their lunch every day, and it clicks.
• The Erich Fromm idea in the quote options, that you can’t say you love flowers if you forget to water them, is perfectly kid-shaped. They’ll think about the class hamster or the goldfish.
• Growth is easy: they’re growing all the time, with marks on the door frame. But the chapter’s growth is a different kind, and they need to be told that.
• Meaning is the hard word. They don’t know what “a life that hangs together” means.

Questions they’d ask:

1. “Do you love someone more if you do more chores for them?”
2. “Does my dog love me or does he just love dinner?”
3. “If I forget to feed my fish, does that mean I don’t love him?”
4. “Can you love someone you fight with? I love my brother, but I also don’t.”
5. “Why does Mom still do stuff for me when I’m mean?”
6. “Is growing taller the same as growing up?”
7. “Can you grow the wrong way? Like getting really good at being sneaky?”
8. “What’s meaning? Is it like what a word means?”
9. “Does my life have meaning? I’m only eight.”
10. “Can a tree love its baby trees?”
11. “Why is loving someone sometimes tiring?”
12. “Who cleans up after the party? Is that love?”

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

• The three definitions (love, growth, meaning as “what care looks like when…”) come in a row and blur together. Each one needs its own picture: feeding the fish, learning to tie shoes, the family’s Sunday pancakes.
• Buber, Murdoch and Susan Wolf are name-dropped with no story. A kid doesn’t care who they are, and wants to know what they would say about a lost teddy.
• “A company can become more effective at extracting value” doesn’t mean anything to them. “Getting really good at tricking people” does.
• The burnout, precarity and underfed-nervous-system paragraph is an adult concern. A kid version: when you’re tired and hungry, nothing feels fun or important, and that’s not because you’re bad.
• The brief says this is the “agreement half”, with players whose wants take each other in. The draft never shows two wants actually merging. Kids want the moment when a sister wants her brother to win the race too.

Examples they’d bring:

• The class pet over the weekend: someone has to take the hamster home, feed it, clean the cage. That’s love as maintenance, and it’s the kid’s first taste of it.
• Giving a friend the bigger half of the cookie: the exact moment another’s good enters your wanting. It’s small and specific, and they remember it.
• A mother bird feeding chicks: endless trips to the nest. It’s care that looks like work.
• Learning to ride a bike with someone holding the seat: growth that happens because someone cares, then lets go.
• Grandma’s recipe: a thing that holds a family together over time. It’s meaning as a pattern that lasts.
• Emperor penguin dads: the male penguins balance the egg on their feet through the Antarctic winter while the mothers go to sea to feed. It’s love as maintenance at an extreme, and kids love this fact.

What would win them over:

• Saying clearly that love isn’t only a feeling. It’s also what you keep doing, and kids already know this from who packs their lunch.
• Letting them see their own small acts as the real thing: sharing, feeding the pet, helping a sibling with shoes.
• Being honest that loving can be tiring and that fighting doesn’t cancel love.
• One simple image that holds all three: watering a plant is love, the plant getting bigger is growth, and doing it every week because it’s “our plant” is meaning.

Cynical adult

First reactions:

• “Love, growth and meaning.” The three most over-marketed words in the self-help aisle, in one title. My guard is fully up.
• The bin, the damp towel and the “Victorian orphan” plant. That opening disarms me. Maintenance instead of grand passion is a genuinely unfashionable angle.
• “The nervous system is not obliged to produce a philosophy while underfed and overdue on rest.” Best line in Act I. It’s the first time a book like this has told me my emptiness might be sleep.
• Then it closes with “make room for one ordinary thing,” which is the Marie Kondo move again.
• Fromm’s flowers quote is homely and exact. Better than the Buber.

Questions they’d ask:

1. Isn’t “care as maintenance” just the unpaid labour women have always done, now rebranded as the meaning of life? Who is being asked to find meaning in the bins?
2. If love is “another’s good mattering beyond your convenience,” how is that different from duty or guilt?
3. How do I know my “care” is for them and not for me feeling like a good person?
4. Growth “is not automatically moral.” Then why is it in the title alongside love, as if it were a virtue?
5. Susan Wolf says meaning comes from engaging with worthwhile things. Who decides what’s worthwhile? You?
6. Frankl’s meaning-through-suffering came out of a concentration camp. Is it fair to quote him next to a houseplant?
7. What’s actually the claim here? That love, growth and meaning overlap? Everybody knows that.
8. What do you say to someone whose care work is crushing them? Is “this is meaning” a comfort or a trap?
9. Can meaning come from something that isn’t care at all, like winning, making money, or being right?
10. Is there any evidence that small maintenance acts make people feel their life is more meaningful, or is that just nice?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

• Offended: anyone doing uncompensated care (a single parent, an adult child caring for a parent with dementia) may hear “meaning lives in maintenance” as romanticizing their exhaustion. The Ukeles quote is actually the fix: her manifesto is angry about unrecognized maintenance. Use its anger, not only its wit.
• Unconvinced: the triad definitions (“Love is what care looks like when…”; “Growth is what care looks like when…”; “Meaning is what care can feel like when…”) are elegant, but the parallel structure makes them sound like a framework slide. Can each definition survive one counterexample?
• Bored: the Buber/Murdoch sentence (“offer different vocabularies… Both resist…”) name-drops without showing what either said. Quote Murdoch’s “something other than oneself is real” and drop the summary.
• Lost: the brief’s thesis is “wanting that includes others.” The draft barely connects back to chapter 1’s want or chapter 2’s conflict. The “agreement half” framing is invisible in the text.
• Preachy: “Keeping one worthwhile thing possible can be a serious answer to the question of meaning.” It’s close to a greeting-card line. Earn it with a person, not a plant.

Examples they’d bring:

• Fromm’s watering can, made real: the friend who posts about loving their dog and never walks it. Everyone knows one. It’s the test of love as active concern.
• Harlow’s rhesus monkey experiments (1950s) on infant monkeys choosing a cloth “mother” over a wire one with food. It’s evidence that attachment isn’t reducible to feeding, and also an ethically ugly experiment, which a cynic will want acknowledged.
• The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the long-running study (directed for years by George Vaillant, later Robert Waldinger) whose headline finding is that close relationships predict late-life health and happiness better than wealth or status. It’s the closest thing to data behind the chapter’s claim, though it’s correlational and its original cohort was all men.
• Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation (1979–80), in which she shook hands with each of New York’s roughly 8,500 sanitation workers and said “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” It’s maintenance made visible without sentimentality.
• “Clean your room.” Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life (2018) made a fortune on the idea that order starts with small maintenance. The cynic will ask how this chapter differs, so answer that.
• Caring for an aging parent: the concrete case where love, growth and meaning all show up, alongside resentment and exhaustion, in one week.

What would win them over:

• Admit the politics of maintenance: who does it, who is unpaid, and that calling it meaningful can be used to keep people doing it for free.
• Replace at least one definition with a scene involving a real person and a real cost.
• Say what the chapter adds beyond “relationships matter” (e.g., that love is a kind of perception, per Murdoch, and that this matters for chapter 4’s problem of other minds).
• Keep the sleep line and extend it: a checklist of boring causes (sleep, food, loneliness, pain, money) to rule out before looking for a grand purpose. That’s rare, practical honesty.

Believer / spiritual reader

First reactions:

• This is the chapter where a believer feels most at home, and also most robbed. Love as care for another’s good, lived through bins, towels and plants, is Brother Lawrence among the pots and pans, Benedict’s cellarer, and the Zen cook. None of them are named.
• Buber is quoted (“I require a You to become”), but his I and Thou ends in the eternal Thou: every particular Thou is a glimpse of God. Using Buber without that is like quoting half a sentence. A Jewish reader will notice.
• Frankl’s self-transcendence is a good choice, and the draft is right that meaning can vanish under illness and precarity without being a private failure. A reader who has lived through depression inside a faith that blamed them for it will be moved by that line.
• “Meaning is not a medal awarded for busyness” is quietly countercultural and close to the Protestant critique of works-righteousness and to Sabbath theology.
• The absence of grace stands out. Love is described as something we do, never as something we receive first. For Christians, “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19) reverses the direction.

Questions they’d ask:

1. Is love only wanting that includes another’s good, or is there a love that precedes wanting (agape, grace, ḥesed) and makes our wanting possible?
2. Where does love of God, or of the whole, fit? The chapter covers partners, plants and relatives. Is the widest circle missing on purpose?
3. Can you love your enemy (Matt 5:44) under this definition, when their good conflicts with yours?
4. If love can “refuse a request that would do harm”, who decides what harm is? You seem to need a picture of the good that you haven’t given.
5. Why should care count as the ground of ethics rather than duty, law or covenant?
6. Is growth always toward something? Traditions name the direction (theosis, sanctification, awakening, moksha). Does yours have a direction, or only “capacity”?
7. Can a life of suffering with no visible growth still be meaningful? What about the bedridden, the dying, the severely disabled?
8. Is maintenance holy, or just necessary? What changes if one treats it as holy?
9. Where is gratitude? Most traditions see it as the root of both love and meaning.
10. Is grief a form of love that has lost its object? The draft lists grief among things that “can matter” but doesn’t dwell there.
11. What about love that costs a life: martyrs, a parent who dies for a child? Does the maintenance frame reach that far?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

• Unconvinced by the triad’s neatness (“love widens… growth alters… meaning is one way”). It reads like a slide. Traditions treat love as the source of the other two (1 Cor 13:2: without love, “I am nothing”), not as one of three co-equals.
• Put off by the jokey tone in the opening (the plant “adopted the expression of a Victorian orphan”, food developing “a second career”). It is charming, but it keeps love at arm’s length.
• Offended mildly if Susan Wolf’s “worthwhile things” is the only account of meaning. It invites the question of who defines worthwhile, and religions have answered it for millennia.
• Lost on the brief’s claim that this “grounds the book’s later ethics”. The draft never says what an ethic of care forbids.

Examples they’d bring:

• Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God (17th c.), a Carmelite lay brother in the monastery kitchen who found God as much among the pots and pans as at the altar. The chapter’s thesis, lived.
• Rule of St Benedict ch. 31: the cellarer is to regard all the monastery’s utensils and goods as if they were the consecrated vessels of the altar (RB 31.10). Maintenance treated as sacred in a sixth-century rule.
• Dōgen, Tenzo Kyōkun (Instructions for the Cook, 1237): the monastery cook’s work of washing rice and choosing vegetables is itself practice. A Buddhist parallel to care as the place meaning happens.
• Matthew 25:35–40: feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these… ye have done it unto me”. Care for the concrete other as the whole of religion.
• Mierle Laderman Ukeles is already quoted. Pair her with the Jewish idea of tikkun olam and the Sabbath: work and the holy stopping of work. Heschel, The Sabbath (1951), calls it “a palace in time”.

What would win them over:

• Crediting the contemplative traditions that sanctified maintenance. They are the book’s strongest allies here.
• Leaving a door open for love as received, not only produced (gift, grace, being cared for as an infant), which also fits the book’s own developmental story.
• Quoting Buber honestly, including the eternal Thou, and letting the reader decide.
• A paragraph that sits with meaning in suffering and dependency, not only in capacity and growth.

Skeptical scientist

First reactions:

• The maintenance framing (bins, towels, plants) is refreshingly unsentimental, and it is well supported. The best longitudinal evidence on wellbeing points to ordinary relationships, not achievements.
• The chapter is almost entirely humanistic (Buber, Murdoch, Fromm, Wolf). It gives no biological account of how “another’s good enters wanting,” even though that is one of the best-studied problems in evolutionary biology (kin selection, reciprocity, attachment). Given that Chapter 2 is about competing wants, the obvious scientific question is how cooperation evolves at all, and the chapter doesn’t ask it.
• “Growth” slides between biological growth, developmental change, skill acquisition and moral improvement. The draft half-admits this (“greater capacity is not automatically moral”) but never pins the term down.
• The sentence “The nervous system is not obliged to produce a philosophy while underfed and overdue on rest” is the most empirically grounded line in the chapter, and it deserves evidence behind it.
• There is a real risk of neuro-romance in the rewrite (oxytocin as the “love hormone,” the “wood wide web” as forest love). Heading it off now saves embarrassment.

Questions they’d ask:

1. How does wanting that includes another’s good evolve, given Chapter 2’s competition? Is it kin selection, reciprocity, or something culture adds?
2. Is love here an emotion, a behavior, a disposition or a commitment? Neuroscience treats these differently; Fromm’s “active concern” is a behavioral definition, and that is useful. Commit to it?
3. What does the evidence say about relationships and health? Is it correlation, or is there causal evidence?
4. Is “meaning” measurable? Psychologists have scales (for example Steger’s Meaning in Life Questionnaire). Do you accept that operationalization, or reject it?
5. Are happiness and meaning the same thing? The data suggest they come apart.
6. What does early deprivation of care do to development? That is the strongest evidence that care is not optional for humans.
7. Does “growth” include decline? Aging, disability and loss all reshape capacity.
8. Post-traumatic growth is popular. Is it real or a self-report artifact?
9. Can non-human animals love in your sense? Where is the evidence strongest and weakest?
10. Is maintenance a biological concept too? Bodies spend most of their energy on repair and upkeep, not growth. Is that a coincidence or the point?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

• “Love is what care looks like when another being’s good is allowed to matter beyond your convenience.” As a definition it is fine, but it is presented as if it describes something, with no evidence that people or animals actually behave this way, or when.
• Buber and Murdoch “resist the idea that love is two preferences lining up.” A biologist would point out that inclusive fitness is exactly a model in which another’s good enters one’s own payoff (Hamilton’s rule, rB > C). That is a precise formalization of the chapter’s thesis, and it is missing.
• The Susan Wolf mention is fine, but it is the only nod to measurement. Meaning research (Baumeister, Steger) exists and has findings.
• If a rewrite says oxytocin “is” love or “causes” bonding in humans, a scientist will stop reading. Intranasal oxytocin human findings have had severe replication and power problems.
• If trees are brought in as a caring example, the “mother tree” narrative is overclaimed (see the Karst et al. entry below).

Examples they’d bring:

• Hamilton (1964), “The genetical evolution of social behaviour,” Journal of Theoretical Biology: Hamilton’s rule formalizes how another’s good gets into one’s own “wanting” via relatedness. It is the scientific skeleton of “wanting that includes others.”
• Wilkinson (1984), Nature, “Reciprocal food sharing in the vampire bat”: bats regurgitate blood to roost-mates who would otherwise starve, including non-kin with whom they have a sharing history. It is care that is costly, maintenance-like and reciprocal.
• Harlow (1958), “The Nature of Love,” American Psychologist: infant rhesus monkeys preferred a cloth surrogate to a wire surrogate that gave milk. The chapter should be honest that the experiments themselves were cruel, which is useful given its ethics of care.
• Bucharest Early Intervention Project (Nelson, Fox & Zeanah; Romania’s Abandoned Children, 2014): a randomized trial moving institutionalized children into foster care, with better cognitive and attachment outcomes when moved earlier. It is causal evidence that ordinary care builds capacity.
• Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton (2010), PLoS Medicine: a meta-analysis of 148 studies found stronger social relationships associated with about 50% increased likelihood of survival. Correlational, but large and consistent.
• Karst, Jones & Hoeksema (2023), Nature Ecology & Evolution: they argued that claims about mother trees and resource-sharing mycorrhizal networks are supported by weak evidence and positive citation bias. It is a cautionary tale for the chapter’s own temptations.
• Baumeister, Vohs, Aaker & Garbinsky (2013), Journal of Positive Psychology, “Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life”: giving to others and thinking about past and future predicted meaning more than happiness. It supports the chapter’s split between meaning and pleasure.

What would win them over:

• One paragraph of biology on how caring for others evolves (kin selection, reciprocity, attachment), so the “agreement half” answers Chapter 2’s “conflict half” on the same terms.
• A pinned-down definition of growth (a change in capacity) that is distinguished from biological growth and from moral improvement.
• Evidence behind the maintenance claim: relationship and wellbeing longitudinal data, plus the basic physiology that bodies are mostly repair.
• Visible avoidance of oxytocin and “wood wide web” hype, ideally naming why.

Earlier draft

From “Love, Growth, and Meaning (Which Are, It Turns Out, Related)”

The bin is full, the towel is damp, and the plant has once again adopted the expression of a Victorian orphan. None of this is glamorous. Still, somebody takes out the bin, hangs the towel, waters the plant, and remembers there is food in the fridge that will become compost if left to develop a second career.

That is a better place to begin with love, growth, and meaning than a dramatic declaration. The three often meet in the work that lets another person, a shared home, a body, or a small living thing continue. They are not the same thing. But they keep borrowing one another’s tools.

Love is what care looks like when another being’s good is allowed to matter beyond your convenience. It may include pleasure and longing, but it also includes attention: seeing what is actually needed rather than merely enjoying your own picture of the person. Martin Buber and Iris Murdoch offer different vocabularies for this. Both resist the idea that love is simply two preferences lining up. Sometimes it means making room for a want you do not share. Sometimes it means refusing a request that would do harm.

Growth is what care looks like when capacity changes. You learn how to cook one reliable meal, apologize without rehearsing a defense, notice a limit sooner, or make a room easier for another person to use. Greater capacity is not automatically moral. A company can become more effective at extracting value. A person can learn a sharper way to wound. Growth names a change in what can be perceived, cared for, decided, or done; whether it is good requires questions about cost and effect.

Meaning is what care can feel like when it holds a life together over time. It is not a medal awarded for busyness. Susan Wolf’s account of meaningfulness as active engagement with worthwhile things offers one useful guide, but there is no tidy meter. Caring for a relative, maintaining a garden, making music, paid work, pleasure, friendship, grief, and rest can all matter. A life need not resemble a ladder to count as a life.

The triad is memorable because it names a real overlap: love widens who and what can count in your concern; growth alters what you can do with that concern; meaning is one way a pattern of concern becomes inhabitable across time. It is not a formula. Love can exhaust you. Growth can involve loss. Meaning can disappear for a while when a body is ill, a job is precarious, or the available choices are cruelly narrow. None of those conditions proves a private failure of orientation.

This matters when life feels oddly empty even though everything is getting done. The problem may be a commitment that no longer fits what you care about. It may also be loneliness, burnout, grief, pain, lack of sleep, or too little room to choose. Before demanding a grand purpose, check the maintenance conditions. The nervous system is not obliged to produce a philosophy while underfed and overdue on rest.

Try Make room for one ordinary thing. Choose a small place to eat, rest, or put something you use. Notice whom the arrangement serves and what keeps it usable. Keeping one worthwhile thing possible can be a serious answer to the question of meaning. It need not become an achievement large enough to put on a wall.

Once our care reaches beyond private preference, we need a way to ask whether our accounts of the world can survive other people’s experience and the stubborn things we share.