The Most Valuable Things in Life Are Invisible
Visible things like food and money help us survive, but a philosopher argues the hidden things are what make life interesting.
The Micro-Philosopher · How To Make Life Interesting Again And Escape The Dopamine EconomyPaul, the writer behind the Micro-Philosopher newsletter, had been wrestling with the view of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel that when mind is what is most basic about what exists, physical things cannot be the ultimate purpose of living. That left Paul wondering why modern societies prize mostly what is material, sensible, and pleasurable, and his reflecting led to a new term for the other kind of value: Dark Value.
In his words: "Although Light Value makes it possible to live, Dark Value is what makes life worth living."
The comparison comes from physics. Everything we can see is made of what physicists call light matter, which responds to different wavelengths of light. Dark matter, by contrast, stays completely invisible to telescopes, yet it has mass and accounts for most of the heft in the universe. One proposed explanation is weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, where weakly interacting means they barely interact with light.
Light value is the visible counterpart. It is the worth embodied in food, water, money, muscles, houses, cars, clothes, and physical beauty, the kind of worth that is easy to count, hold, and recognize at a glance. Paul's own joke is that if dark matter is made of WIMPs, light value is made of SIMPS, with a simp meaning someone who chases another person's attention, because visible things constantly compete for notice and pull focus away, often on behalf of a company that wants that attention.
Paul does not dismiss that visible value, since it covers food, shelter, and the basics that let anyone pursue anything else. Dark value, found in art, education, contemplation, and conversation, is "wimpy" in his term because it touches us only faintly. Finding it takes deliberate effort, like driving far from city lights to see stars, and even then people tend to treat it as a tool for something else by judging it with the question, "What am I going to do with that?"
That effort is the point, because the payoff from material things runs out quickly. As Paul puts it: "A world without philosophy, theology, literature, and poetry, would be a boring world that no human being would want to live in."
Questions people ask
How do scientists know dark matter is there if they cannot see it?
Through gravity. Galaxies rotate too fast and bend light too strongly to be held together by visible matter alone, so astronomers infer extra unseen mass. The leading idea is slow-moving particles that rarely interact with light, though no particle has been directly confirmed.
Who was Hegel, and why do people say he is so difficult?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher of the early 1800s who argued that reality unfolds as Spirit, or Mind, coming to know itself through history, art, religion, and philosophy. He is considered hard because he writes in dense abstractions and long sentences, and because his system tries to hold logic, nature, and culture together at once.
Is visible success ever a useful clue to invisible qualities?
Yes, and Paul allows for that. He notes that visible signs like fitness can signal that someone did something difficult, which is part of why status clings to them. His point is that the signal is useful for survival and coordination, but it does not contain the deeper meaning found in sustained thought or art.