"This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it"

William James offers a pragmatic affirmation: life’s worth is not an inherited property but an outcome of engagement. The phrase “we can say” signals a test by consequences an acknowledgment that beliefs gain legitimacy when they help us act, endure, and create. To hold that life is worth living is not merely to describe a condition; it is to adopt a stance that enlarges possibility. Treat a day as meaningful, and you attend differently, choose differently, persist differently. Meaning, then, is a practice. By committing our will, our attention, and our labor, we convert raw experience into something that matters.

This outlook neither denies limits nor romanticizes suffering. We do not control the weather of circumstance, but we steer by our responses, the habits we cultivate, and the interpretations we permit. Habits shape character as water shapes stone; attention invests events with significance; committed projects organize chaos into coherence. Pain remains real, yet it can be metabolized into purpose care for others, craft, learning, repair. Such meliorism rejects both despair and easy optimism. It insists that partial improvements count and that small acts, repeated, can tilt the balance of a life. Agency is ordinary and relentless, exercised in how we speak, the work we do, the loyalties we keep.

The plural “we” extends the argument beyond private resolve. Lives are co-authored in families, neighborhoods, institutions. If life is what we make it, we owe each other conditions under which making is possible: justice, trust, opportunity, shared truth. Freedom becomes a task, not a possession; apathy hands the pen to circumstance or to those who would write for us. To live as if life is worth living is to choose aims sturdy enough for friction, cultivate habits that carry us when moods fail, and widen the circle so others can do the same. Worth becomes a verb renewed daily by attention, generosity, and resolve.