“Chapter 4 describes four ways philosophers have thought that one could acquire meaning - by achieving goals, being creative, having certain virtues and emotions, and giving and receiving love. One aim of the chapter is to show that each of these ways of acquiring meaning is made richer when accompanied by relevant emotions. Another aim is to show that all four ways of acquiring meaning are legitimate and that a believer in a divine creator can adopt all four. This second aim is relatively uncontroversial, though it is rarely stated.The first way of acquiring meaning - achieving goals - is defended against Arthur Schopenhauer’s critiques of goal-aimed activities. The validity of Kieran Setiya’s use of non-goal aimed activities (“atelic” activities) to respond to Schopenhauer’s critiques is also discussed. The chapter ends with seven observations about meaning after having looked briefly at conceptions of meaning that do not fit well into any of the four ways of acquiring meaning described in the chapter.”

Chapter 8 describes four significant obstacles to acquiring meaning: unconscious motives, the lure of the crowd, dividedness, and constricted circumstances that produce suffering. The first is explained using Friedrich Nietzsche’s suspicion of the real motives of virtuous actions, the second by existentialists’ suspicion of crowds, the third by Soren Kierkegaard’s and Augustine’s idea of resistance to what is good, and the last by the constricted circumstances of women and black Americans. The realistic conclusion of the chapter is a middle ground between the debilitating pessimism of some existential writers and the easy optimism one sometimes encounters in religious people: sometimes people overcome these obstacles and sometimes they do not.