About

Of Value to Life is a school and research-oriented institution concerned with what supports human agency, coherence, and meaning in a time of rapid technological and institutional change.

We bring together research, education, and small-scale experimentation to study how lives and institutions shape what people come to value over time.

We do not offer doctrines or solutions. We work to hold and explore questions that modern systems tend to ignore.

What We Hold

An organization grounded in our approach is defined less by what it sells and more by what it holds:

• We hold space for questions that institutions suppress.
• We hold intellectual rigor alongside existential seriousness.
• We hold humans as developing beings, not resources.
• We hold open the possibility that a good life may need to be rediscovered, not optimized.

This orientation is the minimal condition for a movement that seeks to operate responsibly at a civilizational inflection point.

Why Now

The present moment is marked by a distinctive rupture: the systems that once reliably organized human life—work, institutions, shared narratives—are visibly failing.

Research across psychology and psychiatry converges on a clear finding: humans require meaning to function sustainably. The presence of meaning is strongly associated with wellbeing, resilience, and psychological stability. The absence of meaning correlates with depression, anxiety, nihilism, and disengagement.

Modern institutions have largely outsourced meaning to economic success, individual preference, entertainment, and short-term optimization. The research strongly suggests this is insufficient.

No existing field integrates human development, institutional design, long-term coherence, and post-instrumental human value. The absence of such integration explains why responses feel fragmented, shallow, or reactive.

This is the historical condition in which movements, not services, emerge.

Read the Full Problem Statement