It sounds like the kind of question adults learn to avoid. Children ask questions this large before they discover that large questions make people uncomfortable. Later, we learn to replace them with smaller, more practical ones. What should I study? What job should I take? What should I do this week?
But the larger question does not disappear just because we stop asking it.
If anything, it becomes more important. A life is not made only of errands, obligations, and career moves. Beneath all of those smaller decisions is the older question: given that we are here, and given that our time is limited, what should we do with it?
The first answers seem obvious. We should help people. We should take care of the world. It is hard to imagine a serious answer to the question that does not include these two things.
But is there anything else?
One answer keeps returning: make good new things.
Three Principles
I cannot prove that one should make good new things, any more than I can prove that one should help people or take care of the world. These are not conclusions derived from some earlier rule. They are closer to first principles.
Still, the principle makes sense.
The most impressive thing humans do is think. It may be the most impressive thing anything can do. And the clearest evidence of good thinking is often the creation of something good and new.
At first, one might say that people should have good new ideas. But that phrasing is too narrow. It includes physics and mathematics easily enough, but it does not fully include music, painting, architecture, design, or many other forms of work that are not merely ideas wearing different clothes.
Art may contain ideas, but it contains more than ideas. A song, a building, a painting, or a tool may express something that cannot be reduced to a sentence without losing much of what makes it valuable.
That is why “make good new things” is the better phrase.
It includes ideas, but it also includes the broader range of human creation.
Making as a Test of Understanding
There are other ways to describe the best kind of thinking.
You might say that one should make discoveries. Or understand something more deeply than others have. These are good descriptions, but they still point back toward making.
How deeply do you understand something if you cannot make a model of it, explain it, write about it, build with it, or use it to produce something that did not exist before?
Expression is not merely proof of understanding. It is often the path to understanding.
Trying to write what you think can reveal that you do not yet think it clearly. Trying to build what you understand can expose the gaps in your understanding. Trying to turn insight into form is one of the ways thought becomes sharper.
This is one reason making matters so much. It forces thought to meet reality.
Why Creation Matters More Than Criticism
The phrase “make good new things” also has another advantage: it points us toward creation.
It is easy to confuse critical intelligence with creative contribution. Criticism can be valuable. A sharp observation about something someone else made is still an idea. Sometimes it is an important one.
But criticism has a dangerous glamour.
It can make us feel sophisticated before we have made anything. It is easier to stand outside a thing and explain its flaws than to begin something awkward, incomplete, and exposed. The first steps of creation often look clumsy. Criticism, by comparison, can look polished immediately.
That is partly why creation is rarer.
To make something new, you must accept the embarrassment of beginnings. You must risk making something that is not yet good. You must place yourself in the position of someone who can be judged, rather than someone who only judges.
And yet those first steps are often the most valuable ones.
Why Newness Matters
Is it essential that the thing be new?
I think it is.
In science, this is obvious. If you copied someone else’s paper and published it as your own, the act would not merely be unimpressive. It would be dishonest. The value lies partly in having found something that was not already found.
The same is true, though in a different way, in the arts.
A copy of a good painting may be pleasant to look at. It may require skill. But it is not impressive in the way the original was. The original did more than reproduce an effect. It discovered one.
This also means that making the same thing again and again, even if you make it well, is not the highest form of work. At some point, you are no longer making something new. You are copying yourself.
Newness is not a decorative feature. It is part of what makes the work a real act of thought.
A Different Kind of Should
There is an important distinction here.
Helping people and taking care of the world are shoulds in the sense of duty. They are things we owe, or at least things we should feel responsible for.
Making good new things is a different kind of should.
It is not duty in the same way. It is more like the answer to the question of how to live fully. It is about using the capacities we have instead of leaving them unused.
Historically, advice about how to live has usually mixed these two kinds of should together. It has told people both how they ought to behave toward others and how they might become excellent.
But in most traditional answers, creation is strangely absent.
What Older Answers Left Out
For much of history, the answer to “What should one do?” sounded similar across many cultures.
One should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just. One should uphold tradition and serve the public interest. In religious eras, the answer often became “serve God,” though in practice many of the older virtues remained intact.
This recipe would have seemed reasonable to Cicero, to Confucius, and to many Victorians.
But it does not say much about taking care of the world. And it says almost nothing about making new things.
The omission of environmental responsibility is not hard to explain. People only began to think seriously about taking care of the world once it became clear that we could damage it on a planetary scale.
The omission of making new things is more interesting.
How could making good new things be important if so many traditional accounts of the good life do not mention it?
The Old Question Was Slightly Different
The traditional answers were often responding to a different question.
They were not asking, “What should one do?” in the modern sense. They were asking, “How should one be?”
The audience for these answers usually did not have much choice about what to do. For much of history, the people receiving philosophical and moral advice were members of the landowning and political classes. Their work was largely predetermined: manage estates, participate in politics, fight when necessary, preserve family position, serve public order.
They were not choosing between doing physics, writing novels, starting companies, composing music, or designing new machines.
Original work existed, of course. There were mathematicians, inventors, poets, artists, and builders. They were admired, but they were not usually presented as models for how ordinary ambitious people should live.
Archimedes knew he had proved something no one had proved before, and he was proud of it. But ancient writers did not usually urge readers to imitate Archimedes as a life plan. He was treated more like a prodigy than a model.
That has changed.
Archimedes Becomes a Model
Today, many more people can follow something like Archimedes’s path.
More of us can choose to devote most of our attention to a specific kind of work. We can become researchers, programmers, artists, writers, designers, founders, composers, engineers, or builders of things that did not exist before.
The group of people who make new things cuts across older social hierarchies. In the ancient world, this group existed, but it was not understood as a central category. Now it is.
Archimedes turned out to be a model after all.
Not because everyone should become a mathematician, but because the act of making good new things has become available to many more people than it once was.
What Counts as a Good New Thing?
It is tempting to define what kinds of work count.
That would probably be a mistake.
New kinds of work are often despised at first. Many forms that later become respected begin in low-status places. Raymond Chandler was writing literal pulp fiction, yet he is now recognized as one of the best writers of the twentieth century.
This pattern is common enough that it can almost be used as a guide.
If you are excited by a kind of work that is not considered prestigious, and you can explain what others are missing about it, that may not merely be acceptable work. It may be exactly the kind of work worth seeking out.
The frontier often looks disreputable from the center.
There is another reason not to define strict thresholds. The people most likely to make good new things usually do not need rules to keep them honest. Their own standards, curiosity, and ambition will push them harder than external categories would.
The Tradeoff Between Helping and Making
So a possible set of principles is this: take care of people, take care of the world, and make good new things.
Different people will emphasize these principles differently.
Some will focus almost entirely on helping people. Some will devote themselves to caring for the world. A few will focus mostly on making new things. There is nothing wrong with this variation.
But even if you are one of the people most drawn to creation, you should at least make sure that what you create does not, on balance, harm people or the world.
And if you go further and try to make things that help people or the world, you may discover that the added constraint gives you more energy rather than less.
It will limit what you can make.
But constraints are not always enemies of creation. Sometimes they give the work a stronger reason to exist.
The Indirect Usefulness of Great Work
There is also a reason not to become too narrow about usefulness.
If you make something truly amazing, it will often help people or the world even if that was not your original motive.
Newton was driven by curiosity and ambition, not by a clear plan for practical benefit. Yet the practical effects of his work were enormous.
This seems to be the rule more than the exception.
Deep curiosity often produces usefulness indirectly. The person making the thing may be trying mainly to understand, solve, express, or discover. Later, others find applications, meanings, tools, and consequences that the original maker could not have predicted.
So if you believe you can make something amazing, you should probably do it.
Not because every act of creation must be justified in advance by a practical outcome, but because genuinely good new things have a way of becoming useful in ways no one can foresee.
Final Thoughts
What should one do?
One should help people. One should take care of the world. And one should make good new things.
These are not identical obligations. The first two are closer to duties. The third is closer to a path toward living fully.
But together they form a useful answer.
Do not merely consume what others have made. Do not merely criticize from a safe distance. Do not leave your best capacities unused. If you can make something good and new, make it.
Make it carefully. Make it honestly. Make it in a way that does not harm people or the world if you can help it.
And if you can make something that helps them, better still.
A life is not only measured by how well it avoids doing harm. It is also measured by what it adds.
Notes
[1] It is possible to combine these kinds of “should” by saying that one has a duty to live well or to make full use of one’s gifts. Historically, some religious arguments have tried to do this, but the distinction is still useful.
[2] People are part of the world, so one could merge the first two principles. But in practice, most people treat human beings as deserving special concern, whatever their theories say.
[3] Cicero and Confucius were both excluded from public life for political reasons, and both became more influential partly because that exclusion gave them time to think and write.
